well.
Earlier this year, it seemed, briefly, like I might get a job. In April, a woman emailed me out of the clear blue sky to say she worked for a website that was about to launch, and she had long admired my work as a culture writer. They were looking for freelancers, but also staffers. Could we talk?
Our first conversation went well. So well, in fact, that I began to think seriously about what it would look like to be one of those staff writers. The idea terrified me; as I understood the job, it would require substantially more ambitious reporting than I'd done before. (I was wrong about this, it turns out, but that's another story for another time.) It was also far from a sure thing in even the medium-term-- like most media startups these days, the site was funded by a rich man who could, at any time, get bored and pull the plug on the project. Plus, it would be a big change in general, and I am pants-shittingly terrified of change, even when it comes with a guaranteed salary and, like, dental.
The editor ended up ghosting me-- nothing like being pursued and then rejected in very short order!-- but not before I had a bunch of anguished big-picture conversations with friends about the possibilities that this job offered. What it would mean to say yes to it, and what it would mean if I decided to say no. The weather was intense right around then, and it added a certain something to the proceedings: sitting on the back patio of a bar with a TV writer friend who was about to be on strike, sipping beers in the white spring sunshine, watching a wind storm rip palm fronds off of trees. Saying, anguished, over and over and over again: "I'm just not sure I know what I want."
I mean, I knew what I wanted in a general sense. I wanted to write, and I wanted to get paid enough for my writing that I could stay in LA without grinding myself to dust in the process. But did I want to pursue culture writing as a full-time gig? It would have meant putting down ghostwriting, for one thing, and also the podcast episodes I was scripting. It would have meant declaring myself to be one thing, instead of, anything you need me to be. And it would have directed me towards a narrower path than the diffuse tracklessness I've been wandering for the better part of the last decade.
It was a weird period. To everyone else it was like, you had a couple of conversations with someone about a potential job? This doesn't seem like cause for an existential crisis?? But I was in agony. I got my tarot cards read a few months later and the friends who did the pull shook their heads. "I don't know how to put a positive spin on this, frankly," C told me.
"I think you just need to grow the fuck up," B added.
She was right, and I knew it. There are many, many problems with the way the media industry is currently constituted, but some of its flaws, I realized, had come to suit me. Working in a crumbling industry felt like an excuse to live in a state of mild but constant panic and disarray. It allowed me to refuse to make decisions, because the future was so obviously uncertain. Being able to point to a continual collapse offered plausible deniability that it was only smart to keep my options infinitely open, always taking what was offered instead of trying to pursue something specific. Last year I wrote about talking to E and saying, "Increasingly I see a choice for myself, between freedom and stability. And I keep thinking, choose stability, and I keep choosing freedom instead." And freedom is fine and all, but only if you're not using it as an excuse to keep you from having to ask for too much.
Because there are, of course, a few other things I want. Things so common that I'm ashamed to name them here, out in public. (Okay fine! I know it's fine! I want more success, more respect. A partner, and a baby. A house? Maybe??? Just like, a place that I live that I'm relatively sure I can keep living would be good? Such normal, boring things to want, and yet.)
In a few weeks, I'll do a year-end financial wrap up and talk about the ways that my work life has changed this year; how I've finally, finally, started to shift my ambitions / acknowledge that I have them at all. I've also made some personal changes, things so small they seem laughable, honestly. Getting a cat. Freezing my eggs. Starting to prod the edges of what might, eventually, be another book. (Is writing a novel personal or professional? L O L)
Earlier this year, a different C and I took a number of walks together. She was finding her way through her first pregnancy, and we talked a lot about how certainty is an illusion-- change is the only constant, etc. We've known each other since we were teenagers, and I knew she meant every word she said. And yet, it was hard to look at her-- married, pregnant, with mortgage-- and truly believe that she felt as unmoored as I did.
That baby is fine, but he rushed into the world, headlong, six weeks before his due date. C and I were supposed to have dinner the night her labor started; she texted to say she wasn't feeling well, and could she reschedule. "I've been having these contractions (I think they're the non labor kind...?)" she wrote. Three days later, there he was.
There is no certainty. There is only tiny baby B and his startlingly wise eyes. A shot in the dark, born of desire. I keep telling myself: I've known babies who died, but more who ended up living.
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Anyway, then Tinyletter emailed me a few days ago to say that they were shutting down this service in February. They've already stopped accepting new subscribers. I started this newsletter before my first book came out, originally to serve as my mailing list, and then it morphed into something else. A public diary of me having a mental breakdown and then recovering from it. A place to keep track and make sense of thoughts and feelings. A blog, basically.
Every year I write less and less here, and I had been thinking, loosely, about retiring the Tinyletter anyway. The work I want to be doing going forward will rely less on directing hits to links, I think. But then I look at what's happening with Twitter and think, this is the surest way I have to communicate with people who want to read my writing, whatever forms it ends up taking. It would be foolish to let it go.
So I'm going to port this subscriber list over to another service. (Anything but Substack-- please tell me if you have recs!) I will continue to write periodically about myself, and what I'm publishing. If you don't hear from me, though, please know I am almost certainly still out here in Los Angeles. And I am trying very hard.