1. Feel your feelings

Things that can help with this: Focusing (in the Gendlin sense), meditation, yoga, psilocybin, journaling, simply sitting there and noticing what’s going on with your body (these are all variants of the same thing). It is best to do this when you’re not in a state of acute crisis. (Specifically please, please don’t do any drugs if you’re at all in an unstable state.)

Common failure modes: You are probably not conscious of all the things that you do to distract yourself from your discomfort. Common coping mechanisms: working, scrolling/browsing, alcohol/any other kind of substance, fixating on another human being, daydreaming/fantasizing.

Why do I need to feel my feelings? To put it simply, economy of movement.

Most people waste their whole lives going in circles. They act out the same relationship dynamic again and again. They quit their job, and choose another job that makes them unhappy. Almost always, they blame it on circumstances.

It is rarely, if ever, purely circumstance. Some of the most high-functioning, emotionally astute people I know act out the same dynamics again and again, and complain about being unhappy. “Smart people get themselves into all sorts of crazy situations because they’re really good at rationalizing things to themselves.”

In general, feeling your problems goes so much further than thinking about your problems. Thinking is mostly useful for strategy, and doesn’t get you very far when you’re not in touch with your emotional state.

Being “in touch” with your emotions (as in, your truest, deepest desires), is not intuitive to most of us, especially those of us who live much more in the analytical, cerebral realm. It’s normal to not know how to do it, and I recommend finding a qualified professional if at all possible, ideally someone you’ve seen produce good results in someone you think highly of.

2. Figure out if you should act on your feelings

Often the answer is “no.” Again, economy of movement.

Sometimes, the answer is yes. Let’s say you are trying to get from Point A to Point B in your life. Ask yourself: is this likely to just happen on its own?

Common failure modes: wishful thinking. “It’s all going to work itself out” is true in the sense of, if you do nothing, something happens. It’s just that the something may not be the thing you want, and in fact it might be the opposite of the thing you want. In my opinion, God loves strivers, so I personally recommend Making a Serious Effort to Get What You Want.

It can be easy to cosplay making a serious effort. For instance, say you want to meet a life partner, and then you go on a series of lackluster Hinge dates, decide that there’s no one out there for you, and call it a day.

Something I often ask clients is… Is this truly your best effort? Scratch that, is this even 75% of your best effort? If someone is ostensibly trying to “do something” and I can tell like they’re just cosplaying I honestly will not even talk to them about it because I feel like it’s a waste of my brain cells.

3. Decide what you should actually do.

At this stage I recommend talking to three to five people whose judgment you really respect. IT IS IMPORTANT THAT THEY KNOW YOU REALLY WELL. Ideally they’re all wired quite differently. For instance, when I’m trying to figure out what to do I generally talk to my therapist, who is a hippy-ish “feel your feelings” type, an -brained male friend, and an emotionally astute female friend, in addition to S, who is just very calm and smart. This way I get the full spread of insight. Sometimes the advice really diverges but generally I’m always surprised by how consistently people arrive at the same conclusions.

Of course, what I want to do matters the most, but I’m often too close to the problem to have the best perspective. Other people can check our blind spots for us, and offer general feedback on whether we’re delusional or not.

Friends who will tell you if you’re being delusional are worth their weight in gold. I should honestly make a whole Substack post about how to identify people who are good candidates for this.

Common failure modes: I’ve noticed over time that the excuses people give for not doing things sound logical at face value, but don’t hold up when you closely examine them. I can’t date because of [plausible-sounding excuse]. I can’t quit my job because of [plausible-sounding excuse]. But then when you really think about it, you might wonder… is that true, or is it an excuse mostly manufactured from thin air because they’re nervous about doing something and want to avoid it? Anyway, when I encounter an excuse from a close friend that seems entirely too convenient, I simply say, I’m not sure that makes sense, and then leave it there. And of course then I have to turn it back on myself…

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Hans Thoma, At Lake Garda, 1907

Housekeeping: I took a pause for a few months but I’m taking on new clients again! I enjoy helping people with dating, breakups, and decisions/transitions. My ideal is for us to work together for a bounded period of time (say, four sessions) to help you making progress on, accomplish or decide something. I do occasionally keep seeing clients past this period if we like working together!! (If you’ve filled out my previous form in the past couple of months, don’t worry, I’ll be emailing everyone who did). And I’ll get the broader matchmaking survey out in the next few days :)

My friend says that the couples she appreciates most are the irrational ones, people who not only have nothing to gain from each other, but in fact a great deal to lose. I feel the same way: there is no Didion line I relate to more than the one that goes “I came into adult life believing … that salvation lay in extreme and doomed commitments, promises made and somehow kept outside the range of normal social experience.” I like irrational pacts, I make irrational pacts, and one of the great learnings of adult life for me is that tradeoffs are inherent to these pacts, not anti-romance but in fact fundamentally romantic. For instance:

It is good, actually, that we can’t get everything from one person.

The worst way to relate to this is to bemoan it. The best way to relate to it is to understand that the fact that one person can’t have every quality in the world is an opportunity to examine what matters the most to you.

There is no uniform correct answer to this, and to be honest most people don’t know their answer. We all tend to long for people who are some combination of hot and smart and charming and kind and fun, and what happens over the course of life is we meet someone who possesses a specific combination of those qualities, and they yank at us in a way that’s unexpected. What we like is often not what we anticipate liking, and what we value the most is not necessarily what we fantasize about the most.

I had the realization recently that many of the behaviors that I believed were intrinsic to me in a romantic relationship were merely responses to the other person. I’ve also seen this happen to acquaintances, friends, and partners: you believe you’re a certain way, and it turns out that you aren’t. You think you’re restless or closed off or overly independent or anxious and then you meet someone and realize: that’s not who I am at all. That’s the way I behave in the presence of many people.

Someone once told me that they loved me for the way I made them feel. At the time, I was affronted, but I now have a more generous interpretation: they really liked being the person that they were in my presence. After all, the qualities someone possesses do not exist in a vacuum: ideally, we do not love someone because they’re objectively beautiful, but because they’re particularly beautiful to us. There is some kind of special gestalt created by their being when it’s in the presence of ours, and that gestalt is… better.

The problem that haunted me most of my adult life, as far as romance was concerned, was that I did not know how I wanted to feel in the presence of another person. All I knew to seek was validation, safety, and praise. In time, I’ve come to understand that I would trade almost anything to be known. Fully understood, not in the sense that someone can describe my behavior or tell me about the qualities I possess, but in the sense that how they behave towards me implies a deep understanding of my desires, values, and way of being. Because that, of course, is the expensive and unfakeable thing: behavior.

I’m always surprised by how many people choose partners who are incapable of knowing them in order to sidestep this whole issue. For many, safety feels like holding yourself at a respectful distance: it’s entirely possible to eat with, sleep with, and share the rhythms of life with a person you love greatly while shielding your interiority from them. This, too is a tradeoff.

We are not owed everything; we are not owed anything except common human decency, and we may fail to receive even that. From Eurydice’s post on wants vs needs (I have been binging her Substack recently, and suggest that you do too):

You don’t need esteem, sexual excitement, emotional connection, in order to survive, of course. You do in some sense have a need for them, as a member of the human race, in that life is considerably harder without them. The obligation to fulfill that need always lies with you, not with your spouse. Most people reach for “needs” instead of “wants” because they want to take advantage of the very non-negotiable quality of a need.

Being known is a want, not a need. Sometimes doing the work to be known by another human being feels like Great… now I have to creative direct my way into a tolerable relationship experience. (I hate when I'm on a flight and I wake up with a water bottle…) But that, too, is a tradeoff, because over time I have accepted that the optimal amount of creative directing is far from zero.

I, like everyone else, wish that someone could simply sense what I want. But unfortunately I do not tend to be compatible with the type of guy who is really into chakras, despite being pretty into chakras myself, and being into chakras is very useful for this kind of thing. So instead I’ve learned to use my words.

Using your words is really powerful. I recommend it. The best tradeoff I’ve ever made is accepting the embarrassment of articulating my insecurities and desires in great detail in return for the people I love giving me more of what I want. In this instance, humiliation is so worth it. I think this tweet is true:

Most people are uninterested in sincerely and straightforwardly stating what they perceive and what they want. This is because they intuitively understand that the other person may be uninterested in giving them what they want, and risking the truth feels Really Bad. But both things are true: other people are not slot machines you put effort into in order to receive love and acceptance, and also it is worth being sincere.

The tradeoffs we make tell us who we are. Sometimes it’s not very fun to realize who you are. I’ve been making tradeoffs all my life, because that’s what literally everyone does, but the truth is that I was never fulfilled until I started feeling like the tradeoffs I made were representative of who I actually was. It’s hard to conceive of yourself as generous if you don’t act generously. It’s hard to conceive of yourself as romantic if you don’t act romantically. Who you are today doesn’t have to be who you are tomorrow, but for many confronting who they are today is so hard that they’d rather live in perpetual denial.

Endemic to all of this, of course, is what it means to be on the other side: what do we do when someone makes the tradeoff that leads them away from being with us? And I know this is infinitely easier said than done, but it’s best to celebrate other people’s freedom. Desire, after all, arises when we notice someone else’s power and autonomy. In short, their ability to live without us is what makes the soft underbelly exposed by their choice to be with us meaningful.

One of the most satisfying feelings in the world is looking at your partner and realizing that a beautiful, vital, autonomous human being, different from every other person in this world in their specific habits, interests, personality, and memories, is the one person you have chosen, and they choose you back. Love at its best, to me, has always felt like the opposite of compulsion. They do not need you; you do not need them; there are infinite other tradeoffs you both could be making, and yet. You are here because you want to be here. You want nothing else as much as you want to be here. Duty is the practice of virtue; romance is the exercise of free will.

LOVE

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Edouard Vuillard, Breakfast at Villerville, 1910

I really love Jonny Miller’s website/essay about How to Unclench, and I wanted to share my own observations of periods when I notice myself being less clenched. Broadly speaking I’ve become a lot more open and less anxious over the past several years, but like everyone sometimes I go through periods of intense stress and experience distinct behavioral changes

When I’m not braced or minimally braced, I:

• notice less tension in my face and body. The areas around my scapulae and hips are less chronically tight, and my brow is not furrowed. During periods of intense stress I notice that the last thing that happens before I go to bed is I completely relax my forehead

• my stomach and skin are less irritated

• am more drawn to intellectually demanding reading/work—if I’m not stressed I’m more likely to randomly pick up Moby Dick, if I’m clenched you best believe I’m reading some romantasy before bed

• engage in compulsive behaviors less—less scrolling on social media, less mindlessly buying things, less eating/drinking to soothe myself

• generally less fixated on or distressed by current events, can consume the discourse and even enjoy it without being emotionally triggered

• procrastinate less, actually reply to texts in a semi-reasonable amount of time, do chores/logistical stuff way before I need to, have the emotional bandwidth to grapple with writing things I feel stuck on instead of pushing it aside

• paradoxically notice much more when I’m triggered, if I’m tensing during a social interaction or am bothered by something someone said. Am better at relaxing into the trigger rather than hardening against it

• am much more sensitive to how it feels to be in other people’s presence. More aware of their microexpressions, tone of voice, body language

• better at nondoing, I almost never feel “bored” when I’m relaxed, whereas I have a constant need to occupy myself when I’m clenched

• don’t feel the need to micromanage or control things and have a much more “Let me figure out the correct amount to do to prepare and we’ll see what happens” approach. This generally turns out better.

• fall asleep quickly, stay asleep, wake up feeling alert. When I’m stressed the first thing that goes for me is sleep—I have weird dreams, wake up in the middle of the night, can’t fall asleep, stay asleep, etc

• ruminate less. A big sign of clenching for me is returning to the same topic over and over again and turning it over for hours

• can be deeply engaged with something without being obsessive/hypervigilant about it. For example, talking to someone a lot without being paranoid about how quickly or slowly they respond to me

• actively want to work out. When I’m stressed forcing myself to put on sneakers and go for a run feels like lifting a 50-lb boulder. When I’m relaxed I want to work out every day or every other day

• am more sociable, initiate hangouts more

• … but also am more independent in the sense that I don’t reflexively reach for other people to regulate myself or make me feel better

• I notice that people look at my face more and for longer when I’m less stressed. I think it’s an openness/facial tension thing

• tend to be less preoccupied with meta/existential questions, more present-minded

• when contemplating something unpleasant I have to do, feel more neutral/curious about it (“I wonder what’s the best way to get through this”) instead of anticipating it with active dread

• I’m more verbally expressive and I volunteer things about myself. When I’m clenched sharing anything vulnerable feels pulling teeth and I tend to stick to safe topics or Things One Must Talk About

• I’m more creative, I have ideas for how to work through existing problems or ideas for new things I want to do

• more conscientious, tend to be more preoccupied with thoughts of “what’s the best practice here” and less in survival mode

• effort is a continuous thread through a lot of this—when I’m clenched everything that’s mildly effortful for me by default becomes extremely effortful. It’s hard to work out, it’s hard to do chores, it’s hard to hang out in groups, it’s hard to text back, it’s hard to spend evenings alone… everything feels more grind-y. When I’m relaxed I flow through a lot more of my life.

• this may be specific to my job lol but I write a lot more when I’m unclenched

• there’s a feeling of spaciousness when I’m unclenched that I feel as both a physical and emotional thing. Literally feels like there’s more air in the room

• am excited to wake up every morning

Joan Mitchell, Wood, Wind, No Tuba, 1979

No one’s ever made me feel normal except for you. I’ve met people who are so radiantly warm, complicated, clever, with just the type of mouth I like, expressive in just the way I find sexy, and mostly it makes me think that sex appeal is lost on me. More and more I realize there are so many things in this world th…

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Richard Diebenkorn, Landscape with Figure, 1956

HOUSEKEEPING: I have been traveling all summer and had a lot a lot of fun but I am fully back. After many DMs, I am finally bringing back subscriber matchmaking. I’m also taking on some new coaching clients. More on both this week!

1. Relationships are never shortcuts for personal development. “All sins are attempts to fill the void” is never truer than when it comes to romantic relationships. Don’t use another human being to anesthetize yourself.

1. More on shortcuts: anything that feels like a way to get out of doing the work will come back to bite you. You have to go through yourself to get anywhere good.

2. Focusing on what the other person is or isn’t doing is often a way out of confronting what you are or aren’t doing.

3. “I can’t see what could possibly make this better” as an excuse to not try things is just a method of justifying inaction.

4. Think about how you want to be living in five years. Are the choices you’re making today compatible with that?

5. It’s okay to get stuck. It’s okay to take breaks. “Sometimes human beings just have to sit in one place and hurt.”

6. If at all possible, try to have fun with it. Lightness is usually better than heaviness.

7. Love is extremely anxiety inducing for all of us. How you cope with the anxiety is what matters.

8. If you consistently get the same particular negative reaction from people, it’s best to model your own affect/behavior as the cause. There can be a lot of resistance to doing this because we instinctively want to justify our own behavior as a Correct and Reasonable. But being able to argue that you’re Being Reasonable will Not Get You Better Outcomes.

9. Being honest earlier is always better than being honest later. The more there is to say, the more daunting it feels, and the more blindsided the other person will be.

10. It’s unreasonable to expect someone else to anticipate all your needs if you’re not willing to articulate them. A lot of times people will assume, “Because this person loves me, they should know this situation isn’t fair/is making me unhappy.” In an ideal world that would be true, but most of the time people are consumed with their own needs and problems. They might act very differently if you speak up, or they might not, but either way you should share how you’re feeling.

11. Resentment is almost always the result of self-betrayal. Stop betraying yourself and see what happens.

12. Holding a grudge is really hard and painful. Letting go of it is liberating. Let people fail you, be mad at them for however long you need to, and then make peace with it, whether you keep them in your life or don’t.

13. How do I know if it’s fundamentally not right vs if I should just try harder? Generally I find that people always know which it is, they’re just not prepared for the consequences of internalizing it so they want to delay knowing until they’re ready.

14. You will have an infinitely better time in relationships if you can stay with the other person instead of getting lost in your own head. So much of love is just paying attention to and accurately perceiving what someone else needs.

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B.D. McClay points out that Anne Elliot is 27 in Persuasion, that Lily Bart is 29 in The House of Mirth. Fanny Price is 18 when most of the action unfolds in Mansfield Park, which I just finished reading. We don’t know Anna Karenina’s exact age, but she’s in her late 20s. Emma Bovary kills herself when she is only 27 years old (insert joke about the 27 club). It’s funny to me that I spent my 20s in agony at the passage of time, and now when I’m on the cusp of turning 30 I’m calm, excited. What I was anxious about was not time; it was plot. I was interested in how a particular story would play out. It was the story of my writing—the story of a book—and then the story of my love life. I treated my life as a novel, because all I’ve ever known is how to read things like I read novels. Sometimes that’s made things better, and sometimes I think it’s made things worse.

Lately I’ve been circling back to Jane Austen. I read Mansfield Park recently because of this review, the only Austen novel I’ve never read; the thing I find interesting about it is the idea that you can determine someone’s character simply by waiting. In fact, the optimal thing to do is simply to wait instead of act. Fanny Price’s strategy, you could say, was to go slow. (Of course, the whole point of Fanny is that she doesn’t have a strategy. She is the most passive girl in the world, which is sort of the point.)

In most novels, our character’s fates are determined their errors of judgment, often a result of going too fast: Marianne commits to the charming, aesthetically and intellectually sophisticated Willoughby too fast, only to realize later that he is an untrustworthy cad; Emma leaps into affair after affair with unsuitable men, after marrying someone she barely knows. Isabel Archer says no to Warburton and Caspar Goodwood, only to say yes to Gilbert Osmond, who is a very bad man indeed. Dorothea marries Casaubon because she wants someone to worship intellectually, only to realize he is a poor partner, and does not live up to her lofty expectations.

So it’s bad to go too fast. But also going slow does not mean things will work out for you: just look at Lily Bart. Reader, you see now that all my life I have been tortured by the oldest problem, just like everyone else: you have limited discernment, and limited time. But love is important, and we must get it right. Many model it as game theory, but the interesting thing about Jane Austen is that she understands that marrying well is also about virtue ethics.

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Hans Hofmann, The Conjurer (Small Version), 1946

So much of loving someone is entrusting them with your messiest emotions. You’re surprised when I pout like a child despite knowing that it’s unnecessary, embarrassing. But when I’m happiest I don’t suppress my range. The older I get, the more I feel capable of honoring the social contract as I understand it—of being gracious, polite, understanding, communicative, direct with a variety of different people in a variety of different situations. All of it feels so different from sinking into someone and knowing that you’re held.

The opposite of that feeling, of course, is placing your weight on someone and feeling like you’re sitting on a rickety stool that’s about to collapse. I’ve done that: it’s not a good sensation. The truth is that the fault was mine. I don’t know if I evangelize radical responsibility as a way of life, but understanding my own faults in judgment has certainly helped me work through many things. People are very complicated; they have mostly good intentions; we have to, as Leonard Cohen wrote, “let them off the hook, help them off the hook. Recognize the hook.”

In most relationships, I believe we are happiest when we love someone exactly as they are, tell them honestly when we think they should do something differently, acknowledge to ourselves the ways they do and don’t meet certain needs, and enjoy the joy, pleasure, and recognition we feel in their presence. Different people will be able to meet us to different extents, which is what I see as one of the fundamental rewards of friendship: we can love people, support them where they are and be supported where we are, without asking them to bear our entire weight. In this way, my friends have totally transformed my life, and transform it still. I’ve noticed that people are significantly more likely to work through major life problems when they have even one or two people they can tell everything to, who care about them and give them sage counsel. Just being witnessed and cared for is enough. Being truly close to one person can change your life more than you think.

Partnership is different, because it involves taking on someone else’s problems as your own. Of course, other people are separate from us, and it is very bad to take on total responsibility for a capable adult human being; we are each responsible for our own psyche, our own life. And yet if you are in a romantic relationship with someone you start to find that the way they think and feel naturally bleeds into how you think and feel; the way they express and receive love becomes entwined with how you express and receive love. When you have fundamental disagreements about how you approach things, the differences can become very painful.

On a recent trip to the Alps my friend pointed out that she thinks I have a very moral way of viewing relationships, in the sense that I believe there’s a way people should act. I’d never thought so, but when she said it I realized that I am obsessed with best practices. To be clear, I don’t always successfully implement those best practices, but all my writing is fundamentally about what you should do when you love and are loved, how to parse the various complexities that follow. Hearing her say this made me understand how a previous relationship failed simply because we were so far from seeing eye to eye on best practices that I lost faith in the enterprise. Our differences alienated me. Alienation, of course, is the opposite of intimacy. To me, the possibility of partnership is the feeling that despite the fundamental chasm between two human beings, love allows us to bridge the gap; alienation is the feeling that the gap cannot be bridged, and moreover, that I do not want to.

Best practices in relationships, of course, are both objective and subjective. Other people have different values, and different needs. It is not for me to judge their values, their needs, or the way they go about fulfilling them. It is up to me to honor my own, and if I care about them, find a way to support them in theirs. Supporting other people’s freedom is sometimes painful, sometimes humbling, sometimes liberating. More and more I try to save my philosophizing for writing, and my generosity for life.

It is hard to bridge the gap. We spend so much of our lives trying to figure out attachment, dependence, freedom, trust, acceptance, rejection, and commitment. I see people in happy partnerships try to figure it out with their friends; I see people circle around it again and again with their romantic partners; I see people get it right, get it wrong, get it right again. I don’t always have the language for what my heart knows. The living heat of your body is the living heat of your body, responsive, yielding, speaking to me without words. The love I feel now is the shock of realizing anew what I’ve already known for a long time. The same old Jack Gilbert poem all over again: What we feel most has / no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds.

His novels are deeply haunted by pain. James Wood, in one of the best lectures I’ve ever listened to, says:

Dostoevsky always stressed the aesthetic principle in our response to God, and found more moving than words the image of Christ. For his 58th birthday, his wife gave him a reproduction of Rafael’s Sistine Madonna. “How many times,” she wrote, “have I found him in his study in front of that great picture, in such deep contemplation that he did not hear me coming in?” Seeing suffering, being made to witness it, is not of course a solution to suffering. But perhaps, it’s the only comprehension we can really possess. A contemporary philosopher, Kenneth Surin, ends his book on the problem of evil by saying that suffering is indeed a theological mystery. So, he essentially ends with the incomprehensibility theory. That it is indeed a theological mystery, and that all we can do is let it exist as an interruption. That’s the word he italicized. As an interruption in our sense of divine order and goodness. When I first read this book, years ago, I thought Surin’s conclusion little more than postmodern relaxation, a kind of preciousness in which Surin had managed to find a convenient metaphorical blanket for the elephant in the room. But I’m not so sure, now, and find the idea of interruption, and the kind of interruption provided by Dostoevsky in novels, a useful way of addressing these issues.

Interruption, first of all, in the way that I interrupted my lecture to read from the novel. The interruption that the representation of pain brings to our largely unbroken existences. But there’s also the interruption that Dostoevsky’s peculiarly open-ended novels provide. Bakhtin famously called this the dialogical principle, by which he meant the way in which ideas in Dostoyevsky circulate alongside other ideas, and none seems to be privileged by the form of the novel. “For Dostoyevsky,” wrote Bakhtin, “There are no ideas, no thoughts, no positions, which belong to no one-- which exist in themselves. All ideas are attached to characters, who then warp and modify them. And this applies as freely to obviously good ideas, like the preaching of the monk Zosima in the Brothers Karamazov, who says we must love each other, as it does to the obviously bad ideas, like Raskolnikov’s utilitarian nihilism.

We might write novels to work out problems in our own life, like Palahniuk says. But novels are about bearing witness to something we fundamentally cannot solve, which is to say the inexplicability and incomprehensibility of human life. From George Steiner’s Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky:

Belinsky stated that the question of the existence of God was the final and all-determining focus of Russian thought. As Merezhkovsky remarked, the problem of God and of His nature had “absorbed the whole Russian people from the Judaizers of the fifteenth century to the present day.” The iconography of the Messiah and the eschatology of Revelation gave to political debate a bizarre and feverish resonance. The shadow of millennial expectations lay across a stifled culture. In all Russian political thinking—in the pronouncements of Chaadaev, Kireevsky, Nechaiev, Tkachev, Belinsky, Pissarev, Constantine Leontiev, Soloviev, and Fedorov—the kingdom of God had moved terribly close to the declining kingdom of man. The Russian mind was, literally, God-haunted … Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov are, if you will, fictions and poems of the mind, but central to their purpose is what Berdiaev has called the “quest after the salvation of humanity.”

The Brothers Karamazov is a chronicle of an unhappy family, but is also a novel about belief and disbelief, the necessity and impossibility of God, the“logical claustrophobia of Christian commitment” as a response to human suffering. The characters are incredibly vivid. Dmitri, chaotic, violently passionate, wildly loving. Ivan, the charismatic atheist who is so close to being a believer. Grushenka, a Mary Magdalene character if I’ve seen one, opaque, vindictive, charming and damaged with her swollen lower lip, her lovely body that will run to fat before she’s 30. Katerina Ivanovna, proud and unbending. Alyosha, saintly, beatific and naive.

From some notes I wrote after reading War and Peace:

Tolstoy’s work is powerfully animated by a precise awareness of the universality of human experience—he can illustrate the ways we are different because of his deep sense of how we are alike. His writing feels nearly Biblical to me—one almost has the impression that a prophet has descended to impart tales of human folly and wisdom. And the topics that Tolstoy instructs us on, especially in War and Peace, are not much less ambitious than what you’d expect of a religious text—good and evil, altruism and greed, freedom and necessity, the nature of romantic and familial love.

War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov are books of incredible scale. One way of looking at it is that you and I, dear reader, do not live in God-haunted 19th century Russia, but the problems of contemporary America do not seem any less immediate, vivid, religious in nature. In fact, like many others, I've lately been hyperfixated on the idea that our problems are astonishingly religious in nature. Meghan O’Gieblyn writes in Interior States (her essay on attention is currently circulating on X, and I highly recommend reading… well, every other essay she’s ever written):

William James once noted that “the most violent revolutions in an individual’s beliefs leave most of his old order standing.” In other words, even when a person outwardly denounces a long-standing belief, the architecture of the idea persists and can come to be inhabited by other things. This is as true of cultures as it is of individuals. Some of the essays in this collection examine the ways in which our increasingly secular landscape is still imprinted with the legacy of Christianity. The testimony, as a narrative form, endures in the rooms of twelve-step programs and in contemporary writing about motherhood, which often takes the form of conversion narrative. Meanwhile, the faith’s epic story of messianic redemption lives on in the utopic visions of transhumanism and in liberalism’s endless arc of progress.

The mood in the labs is fever-pitched and overtly eschatological. But as a society, we no longer seem to write novels explicitly about God, or at least not since Gilead. I’ve been thinking about James Wood all week and why it is that I was pretty much disinterested in literary criticism until I read him. Like Meghan O’Gieblyn, he grew up evangelical; this interview describes him as “a writer for whom criticism is a way of proselytising for literature.” But he sees literature as inherently an earthly form, focused on our absurdities and failings. It is possible to write a mystical novel (he categorizes Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Moby Dick as such) but it is hard to write a Christian novel, perhaps because “narrative is inherently secular.”

I agree with Wood that the most vivid, poignant character in the Brothers Karamazov is Ivan, the atheist who cannot reconcile the existence of God with the existence of children suffering.

The Russian philosopher Lev Shestov, for instance, thought that Dostoevsky, for all his orthodoxy, was so corroded by doubt that when he came to imagine the doubter Ivan, he couldn’t help giving him a vitality and appeal far beyond the saintly and bland Alyosha. Those of Shestov’s mind think that even if the novel demonstrates that atheism is finally a murderous idea, because it kills old Fyodor Karamazov, religion is so damaged by Ivan’s onslaught that it cannot mount a proper reply.

In real life, months before Dostoyevsky started writing The Brothers Karamazov his two-year-old son Alyosha died following an epileptic fit. Knausgaard:

Dostoyevsky “loved Lyosha somehow in a very special way, with an almost morbid love, as if sensing that he would not have him for long,” Anna wrote later. When his son stopped breathing, Dostoyevsky “kissed him, made the sign of the cross over him three times,” and broke down in tears. He was crushed with grief, Anna wrote, and with guilt—his son had inherited epilepsy from him. Outwardly, however, he was soon calm and collected; she was the one who wept and wept. Gradually, she grew worried that his suppression of grief would have a negative impact on his already fragile health, and she suggested that he visit the Optina Pustyn monastery with a young friend, the theological wunderkind Vladimir Solovyov. There they met the elder of the monastery—the starets—Ambrose. “Weep and be not consoled, but weep,” he said to Dostoyevsky.

What happened to Dostoyevsky is profoundly visible in the novel: The Brothers Karamazov is a book written by a man who has experienced unbearable suffering, and struggles to reconcile it as a profound believer. Dmitri’s passion is Dostoyevsky’s passion; Ivan’s torment is Dostoyevsky’s torment, just as Alyosha’s goodness is his conception of goodness. The Brother Karamazov is suffused with pain, but I agree with Knausgaard that the kiss that Alyosha gives Ivan at the end of the Grand Inquisitor chapter (the best chapter in the book, and as has been argued, one of the best chapters in any book anywhere) feels like the heart of the novel. Atheism debates about ideas. But faith is not an idea but an act.

The Wood lecture I quoted above continues by elaborating on this point:

Perhaps all narrative, indeed, corrugates dogma. Puts truths in motion. Narratives’ continuousness, if you think about it-- this happened, and then that happened, and then that happened--is secular rather than religious, because it is endless in the way life is, rather than eternal in the way religion promises. In other words, like life, narrative only seems endless. It’s bottomless rather than circular. But eternity, religious eternity, stops time by expanding it into infinity, and making a circularity of it. Time will come to an end, we are doctrinally instructed, when the apocalypse comes.

Viewed that way, AI could not be a religious movement if it was not a story about the apocalypse, about time coming to an end. I wonder if there’s a way in which the most pro-literature thing you can do is to believe in narrative, which is to say: to believe that time will continue.

Tony Feher, Come Out and Play Stephen Jay (detail), 2013

Finishing the book feels like travelling through time. I can tell I’m more sensitive than usual this week, overwhelmed. I remember where and when it all started, and who I was back then.

I’ve learned our actions have consequences. I do understand you deeply and why you’ve made the choices you’ve ma…

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Pleading, 1984 by Jeff Wall

Safety without aliveness is deadening; aliveness without safety is disorienting. You can tell where you have room to grow by examining your relationship and asking yourself what you’re more afraid to expect: safety or aliveness?

If you want to know if something is alive, ask yourself: does it thrill me?

If you want to know if something is safe, ask yourself: do I intuitively feel I can depend on it in every realm that matters?

If you care too much about safety, you’ll be terrified of risks that lead to more aliveness because you’re so indexed on what you might lose: This is good enough.

If you care too much about aliveness, you’ll struggle to create a solid foundation from which to experiment and grow, or the intuitive sense that you are fully held.

If you’re never experienced safety and aliveness at the same time, you probably doubt that they can coexist. We love to depict them as mutually exclusive in our culture. Manic pixie dream girl or nagging wife. The guy you fuck versus the guy you marry.

Dating is somewhat of a luck problem, but mostly it’s a search problem. Most of us are bad at it because we don’t understand what makes us feel both safe and alive in work, love and life. If you don’t believe it’s possible, you might not recognize it when it shows up.

For most of my life I couldn’t find the love I wanted because I was unable to let it in. I wasn’t ready. We think of giving a skill, but receiving is also often a learned ability. Discernment matters. You might conceive of yourself as having high expectations, but that doesn’t matter if you expect the wrong things. How in touch are you with what actually matters the most to you?

My sense for most of us is: not very. Getting in touch with what you really want requires a level of intuition that we’ve either explicitly tuned out or never listened to in the first place. What does your body say, what does your heart say, which is the voice of fear and which is the voice of love? What are you bracing against, is it really so bad? It takes time and sincere personal work to answer these questions.

I always think about Elizabeth Gilbert’s anecdote in Big Magic about how ideas will find you, but also leave you if you don’t sincerely give yourself over to them. I believe that love is the same way. You have to give yourself to it it; you have to work at it; you can pretend to yourself, but you can’t pretend to the universe. If you give yourself over to the right love, however, you might just feel the best of all feelings: safe and alive.

I saw a daddy longlegs on the ceiling while I was showering and didn’t panic, even when it started slowly descending in my direction on an invisible silken thread. Instead I grabbed a backpack, coaxed it inside, and let it out. This is a sign that I’m in a good state of mind. What I’m feeling is the opposite of panic. The circumference of your eyeballs seems extravagant. They’re very large. You told me no one had ever said so, though they’ve complimented your eyelashes and mouth. I’m sure someone you’ve met has noticed the same thing. Maybe it coalesced into an unspoken thought and maybe it remained sub-perceptual. It’s odd how the texture of someone’s skin can create feelings in others without closeness, without touch. We absorb so much we can’t put into words.

Can you be loved if you don’t feel loved? Is what I want simple or impossible? What makes someone act like that? I’ve let go all of my questions, which for so long seemed so important. The act of inquiring, the relentless search for the deepest truth. I thought that understanding would protect me. I understand now that nothing will protect me. When I look at the things that other people have, their houses, relationships, children, organizations, convictions, delusions, and faith, I feel our vulnerability acutely. Vulnerability is the human condition, which I spent so long rebelling against. I will fight it no longer—I will submit to being stripped bare in front of God. My intellect, intuition are merely gifts I’m borrowing, my body is only a vessel. N got it right when he said his partner could look however, as long as he could see her soul flashing in her eyes. You can immediately tell if someone is smart by their eyes, but intelligence is not sufficient. Neither is kindness. When you put your hand on my back I wonder if you can sense my soul through my body and that’s what you’re responding to.

I feel you so deeply with no effort. I feel you in my stomach, close to the knobs of my spine, which makes sense because the stomach is where feelings are stored. This is why hot girls have IBS. I feel you the tips of my fingers and the soles of my feet. In my tear ducts, you feel like a certain welling. With you, there’s no need to say I’m passionate. Everything is obvious. The way you watched my face during the movie reminded me of another time at the ballet in December. Time folded back on itself, and it was so sweet. Right now, everything is so sweet. When I think sweetness I think of the CoQ10 chews I bought on P’s suggestion that look and taste like starbursts. I loved so much candy when I was a kid, I wish you’d known me then. I had such a hard time being a kid, you’re the first person who I believe would really understand that. For so long, that incredible sense of alienation, an inability to relate. When I was six years old I wrote a poem. It was about angels and I could tell my teacher was impressed, and that was the beginning of my whole life. I don’t miss anything about being a kid except learning to read every night with my mom, and the way she would put my book back into a ziploc bag for the next day. I learned to read very fast because of her. Also because I was born voracious.

It’s so disorienting to look back and know that none of it was wasted. All that time spent worried for nothing. I would do it again, I would do it all over again, and I would properly enjoy it this time. I’m gonna go back and read the Ann Patchett essay. I’m gonna go back and read the Amy Bloom memoir. It’s so obvious to me you don’t know anything about John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands’ first date. It’s okay because I know. Well, he asked her out and they went to dinner and she wasn’t into him because they didn’t have anything to talk about. So he asked her what she wanted to talk about and she said literature, plays, the like. Two weeks later he calls her and says, I want see you again, I read this book and that book and that book—and I want to talk about them with you.

That’s how it started. I suppose he was an alcoholic, but so what. I don’t know when I started thinking conversation was the heart of romance. I guess my life started changing when I got the allergens injected in my lymph nodes, so maybe we should instead conclude that smell is the heart of romance. In Venice when I stay at P’s place I always sleep better. Close to the ocean. Some of the most fulfilling moments of my life have happened when I’m sitting all alone wracked with feeling, on a plane or just in my apartment, feeling like a beached whale. Fullness, intensity and despair. Whales thrash violently when stressed, just like me. I’m currently operating at a level of corniness where I’m ready to write poems about the 52-hertz whale. G#1 is the 12th lowest key on a standard 88-key piano keyboard. Take me out back and shoot me before I get too sappy.

I don’t think that the first line of Bruce Springsteen’s song I’m On Fire is creepy. It reminds me instead of the movie Pig, where Nicholas Cage goes on a wild mission to rescue his kidnapped truffle pig. You can love someone so far past reason and be unable to save them. I can no longer think about Orpheus and Eurydice without irritation, or The Transit of Venus. (I lied. I’m gonna go back and reread The Transit of Venus.) You can go to the underworld in an attempt to bring someone back, only to find out that the reason they ended up in the underworld is because they’re an idiot. Go figure. Well, idiocy is no deterrent to love.

I got a perfume in Japan that smells like hawthorn flakes. I used to eat roll after roll of them when I was a kid. We bought them from a Chinese grocery store called Big Crazy in Richmond, BC. This was usually after I was berated for an hour in piano class by my teacher, who was emotionally abusive and had a bad perm. Okay, one other thing I miss from my childhood was eating White Rabbit candies until the silver cap on my cavity-ridden tooth came off. And packets of WANT WANT Senbei Rice Crackers. And Tim Hortons iced cappucinos when I was a preteen with an eating disorder, and my parents tried to reason me out of it by telling me that I had to be a little fatter to grow a little taller. Over time, my mom came to worry that the way she’d raised me had made me too fixated on perfection. She thought I didn’t know how to be kind to myself, and she was probably right. For a long time, I didn’t know.

I think I know now. Though I did still think it was a bit too much when Amy started reciting Wild Geese by Mary Oliver during our therapy session on Tuesday. First of all, I can recite Wild Geese by heart, so there’s really no need. Second of all, my favorite short story collection is Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill, you’d really think I know quote unquote I do not have to be good. But she’s right, she’s always right, I have to let her have that. The way I’m feeling now is that I want to track Marie Calloway and Chris Kraus down and give them both hugs. We were girls together.

Everyone I know loves Taiwan. I’d been holding out on visiting for some years until I was on a group walk and encountered a friend of a friend who had interned at Bytedance and grown up in Taiwan and politely informed me that I should visit soon, before China invaded. Well okay. I took her suggestion seriously and a plan was made in the group chat.

I went with my friends C and L and my mom. My therapist was like Are you sure you want to go with your mom? I was like yes my mom is a great hang. She’s met all of my friends, plus she speaks Mandarin, which I assumed would be a bonus even though I was told everyone in speaks English in Taiwan.

The vacation was meaningful for me. People have written about this more comprehensively than I have, but my unconventional work life means that while I have very flexible hours I also don’t really have any distinct starts or stops in my work life. I have coaching calls every week, I try to post on Substack every week (though I’ve been more relaxed about it for the past six months… that’s probably gonna change, I’m in the mood to write more), I’ve been working on the novel continuously for a while. My agent got back from maternity leave in May and I sent her a revision that I’d been working on for the past few months. I’d tried to get the edits done before she left for maternity leave, but she’d gotten back to me and basically informed me that my edits were not good. Which I accepted: I’d done it on a pretty tight schedule and tried to give her exactly what she requested, which essentially meant it came out somewhat lifeless. I knew that I could do a better job if I gave myself some time and just vibed it out, but it felt high stakes to give her the revision when she came back because, well, I really want the book to be sold and published! And I’d put six months of my life into revising it! During these six months I’d luckily made the smart decision to hire this amazing novelist as an editor so I could get a pair of eyes on it. I highly recommend Anna; she is the most professional person in the world, her comments were super helpful, and most importantly having someone else read it and offer feedback kept me tethered to reality. When you’re doing something with a very long feedback loop you can sometimes start to feel totally insane. (I know that’s how my friends feel: they’re all like, is there really a novel? Does it actually exist? I haven’t seen it. Which isn’t helped by my air of extreme secrecy around it. But at this point I can assure you: the novel really exists, and Claude had no part in its creation. Thank God.) Anyway, the week before I left for Asia, which I spent partially in Edge Esmeralda and partially at Interact (more on Californian utopia communities soon at ava.substack.com!), my agent emailed me and said she was mostly through the revision and liked it. Which was an incredible relief. I was so happy. I still have work to do on it, but this feels like a turning point. And going to Asia is the age old way to celebrate turning points… right?

DAY ONE

My mom and I were on the same Sunday flight. C and L had gotten to Taipei the day before us. I ended up sleeping six hours of the 13 hour flight, and my mom was out out the entire time. When we landed I was amused by these signs at the airport… are there really so many people try to smuggle pork floss through security? Evidently yes.

As the weather forecast had anticipated, Taipei was overcast, wet and sticky. I have a love-hate relationship with humidity: I was born in Shenzhen, where it was so hot my parents kept my head shaved (!!) for the first two years of my life and I have pathologically dry skin and hair that thrives in wet environments, so in some ways I'm very well-suited to it. But I choose to live in seasonless San Francisco because I hate the heat.

It was raining when we got to the Airbnb and would continue raining on and off the entire trip. I spent the whole time wearing these white sandals from the Row I got for $50 (I’ll be bragging about that until I die). We donned our rain jackets and umbrellas and wandered outside. We ate at Chapman’s Noodles, which was pretty good. I immediately learned that cash is king in Taipei, especially for restaurants. Taiwan is like Japan in that sense—they have these weird extraneous gadgets like a machine where you place your order but the restaurants won’t take Apple Pay. After dinner I requested we go to this (touristy) speakeasy called Book Ing, that was ostensibly book themed but actually was Studio Ghibli themed? I ordered a Howl’s Moving Castled Bloody Mary. One thing that you may or may not know about me is that I am super fixated on tomatoes and as a result I’ve consumed probably thousands of Bloody Marys in my life. On planes… at bars… at brunch restaurants. I will happily embarrass myself at a fine dining establishment by asking if they can make a Bloody Mary. You have to stand for something in this life.

C and L instantly got on with my mom, which I was happy about. She told us a little bit about her (hilarious) relationship with ChatGPT, who helps her shop. When she’s at Marshall’s or whatever she’ll take pictures of whatever she wants to buy and Chat will be like “That’s not worth the money.” When I heard that, I immediately thought, OpenAI is going to make a trillion dollars.

DAY TWO

In the morning we ate Food Life, which had amazing breakfast sandwiches. My mom really wanted to hike Yangming Shan, but I said we had to wait until she bought sneakers because all she’d packed were Crocs. Instead we walked over to Daan Park, which was peaceful and green. I noticed that there are a lot of old people out and about socializing and doing taichi—Taiwan is definitely an elder-heavy society. There was actual netting on the basketball hoops, which C and L said were a sign of a high-trust society (apparently people in the US steal the netting?). Afterwards we went to the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall. Despite repeated applications of sunscreen, it was so sunny at this point I felt like passing out, and insisted that we seek shelter in the air-conditioned inside of the all. There was a Botero exhibition which I was thrilled about—I love Botero’s art! I have a little Botero cat sculpture on my coffee table that Maran gave me. I guess taste in art is genetic, because my mom and I both were obsessed with his paintings. I like his idea that volume is sensuality.

I wondered out loud if he was a feeder but everyone else refused to engage with me. After we finished browsing we decided to go to Eslite Spectrum Songyan. The bookstore is apparently open 24/7. It was really interesting to see the Asian covers of Western novels. I hope that one day my novel will have an Asian translation and cover, too. I found the books on AI very funny—like this one, which seems to be mostly about how to generate anime girls?

We ate lunch at FUJIN TREE Taiwanese Cuisine & Champagne, which was honestly some of the best Asian food I’ve ever had.

The chicken brought me to tears. In the afternoon we mostly browsed stores—I bought a slouchy summerweight jacket made by Ulterior and a pair of emerald green Rototo socks from Groovy, which had a great selection of Japanese brands. Another standout was this great outdoor equipment/gorpcore store called Field Day. I bought a baseball cap with cat ears (never saw a hat with ears I could turn down) and discovered this great running gear brand called Unna. I loved these shorts but didn’t buy them because they were available for cheaper online.

Honestly, I would’ve probably purchased them if I knew how much sweat and rain was ahead of me, but whatever. At night we briefly walked through the LinJiang Night Market and ate at this cute izakaya called Shinjai Shokudo. We finished off the night by getting cocktails at Bar Mood.

DAY THREE

We ate breakfast at Pei Pei Tong Breakfast Restaurant (沛沛彤早餐), which actually has a different sign and name. The guy who served us was definitely an Asian baddie. As readers might know, one of my longtime complaints about San Francisco is there are not enough male Asian baddies here though there are many female Asian baddies. After that we went hiking at YangMing Shan. I was nervous because of the heat (and I did end up completely soaked in sweat), but it was really beautiful. Taiwan has amazing butterflies.

There was a bird that had the most haunting call. For lunch we ate at Halal Chinese Beef Noodles. We spent most of the afternoon in the Chifeng St area, which has a lot of cute vintage shops. I really liked Ede Select Shop—I bought a pale pink Margiela midi skirt there. They also had a great Issey Miyake bag but I’m banned from buying bags. I also liked Par Store, which had vinyls, posters, and magazines. I bought a fringe Moschino top and a BCBG dress from Masako Vintage. We went to a few bookstores: Athena, Kimotsi, and 浮光書店. We were all still full from the beef noodles, so for dinner we just ended up going to this very charming bar called Cafe Society with a lot of Jura wine.

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Hilma af Klint, Eros, Group II, No. 2, 1907.

I’m a passionate romantic, Tammy says so. I don’t like the way the consultants at the clinics upsell you in Seoul, though everything is very efficient and meticulous. A great novel could be written from the perspective of a Korean plastic surgery consultant. I didn’t get anything done except three non-invasive…

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On the phone in France, he said: “It’s not worth it.” I was being so negative, too negative, and he stopped me in my tracks. The words coming out of my mouth didn’t sound like me, and I couldn’t help but wonder how I’d gotten to this place. I’d read in a Buddhist book once that if you’re deluded enough to believe you’re enlightened, a relationship will soon come along to challenge your self-concept. The relationship will make you want to travel a lot, but you should resist the urge. Funnily enough, I met him shortly after a spiritually transformative time in my life. I was ecstatic for a sustained period of time, and then humbled. I am a fatalistic person, which means I believe that I was born to feel what I’ve felt.

Years after meeting this person I met someone else, whom I thought was different in important ways. This, too, I believe I was born to experience. I have at different times in these relationships felt extreme joy, extreme frustration, and quiet faith. Esme Wang, from The Collected Schizophrenias: "Hung on my bedroom wall is the quote attributed to Joan of Arc: "I am not afraid. I was born to do this." However my life unfolds, goes my thinking, is how I am meant to live it; however my life unspools itself, I was created to bear it."

Was it hard? It’s the same as asking whether my relationship with S was hard. Then and now, I experience love as easy: the easiest thing and the most absolute. Just as being whacked by a dog’s tail is like being brushed by the wing of an angel, to be clobbered by love is to be patted on the head by the hand of God. Love knocks you off course; love is totalizing and ruinous; love is cruel and frustrating; love is the only redemption we can know on this earth.

I believe the primary way in which I am fortunate is that everything I’ve ever experienced has made me believe more in love and not less. Also, I have a great sense of humor.

If I had to tell you what happened without telling you exactly what happened, I’d say: for a couple of years my life stopped making sense because people I loved dearly did not behave in ways that made sense to me, and everything got crazy. And I wondered: how will I get through this? How can anything possibly resolve? What can I say to communicate what I feel? What can I do to make things sane again?

I’m sure many of you have experienced this particular form of insanity: something happens, the unbearable senselessness of the world comes sharply in focus, and you go berserk. You cannot accept what is happening.

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Kitty Kielland, Peat Bog at Jæren, 1901

You can get stuck in these ways of thinking that are antithetical to your flourishing. They’re sinkholes, gravity wells. There’s this meme floating around that as children we believe quicksand is a much bigger component of life than it actually is. Adult life has taught me that while literal quicksand isn’t around that much, metaphorical quicksand is everywhere.

It’s so easy to dismiss other people’s traps. We look at someone who falls into a weird cult or stays with an abusive boyfriend and think, That could never happen to me. But it could, and it probably has—it’s just likely less dramatic.

One hard-won piece of knowledge: if you’re in an unhappy relationship, it’s probably because you’re doing something wrong. Yes, it’s your fault, just as you suspected. Even if you aren’t actually doing something wrong, you at least chose the person. But often the way to get out of it is to go the opposite direction. Instead of doing more of what you’re already doing, try doing less. Instead of going left, go right. Think about what people do when they’re in quicksand: they struggle. What does struggling do to them? They sink.

When you’re in a sinkhole, your entire model of the sinkhole is probably flawed in some important way. Another way of putting it: the reasoning that got you here is not going to get you out. What you need is not a modulation of effort, but instead a change of perspective.

An exercise to try: think about the people you know who are in unhappy situations, whether professional or personal. How many do you think need to try harder, vs how many simply have the wrong approach? People’s problems are generally created by their approaches, which is why trying harder tends to just drive them in deeper.

The problem is that your approach has probably worked for you up until this point in time. As they say, coping mechanisms that hamper you in adulthood tended to be survival mechanisms in childhood.

When I reflect on the sinkholes I’ve been stuck in, I never think “Oh, I was so dumb.” I got stuck because I stumbled into situations that spoke to my deepest beliefs about what love meant, what care meant, what effort meant and what I deserved. There is no possible way I could have avoided getting stuck. Some drives are deeper than your self-concept, primal and irresistible. And yet: getting unstuck means fighting against your deepest drives, and winning.

Yes, it’s difficult. If it was easy, no one would ever get stuck. And it’s humiliating to put an incredible amount of time and effort into a problem and admit that you just haven’t made very much progress. But I try to think about it this way: humiliation is the beginning of freedom. If you can admit that you haven’t made very much progress, you can maybe admit that you should try something different. Which, again, is no guarantee of success, but at least you’re no longer pushing yourself deeper into the sinkhole.

Often people think: if someone only suffers enough, they will surely realize something is wrong. As someone who loves to suffer, I am here to assure you that’s not the case. You would not believe some people’s capacity for misery! What’s gotten me out is something different: the mundane passage of time and a growing disinterest in repetition. The thing with sinkholes is that they tend to involve a lot of cycling, and after a while you start to notice: this again? THIS AGAIN? You thought you were in a traffic jam, but suddenly you realize you’re on a ferris wheel. Of course, it’s up to you whether or not you want to get off. The view can be very nice from the highest point of the Ferris wheel, which is probably why you got on in the first place.

NOTE: I got the bog metaphor from Adam Mastroianni’s wonderful post, which should be compulsory reading for literally everyone and has helped me lots.

David Hockney, Red Celia, 1984

M and I talk about how we no longer wish to be dominated by relationships, knowing that we both like to be consumed. What I’ve learned is that you should choose your consumption carefully. During my last relationship I kept trying to negotiate the working conditions—can we just do this, so it can be a little better? I felt that what I fundamentally needed was transparency. Those conversations never went anywhere, and after a while I refused to have them.

When I was feeling particularly frustrated, I would think about how if the apocalypse happened and we all had to go into nuclear bunkers, the object of my affections would probably put me in the bunker two doors down. And then he would apologize, in that helpless, hapless way—what else is there to do?

J says I am eminently lovable. I had the thought that last week that a problem I have with my therapist is that she loves me too much. This stresses me out because it reminds me of my mom, who loves me with her whole heart and wants me to get everything I want. Because I am so Type A, I interpret this love as the obligation to achieve the good life and make it look easy. Though I am a Buddhist, I don’t even believe in achievement. (Though if you know me even a bit, you know that’s obviously not true.)

This week I was thinking that my worst and best quality is that no matter what happens to me, I will stretch out, roll over and pop up with a Cheshire Cat grin. I can make abasement look sexy. Or indifference, kindness, cruelty. It doesn’t matter. (Though it matters!) Style is fate, as they say.

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From R. D. Laing’s Knots (1970)

I’ve always thought there’s something very powerful about Carolyn Elliott’s framework of Existential Kink. Sasha has a great post about it, but I’ll roughly summarize it as integrating your shadow (in the Jungian sense) by accepting that you might be into what you say you don’t want. Like, let’s say you complain all the time about your terrible job, but you’ve refused to quit over a period of years. You might actually achieve integration by realizing that you actually, in her language, get off on hating your job. In other words, you have what you want.

On TikTok I sometimes watch content by women who are in relationships or married to inmates. Some of them conceive children with their partners while said partners are in prison. Now, momentarily putting aside other concerns, it’s very difficult to date an inmate because you can’t see them that often and you don’t know what the relationship will be like when they are released from prison. But you might also be able to imagine how that could be a feature rather than a bug. So someone might consciously identify as desperately missing their incarcerated partner, but on some level they may also have chosen that partner precisely because they are in the most literal sense not available.

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Zhang Enli, The Wires (3), 2015

In Los Angeles, gardenias. In the Bay, bougainvillea and hydrangeas. Summer in San Francisco feels like the center of the world. I associate June with drain flies, coconut-scented sunscreen, tan lines from my sports bra. War and Peace is a winter book; Bonjour Tristesse and The Ravishing of Lol Stein are summer books. I noticed recently that I don’t care about Freud anymore and I no longer obsessively reread Annie Ernaux, Graham Greene, Flaubert. For many years, I would chew through bildungsromans before bed; now I exclusively read shitty fantasy. How I expect books to help me has changed. I used to hope they would explain the vagaries of my emotional life, assure me my appetites were understandable if not typical. I no longer require the same reassurance. More and more I sense that ageing is a process of gradual simplification. I am no longer bothered by complexity, and more and more I’m barely intrigued by it. What interests me is nature, physicality, how one person can move or change another. In other words: summer books.

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I follow experiences all the way to the end. I can work on the same thing for a very long time. It’s not simple for me to find something that’s a good fit, but I experience compatibility as easy, immediate and seductive. I take things hard but I bear them easily. At my best I’m amused by everything. Amusement, I see it, is the ultimate gesture of gratitude: to take something seriously is also to believe it can be seriously funny and fun.

Six years ago, I started writing consistently. I take writing seriously, but it has been both funny and fun. Part of that fun includes prolonged moments of extreme despair and hopelessness. Writing makes me feel free and often it makes me feel incredibly stuck. For me, a creative life means that there’s always something that I’m evading and something I’m running towards. It requires gradually building up my tolerance for intensity, disappointment, and repetition. It’s made me more interested in pain, and more sensitive to joy. I’ve tried to treat it as a marathon: it’s more important to keep going than to run fast.

I’m in love with writing still. More and more, all the time. It is what I hoped it would be.

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In sixth grade, over summer break, I attempted to read the classics. I’ve spent every summer since more or less the same way. Other summer books: Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, Mating by Norman Rush, Herzog by Saul Bellow, Inseparable by Simone de Beauvoir, the Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante, Blue Skies, No Candy by Gael Greene, Anais Nin’s diaries. Summer books have a heat to them.

Each year, summer feels like starting over. I go to a new country and for around eight days feel like I could be anyone I want. Then I think, like clockwork: I want to go back to my house in San Francisco and be myself. Eat a popsicle, call my mom, give my dogs a belly rub.

The more I write, the more I feel that it takes me home. My preoccupations change, but my obsessions run deep. I am drawn to similar stories about similar girls. There’s always a party on a warm evening and there’s always a boy, and the face of the boy is always a little haphazard, because his face is a representation of our narrator’s hopes and dreams. It’s a repository for memory and emotion. Love is when we assign irrational amounts of meaning to someone based on how fast they speak, the way they look at us, the color of their eyes. Like all deep magic, it’s so simple and dumb it has no choice but to be profound.

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I miss summer in Utah, hot and green, the mountains craggy against the sky. Summer in Vancouver, taking acid in Stanley Park, last month’s rain like a distant dream. In Shenzhen, it rains sometimes in the summer, and the rain that runs down the back of your neck is warm. In Tokyo I read Timothy Williamson and walked until my feet were raw and drank a cocktail out of a tiny bathtub. This year I’d like to see some more Bernini sculptures. His masterpieces focused on moments of extreme narrative tension: Pluto grabbing Persephone as she cries, Apollo catching hold of Daphne just as her skin turns into bark. I guess you could say they are summer stories.