I'm telling you four secrets

Don't tell anybody or else I won't do anything about it

I was in New York City a few weeks ago, and while I was there, my therapist broke up with me. She did it over email, which was jarring, but totally appropriate for the relationship we had. And it was also fine because I realized recently that I do not have any real problems. At least none that aren’t shared by anyone who lives a human life, amongst other humans, for the better and worse that comes with that. I have no problem that isn’t solved by reading a novel where the protagonist overcomes hardship and thinking to myself “wow that’s me af and is possible af.” Also lately whenever I’m struck by a sequence of imperfect feelings, literally just thinking about the Yin Yang symbol will make me go “literally true, that’s so real, there is light and darkness in every moment and experience af,” and then I don’t have much of a problem anymore. 

While I will genuinely miss gazing at the framed picture of the cast of BBC’s Sherlock that hung on the wall of her home office, or the Marvel Funko Pops that adorned her shelves, I do think I overall wasn’t the best candidate for her services. At the end of our sessions, she would mostly ask if I had been keeping up with my writing, or examining my feelings through art of some other kind. I think she might have been subtly suggesting I stick to those more economical methods of self-interrogation, and I appreciate that from my realistic and frugal queen. 

This betrayal— sorry, I mean this totally normal and valid event— now leaves me with this newsletter as my primary outlet. That means the responsibility that you all each now have to help maintain my well being just increased drastically. This is a major opportunity for you all, who each hold stake in the contents of my psyche: now being distributed through the market in a form that is much more pure and rare. 

Just kidding. As I mentioned before, I am generally content and normal. Anyway, I’m going to elaborate on a few thoughts I recently threw in the note I have in my phone labelled “TWIRL.” These thoughts are secret and exclusive, and if they got out, disastrous things could probably not happen. 

Thoughts I Had on Raising A Child Someday While Laying Down in Central Park

I think I could be a comparatively good father to a daughter someday. For some reason, whenever I’ve imagined raising a child, the default experience that I think about is raising a boy. Maybe that’s because of patriarchy, or because I grew up as a boy and think of that as the default child experience because it was mine. Or because the only child I’ve really seen grow up, up close, was my cousin who was born when I was 10, and he was zero; he lived down the street until I was 18 and he was 0+8. 8.

I also think I give thought to raising a young boy because young boys are like, dangerous. They’re like nuclear missiles that require continuous conscious intervention. Definitely can’t be left solely to the influence of other young boys, cursed to wander manosphere rabbit holes on the internet, or optimize their lives in service of world domination. It feels like every young boy flips a coin at the start of puberty that determines whether they’ll be an incel or a war criminal. Or both. In that sense, I’ve put a lot of thought into how to steer a young boy clear of developing bad vibes. 

However, since turning 25, I’ve felt that I’m now charting a steady course through adulthood, and I’ve been reflecting on everything that went right such that I have such a solid foundation entering my adult life. I constantly reflect on my gratitude for the formative platonic friendships and communities I’ve had with women throughout my life. I come from a family with a lot of girls, and as a young boy was practically raised by the girls around me. That’s one of the greatest blessings I think a young boy could possibly have, growing up. The girls around me always seemed to know more, and be more, a little earlier than I was.

Laying down in Central Park, seeing families strolling by, I thought about what a privilege it would be to pass the guidance I’ve gotten from the women in my life to a daughter, and what an oddly worthwhile hypothetical experience that could be. 

Obviously I would love this hypothetical child with whatever gender or expression thereof that they could take on, but lately I’ve felt a lot of gratitude for the girls who helped me grow up.

“There will never be enough writing about love”

An embarrassingly earnest sentence I wrote in my notes app, thinking about how many people in my life are seated in different compartments of the endlessly turning ferris wheel that is the cycle of romantic relationships. No matter how many different experiences I have or hear about regarding love: new crushes, flings, falling-in-loves; reckonings, heartbreak, loneliness; rebounds, backslides, and new beginnings again, it seems like for everyone involved, every experience of love or loss always feels like the first time it has ever happened, and the last time it ever will.

Every new experience, or relationship of any kind, creates a whole new organism. Faced with constant novelty, I can’t imagine that we as people could ever stop writing about love. I’m sure everything that could be said about love has been said. Nevertheless, I can’t imagine that we’ll ever run out of more things to say. 

A few years ago, at the end of college, I found the most intriguing, confusing, confounding concept to me to be death. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Everything I wrote worked on the concept of death in some way or another. Now, I feel that same sense of fascination with love. Love, to me, can be so irrational and confusing, so gorgeous, and so daunting. It’s the ultimate conjunction of consonance and dissonance, one subject that constantly forces me to reach toward the outer edges of my vocabulary. I both never expect to hear a fresh take, and constantly find new ways to look at what is happening to us when we love. I don’t expect to ever get to the bottom of the issue, yet also feel that it will never surprise me again. 

Every new person, and every new experience, creates a new language made up of old words, and I will always read it all. 

Camping Solved All of my Problems

I had never been camping before this year, which is a fact that has really confused all the white people in my life. I didn’t grow up going camping because my parents don’t like being dirty, really. I also unfortunately, racistly, as you can probably tell from the topic sentence of this paragraph, assumed for most of my life that camping was for white people. 

However, camping for the first time was really fucking awesome, specifically for me, for many reasons. The biggest reason was that camping amongst a beautiful natural backdrop exposed me to a sense of awe that I had thought was only possible to feel from engaging with great creative work. 

We went to Shaver Lake in Central California, and camped by the most beautiful lake I’ve ever seen, witnessed the tallest trees in the world, and were immersed in a gorgeous mountainside. Every second I was there, besides when I endured the purgatorial ritual of using the public restrooms, I spent with some of my best friends in the world. 

For most of my life as a young adult, I have connected the feeling of being awestruck with my sense of purpose. I have typically felt that way when engaging with great creative work, or doing my own. I felt a sense of awe when watching the films created at RIFF, or when my buddy Kel and I put together Concessions, the Play. That feeling of awe is always heightened by the fact that it is shared amongst everyone involved and in attendance. 

However, part of the addiction to that experience comes from the fact that it’s hard to achieve. Every substantial creative project that I’ve mounted, even at its most whimsical and enjoyable, comes with a decent amount of effort and stress. That feeling of awe is worthwhile, but it’s just not sustainable to spend all of life grinding in order to access that feeling.

Being immersed in nature let me experience that same sense of awe and connection to those around me, at the scale of a great creative production, without the obsessive labor that goes into that work. I read this amazing passage in the book “How to Change Your Mind” about how an experience of awe contributes to a positive kind of depersonalization; a reduction of activity in the part(s) of the brain associated with egocentrism:

It’s funny that in general, I’ve attributed most of my experience of awe to witnessing great feats of creativity; yet, the culture of many creative communities includes and assumes a high level of egocentrism. I’ve thought of that egocentrism as being innate to the community, and maybe it is, but now I am more certain that it’s exactly opposed to generating good creative work. Because the goal of good creative work should be to conjure that sense of awe. That feels like the true North Star to follow amongst all the inferior incentives: working on experiences that diminish egocentric behavior and connect us to one other. 

Between meaningful creative experiences, I’m grateful to know now that I can always recapture the feeling of being struck with awe at the top of a mountain, the base of a tree, or in the middle of a gorgeous lake. 

At the Beach, I Wrote the Worst Sonnet You’ve Ever Read

Last week, there was a crazy heat wave in LA. Every day was well over 100 degrees, but I am lucky to have shelter and access to water, so I was not affected badly. On the last day of the heat wave, my friends on the west side invited me to come beat the heat at the beach. In my rush to beat traffic, I forgot my headphones, markers, or a book to read. I rawdogged the beach with just a notebook and pen. To make that interesting, since I had already completed the daily journaling I’ve turned to sans biweekly therapy, I looked up the rules to writing a sonnet, which I’d never formally learned in any class, or maybe had learned but didn’t care enough to remember. 

Just trying to create an example of the format, I wrote probably the worst sonnet that anyone has ever written. But I also see it as a sweet little premature child of mine, a good snapshot of where I was at, or where I am now, or maybe who I am in general despite its rudimentary nature or all its flaws. Our rudimentary nature or all our flaws. Don’t tell anyone about this:

I’m at the beach and I am laying down

Avoiding work to be in the hot sun

I could not hope to ever feel a frown

By sitting with my friends i feel I’ve won

I had some problems, issues on my mind

If love is gone or always still in reach

Thank god the waves are acting oh so kind

The breeze it hits my good friends at the beach

I’m settled here, and feel that all is good

I love my life more than I thought I could