Over Three Years of Newslettering
Overcoming self-doubt / plus, some newsletter recommendations
Hello Writers and Artists and Readers,
Thanks for hanging in with me through my ups and downs. That’s what it is to be a writer, right? The ups and downs? Or maybe that’s what being a human is.
I am feeling better than I was a few days ago, and I’m grateful for that. It’s so easy to find myself lifted by an undertow. I can exhaust myself struggling against the current, but thankfully I remember to let go before I lose my breathe. I let go, and the sea carries me.
I am in the sea now, drifting; remembering that I am the sea and you are the sea and we are all the sea, and we are all carried and we can all struggle but we cannot refuse the power of the ocean.
It’s been a little over three years since I started this newsletter.
There are many Substackers who have been inspiring me lately, and I am grateful for them. Holly Whitaker’s most recent essay on Recovering was a lovely morning read. I may have cried through a lot of it. Yes, you have to be a subscriber. Yes, a paying subscription is worth it.
I also took comfort in Marlee Grace’s recent success in being named a Substack Reads featured publication, which they wrote about in their last newsletter. I took a class from Marlee a couple years ago, and was subscribed to their newsletter when they transitioned over to Substack. I know the transition was scary for them, but look what happened. A leap and a catch, though there were many many months of hanging in midair, most of which were openly shared with their readers.
From Marlee, I have learned about consistency and vulnerability.
Arbuscular is another Substack I adore. This one, about Lichens, is gorgeous, but everything Guérin Kairu writes is its own kind of beauty.
Lastly (but not leastly) Summer Brennan’s newsletter is simply wonderful. She is a write living in Paris and just started her (FREE!) essay camp. I highly recommend you join and subscribe. All of Summer’s essays are accessible and none are kept behind a paywall, which I absolutely love, because I can’t currently afford subscriptions to anything. But when I can I will absolutely become a paying subscriber.
I am so grateful for you.
This newsletter is in its third year of existence, and I am frankly surprised I have stuck with it. I’ve been writing online since 2007, but dropped platforms often and silenced myself often. After my last post, I contemplated shuttering the newsletter, because writing so vulnerably overwhelms me, and there is also no other way I can write.
I am someone whose inner dialogue is a back and forth arguing for and against my worth, my right to exist and take up space, my gender identities, my life choices, and constantly projecting its assumptions of what others must believe I am. Often these assumptions are harmful and off base.
I remind myself now that I do have tools.
I have quiet and meditation and long walks and music and friends and…writing.
Yesterday I walked to class while listening to Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Heart of Understanding. This is a recording of a dharma talk he gave decades ago, on the Heart Sutra. Thay’s voice and words reminded me of who I am and how easy it is to lose myself when I see myself as separate from everything.
Recorded dharma talks are a specific genre, and while I was walking home from class last night, as the birds chattered and flitted and the dark clouds above me threatened rain, I thought of how long I have been coming back to dharma talks for centering and reminding. Over two decades, now.
My first dharma talk was in person, at the temple my grandfather took me to when I was a child. When I was nineteen I figured out that I could buy dharma talks on CD, or check them out from the library. Now I listen to them via Libby. The moments of silence imbued with a recorder’s static, the occasional coughs and throat-clearings of the audience, the bells rung throughout; all of these elicit physiological responses in me.
As I walked, I breathed. I remembered to breathe. I remembered the trees and their leaves and the sky and the tiny ants in their anthills and all of the earth surrounding me.
I forget about how surrounded I am. How surrounded we are. Sheltered and soothed, if we allow it.
Near the end of Thay’s talk, he tells the audience that there is a bow one can take to the Buddha, forming a lotus with one’s two palms. He sings a chant which translates to:
"The one who is bowing and the one who receives the respect; both of them are empty. That is why communication is perfect. The one who is bowing is me. The one who receives the respect is the Buddha. Before bowing to him I say: you and I, we are all empty. I and the Buddha, we inter-are. And the Buddha is made of non-Buddha elements like me. And me, I am made of non-me elements like the Buddha. “
“Just look at this stick,” Thay says. “If we look at the non-discriminating mind, we see a wonderful stick. But as soon as we think that this is the “right” and this is the “left,” we are caught. Now we want to eliminate the right, we want only to keep the left. It’s like the good and the evil. You want to eliminate the evil, and you want to preserve only the good. Now I think that if this stick has a right and a left, I would like to remove the right side, so I divide it into half, and I remove this. But as soon as I do this, this becomes the right. Whenever you have the left, you always have the right.”
“So good and evil inter-are.”
This teaching; that one cannot be good without evil and evil without good, is comforting.
So much of my own self-rejection has to do with fearing my “evil.” Fearing what in me can be perceived as bad, or problematic. But when I am scared of my own inherently problematic nature, I am also blind to my good nature. To my goodness. We can’t fully embrace our whole selves without embracing the parts of ourselves we’re scared of.
As a writer, this fear can lead to self-silencing, or a resistance to entering into and interrogating my own complex views of the world and my experience within it, specifically in my nonfiction.
I’m interested: do any of you struggle with this? And if so, what are your tools for taking care of yourself and helping to remove your own internal barriers?
Tell me in the comments.
