April reflections and process notes
Extras from this month’s posts + what I’m reading/watching
This is my monthly paid recap post where I share reflections, process notes, and content that was cut from last month’s essays. For a sample of what’s inside, check out the first one. It covers different essays but the format and vibe are the same.
Highlights in this one: Books about the dark night and specific passages, etymology of “dark night of the soul,” psychological framework of internalizers/externalizers
This Month’s Writing
I wrote this because multiple people told me they would be interested in reading about my dark night. I don’t think I would have otherwise—the material is too dark, personal, and niche—but I thought if this could help someone, I should do it. People don’t really talk about the dark night because it makes meditation seem terrifying, and those who have been through one struggle to put it in words. The people who do talk about it sound paranoid and focus on giving advice and frameworks. But I just wanted to describe what it was like, without telling people what to think or do about it.
The personal cost of writing it outweighed what I could expect to get from it. It’s not a piece that would go viral or get a lot of reach. Many people who do read it won’t openly engage with it. I knew it would change how some people saw me. And in the course of writing it, I would have to relive the worst of those months. But if, through choosing to write it anyway, I could offer even one person the comfort they need to get through something similar, it would make the whole thing worth it. I’m glad to see from its reception that this has come true. It is responses like the ones to this piece that remind me why I write publicly at all.
One of my favorite poets, Louise Glück, said in her Nobel Prize lecture:
Those of us who write books presumably wish to reach many. But some poets do not see reaching many in spatial terms, as in the filled auditorium. They see reaching many temporally, sequentially, many over time, into the future, but in some profound way these readers always come singly, one by one.
They come one by one. I am not writing for “the people.” I am writing for the one person who needs it, who can see how I am pointing to experience and say, yes, that is how it is for me as well.
Many months ago that image of the mouse in a maze came to me while I was curled up in bed, overcome with shame. I felt about it the way I do about Macabéa in The Hour of the Star, a sad young girl who subsists on hot dogs and Coca-Cola—you can’t help but love her because even though she doesn’t know how to live a life, she’s trying. I built the rest of the essay around that image of a mouse as a seed.
It is the most “literary” thing I’ve written. There is no easy takeaway; reading and experiencing it is the point. The emotional arc for the reader was deliberately designed: I start with the hook about dissociation, shock you with the journal entry from my lowest point, reset and gradually build it back up again so by the climax you can feel the exhaustion I did going through it, give breathing room with the grounding passages, add surprise and nuance, and leave the ending a bit unresolved. At every point I knew what I wanted the reader to feel, and made intentional choices to engineer that effect. Two months ago I had no idea how to write an “essay” but now I am really starting to understand. It’s about leading the reader through an experience as the piece unfolds.
I was worried that it would come out depressing, but that wasn’t the case at all. In a way I am still scared of my own writing, because it takes me places I can never plan for. That is the beauty and terror of it.