If you hate the valleys, this is for you
Also, what I've been reading/watching the past two weeks
Is it appropriate to thank those who had no idea or intention of what they gave?
I don’t know but it’s in that spirit that I thank you for the past several weeks grace period while I checked out of all things writing and basically binge watched documentaries and read not literary fiction and tried to get our budget back under control and then spent an ungodly sum to print, punch, pack, and mail copies of the novel for beta readers so I could spent the next two months not obsessing at 1am (and 2am and 3:37am) whether this sentence or that sentence was a better way to say the exact same thing. Oh, and then woke up yesterday in the excruciating pain I related immediately and terrifyingly with the ectopic pregnancy I had in 2019 until I realized it was probably a kidney stone since we quit buying fizzy flavored waters and that meant I was probably unintentionally dehydrating myself in protest of Plain Ordinary Water.
Basically, all I’m saying is thanks for the grace to just life for a bit instead of producing. Since I shared that
quote “My subconscious is working for a solution” with Nate, he jokes that watching episodes of dating reality shows (Love is Blind is best, but any will do), survivor reality shows (Alone is best, but will accept nearly anything except Naked and Alone), and true crime documentaries is surely my subconscious at hard work. I shrug in response. He’s probably right. I’m not proud of it. I’m still gonna do it.I’m midway through a summer off social media and have zero desire to talk about all that here on Substack (which is and isn’t social media). The only bit I’ve really missed are the glimpses of my nieces, nephews, and all the kids I love because I loved their parents first.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how short the pipeline from “Thinks a thought” to “Takes an action” has become in 2025. I write of buying things of course, but not only that, also of sharing images or memes or calling our representatives or coming out in support of something we used to find abhorrent or changing our mind about an issue or way of life.
It used to be (I think?) the process for these shifts was much slower and I suspect good happened in that space, a lot of good we’ve now foregone in favor of convenience or signaling or not wanting to feel the discomfort of being between things.
That’s all very vague but it all relates to our personal efforts to divest from billionaires (finally canceling our Amazon and Costco accounts, not only because of the Bigness of them, but also the waste/plastic of them), the near constant conversations we have in our home around gender/sexuality/theology —> politics/culture/community, and our attempts to wrangle our financial and chronos budget because holy cow, everything is expensive and shopping locally means going to more places and probably spending more money at them and then the time it takes to plan/prep/cook all the raw ingredients is akin to a full-time job.
All that to say, there is a lot of tension to be found here in these parts right now.
A few years ago I was talking with a friend about a hotly debated subject in our circles and the pressure I felt to land one way or another and all the reasons I felt landing one way or another was important for someone like me who wrote publicly. She said something like, “What if the way you can actually serve the community of people who read you, is to not land one way or another, but to mine what’s to be found in the tension between the two?”