a blog is a space for dreaming

how did I get here? am I happy where I am? if not, how do I go somewhere different?

Kamrooz Aram, Untitled (Arabesque Composition), 2020

Very exciting news: for anyone who participated in the matchmaking experiment, your matches will go out tomorrow!!

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I woke up angry today. As I got dressed, put on makeup, and took my dog to the park, I tried to puzzle through why. Then I cleared my mind and stayed with the feeling until it shifted, clicked. Turns out that I was mostly frustrated at myself. But as anyone who knows me understands, I find it very easy to forgive myself, so my anger soon dissipated. Something else appeared in its place: a certain vulnerability.

That’s something writing this Substack has taught me to do: move through the life cycle of a feeling. My feelings have historically been large and impenetrable, slamming into me like a tide; it’s only after I emerge from the undertow, soaked and choking, that I can enjoy the still water again. Through writing (and living), I’ve learned not so much to surf but to be knocked down more quickly. Instead of spending days consumed by a mood, I spend hours or sometimes minutes.

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I care about parsing my emotions because I have big feelings and throughout much of my life I’ve found them overwhelming. For a long time, all I could do was shut them down, numb them out. This felt like relief to me for many years. Then in 2019 I did psilocybin for the first time; in 2020 I started writing consistently, seriously. It’s only now that I can see these two things are connected. By refusing to feel my feelings, I thought I was safe from them; in retrospect, I can see that every choice I made in my life was controlled by my emotions. The decisions I made about work, partners, friendships were shaped by fear, shame, and obligation. I realized that I wanted to make decisions that were shaped by joy, love, and desire.

I started changing because I was in a safe relationship. I started changing because I thought that I could get better. I started changing because what I was doing before was not working in a profound way. How much it wasn’t working for me only becomes more obvious with time.

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I’ve been interested in relationships and feelings my whole life. To me, every story is a love story. Whether I was reading about a movie or a city or a company or a war I was always interested in who was married to whom, who was loved and who was hated and who was betrayed. I always wanted to know about the inner experience, the innermost experience. I read novels about difficult women like I was being watched and timed.

For a long time I was embarrassed by my preoccupations. They seemed so navel gaze-y, so female. An ex-boyfriend said something to me like: Your writing’s good, but why are you so obsessed with love? For a long time I wanted to get out of my head, out of myself—more removed, more dispassionate, less gooey.

But then I started writing for you guys. And I stopped caring. There was always this other voice in my head, the mean judgmental voice, the Ex-Boyfriend voice, the voice of the Hypothetical Person I wanted to impress, and I stopped hearing it. I started realizing that the way to get outside myself was to go further in.

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Whether or not we live fulfilling lives often depends on our ability to honestly ask ourselves, How did I get here? Am I happy where I am? If not, how do I go to go somewhere different?

My own conception of my work is that I want to help other people ask that question from a body-based, feelings-based place. My failure mode is spending so much time getting you to ask yourself that that I forget to ask myself. I experience shame when I realize this, like shouldn’t I be better by now? But I am improving at my own pace. I often think about how cool I’ll be in 10 years. It may take that long.

How did I get here? Am I happy where I am? If not, how do I go somewhere different?

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A blog is a space for dreaming. Before this blog, I didn’t fully know my own dreams. I liked to write, I had always known that. But I didn’t understand what mattered to me. It was like I was trying to objectively look at the world around me and make some kind of decision about what was important. Top down, very rational. People need X, so I’ll work on that. My desires lacked specificity and urgency.

Let’s return to above: my conception of my work is that I want to help people answer How did I get here? Am I happy where I am? If not, how do I go somewhere different? from a body-based, feelings-based place. Feelings and relationships matter to me, and I believe that when people understand their emotions they have richer, deeper relationships.

Understanding the core of my work has made it easier to move forward. I started working through different ways of helping people answer those questions. As a result this year has been perhaps the most fun year of the Substack since the beginning. It feels expansive—well, of course it does, since I’m asking myself how it could expand. Doing the workshops and the interviews and now the matchmaking feels joyful in a way that I didn’t expect. I’m letting my work spill over into the rest of my life. I’m experiencing more conflict, I’ve been dreaming bigger, I’ve been hosting parties with friends. I have a renewed sense of my own capabilities and desires.

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People who are stuck often ask themselves, What am I supposed to do next? That question often comes from a place of paying attention to your thoughts, not your body. You’re too busy being slammed by your feelings to read what they’re telling you.

But how do you pay attention to your body, how do you parse your feelings, how do you reach that sense of clarity? I keep trying to explain this to other people. Today I woke up and realized that I should just find it in myself.

For a long time, I used writing as a way of thinking. These days, I’m using writing as a way of feeling.