There can be no more waiting

My dear reader.

What I am feeling right now, both personally (in the aftermath of my father’s death) and collectively (in the daily horrors of violent state repression and rapidly expanding authoritarianism), is a kind of sacred urgency.

It is a feeling of: there can be no more waiting. A galvanizing force that supports me in taking action on everything that feels most important instead of staying frozen in despair. (Except of course on the days when I am indeed frozen in despair. Both/and, you know?)

The sacred urgency of no more waiting is why I changed my website URL and my email address, and am in the process of changing my book covers, all to match the fact that I am using the name Nic now. That is simply my name, and I want all of my public-facing writing to reflect that.

The feeling of no more waiting is why I gave away all my dresses. It’s why I baked chocolate chip cookies for five families on the next block, as a fun way to finally introduce myself and start trying to build familiarity that might one day lead to community.

No more waiting is why I’ve been pulling money from my savings to help provide tangible things to vulnerable folks in my local area — towels and toiletries to the homeless shelter, canned soup and baking mixes to the food pantry, masks and covid tests to a Boston-area mask bloc, ongoing funding for the ICE watch and hotline.

The scale of pain and need right now, and the speed of increasing cruelty, is something my brain is honestly having trouble processing. So many times each day I think (or scream) “what the actual fuck?!” But the gift of sacred urgency has been the way it nudges me to repeatedly ask myself the clarifying question of: What can I do, that I am actually willing to do, today?

Sometimes the answer is: absolutely nothing. Get back under the covers. Goodbye.

Mostly though, when I can stay grounded in my belief that what resistance requires is many efforts of many sizes and scopes from many people in many places all at the same time, it helps me to then recommit to simply doing what I can do right now, from exactly where I am, with whatever and whoever I have access to.

This commitment is bolstered by the words of Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This:

“Active resistance — showing up to protests and speaking out and working to make change even at the smallest levels, the school boards and town councils — matters. Negative resistance — refusing to participate when the act of participation falls below one’s moral threshold — matters. And yet there are days when both negative and active resistance feel pointless. [. . .] What use is any of it, what use? [. . .] But there is a use, always. [. . .] Every small act of resistance trains the muscle used to do it, in much the same way that turning one’s eyes from the horror strengthens that particular muscle, readies it to ignore even greater horror to come.”

As I navigate this particularly hard season of my life, I think often about another hard season, that of early sobriety. One thing that was helpful for me back then was to constantly remind myself that the secret to not drinking is not drinking. To not drink, you don’t drink. That doesn’t make it easy but it does make it simple, and so not drinking became the magnetic north toward which my internal compass of self was always pointed.

I bring this up now, in the context of resistance, because I’ve noticed that the people I look up to, the ones who are most courageous and radical and devoted to liberation, often have a guiding compass of their own. Not necessarily as binary a compass as drink/not drink, but a clear set of guiding principles and ethics through which to filter their choices. That’s what a compass is for, isn’t it? To help you make decisions about what to move toward and what to move away from given the destination where you want to end up.

This framing — of knowing that each of my choices can serve to either move me closer to something I want or away from something I don’t want — is extremely useful. It helps me to see that I can always be shifting, and that I do not need to be so harsh and perfectionistic with myself as I try to live into my values. The values are the compass, and I can use them to help as I move forward, course-correcting as many times as needed along the way.

One of the compass-guided moves I’ve made recently, which of course you know since you are reading this newsletter, was a move away from Substack.

I decided to leave many months before I actually went through with it, and the main reason it took me so long to leave is because I was afraid.

Afraid to make changes to my much-needed main source of income, afraid readers would be unhappy with a simpler newsletter interface, afraid of losing access to the new readers I gain through Substack’s algorithm, and most of all afraid of making yet another choice (like leaving Instagram, like refusing to use AI) that feels absolutely correct to me but that comes with the trade-off of being left behind by mainstream culture, mainstream communication channels, mainstream online business.

Looking back, it’s no surprise that it took my father’s death to make me leave Substack, because what I needed was that energetic surge of sacred urgency that I mentioned before, that feeling of there can be no more waiting to carry me through to the other side of my long-standing fears.

And so, I left.

You might or might not care much about the details of that choice, depending on your interest in the decision-making processes of my tiny business, but in the spirit of transparency (which is another point on my compass!) I’d like to tell you why I left Substack.

The first reason is that I just didn’t like the experience of spending time there anymore. And why, if it is within our control, should we force ourselves to spend time in a place where we do not want to be? Substack has been feeling more and more like social media to me with every new feature added — the ‘likes’ on posts and comments, the DMs, the ability to tag people, the status checkmarks, the Twitter-esque Notes, the app, the feed of content designed to keep you scrolling, the push for writers to start creating videos and host chats and go live — none of which I want. What I want is just to write, and for that writing to land in the inboxes of my readers, and for any readers who wish to engage in the comments to be able to do so. That’s it. Nothing extra.

The other reason I left, and this one is more nuanced, is that I don’t trust the people behind that platform. Or perhaps a more accurate thing to say (since I don’t know any of those people personally and have zero access to whatever goes on behind the scenes there) is that based on their behavior (here’s a roundup from another writer who left) and on the fact that some of their funding comes from right-wing billionaire Marc Andreessen, I simply don’t trust that what Substack is building aligns with the world I most want to live in. I don’t trust that they won’t willingly collaborate with a fascist state, whether through surveillance, data access, or implementing a similar kind of shadow banning like what Meta does on Instagram to folks who, for example, vocally support Palestine.

No tech is perfect, of course, and that saying that there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism applies here, too. I’m not “better” or more “pure” or whatever because I left this one specific place, and in fact there are plenty of truly radical writers and activists who I deeply respect (and who I continue to learn from all the time) who are still on Substack and/or all the main social media sites. Their crucial messages are spread to more people because of it. There is no singular “correct” way to be.

Which brings us back to the compass. Every one of us makes our own choices for our own reasons, based on our own circumstances and on the compass we are using for how we want to live our lives. Sometimes (often times) I do not even come close to meeting the ideal of where my own compass points — that’s simply part of being human.

But one aspect of my personal compass that has a particularly strong pull for me right now is this: fuck the tech bro oligarchs. And no, I don’t think me leaving Substack this year or leaving Instagram in 2023 changes anything at a systemic level, but I will tell you for sure that those changes have positively impacted me. I feel better here, off Substack, just as I feel better off Instagram. Which I believe (hope!) will lead to clearer and more thoughtful writing, and I have fully accepted that if the price of admission, career-wise, for feeling this way is that I get less visibility, less status, less growth, and less comfort of doing-what-everyone-else-is-doing, I will pay it.

If you’re reading this, then I (gratefully!) assume you’ve decided to make this move with me, and to stick around. I know there were a few hiccups for certain folks in getting everything migrated over here, and just like with any digital space there will likely be some new and unforeseen issues in the future. But I truly can’t say enough about the personalized, thoughtful, detailed, and refreshingly human customer service experience I’ve had here at Buttondown so far, which makes me trust that with a little patience any problems that arise can be fixed. It feels good to be working with a small team who is seemingly trying to build a simpler alternative for paid newsletters in a transparent way, and I’m hopeful about what I’ll be able to create for you in this more right-fit space in the weeks and months ahead.

Here’s to following our own compass however we can, with both sacred urgency and gentle care.

**

More soon,

Nic