March reflections and process notes
Extras from this month’s posts + what I’m reading
I’m back! From now on, you can expect essays twice a month and a monthly recap.
The recap post is meant to be a behind-the-scenes look at my writing process and thinking. I’ll share fragments that didn’t make it into essays, sources I referenced for research, reflections on that month’s posts, and what I’m reading and thinking about.
My hope is also for it to be a space for you guys to co-create with me. I can float essay ideas and you tell me what you would find interesting to read, or ask you to share specific experiences if they’re relevant to a piece I’m writing. The fun part about this is that I don’t know exactly what it can become, and I’d like to discover that together.
All my essays will remain free. The monthly recaps will be paywalled starting from next month’s issue, but this first one will be free. After giving it some thought, I think this is the best structure to balance my desire for my writing to be a public good and to make this project sustainable. If you enjoy my writing and want to see more of it, consider becoming a paid subscriber.
This Month’s Writing
This was the first essay I put out after I committed to posting regularly, so it felt like starting up an old rusty car. A lot of questions came up: Am I going to be able to do it? I’ve always written sporadically; can I do it by the date I set out for myself? I’ve never had a process for my writing; am I actually going to be able to see the essay improve over several iterations? Up until the last day, I still wasn’t sure. But something clicked in that final draft. I saw two weeks of effort condense into a single point. That’s when I knew. I did it once, and I can do it again.
One weakness of my writing is that I overly rely on internally derived conclusions. Because my perception is sharp and I have a good internal bullshit meter, this gets me pretty far, but at a certain point it was handicapping my writing. No matter what I come up with, someone thought about it hundreds of years ago, and probably did it better. It would be a crazy act of hubris to think I could cook up genius in my own head. I needed more rigor: bringing up half-formed ideas with friends encouraging them to tear them apart, reading books about the topic, discarding disproven points.
My initial thesis was “Hatred is a result of miscalculated distance” because I noticed that setting boundaries or adjusting the distance I had from people I was resentful toward tended to help. But then I realized that once we made contact again the same feelings would surface, so that couldn’t have been it. I knew I was missing something. Reading The Forgiving Self by Robert Karen (good book btw, I recommend) taught me that resentment is actually caused by dependency, so I changed my thesis. I also learned resentment and hatred were different, and that I was writing about resentment instead of hatred.
I think it’s great that I don’t need to have it all figured out in my head before putting it on the page. I tell myself: it has to exist first, before I can make it better.
I have gotten a lot out of decoupling my self-worth from the quality of my ideas and writing. It has made writing more fun and helped me produce better work. Before, if I posted a piece after writing it in one sitting and people pointed out something I failed to consider, I felt like an impostor. Now, I consciously interrogate the ideas during the process itself so the end product is more completely considered. Subjecting your work to pressure and iteration is actually an act of great care for the reader, and for the ideas themselves.
Other thoughts/fragments
Distinction between resentment and hatred. Resentment is more internal, caused by feeling wounded or treated unfairly. Hatred is more external and malicious, like actively wanting to cause harm to another. Unaddressed resentment can intensify into hatred, but they aren’t the same. I use the two slightly interchangeably in the essay, because “to hate is to feel helpless” had a better ring to it with the alliteration, but I will admit it’s a bit sloppy of me to do that.
I don’t address cases of injustice in the essay. Resentment is a natural and healthy response to being mistreated, and I don’t want people who have been wronged to blame themselves. But I do think at a certain point it’s beneficial to make peace with past events and fully feel the anger or grief of those experiences, not because what happened to us was okay, but because we no longer want to be bound by the ways in which we were hurt.
Nietzsche has a concept from Genealogy of Morals called ressentiment, which is when the weak/oppressed turn their envy and resentment towards the strong into a new moral system. It’s a way to cope with their powerlessness: instead of facing the pain of feeling inferior, they can reframe morality so that their weakness is actually good. It is a self-destructive attitude that keeps them stuck.
Resentment can serve an important social function as a tool to influence other people’s behavior and help group cohesion. If I resent you for hurting me, and expressing that gets you to stop doing things that hurt me, then it could improve our relationship. The version where you hold on to resentment long after there is anything to be done about it, however, mostly just hurts the person holding it.
I’ve been meaning to write this for months. The primary feeling that kept me circling back was amusement. I wanted to point to an unusual experience I was having and say, “Isn’t this bizarre?” I found the gnome imagery really funny and wanted to make it more central, but the more I worked on the essay, the less congruent with the tone it seemed. It took a more bittersweet and devotional turn instead.
It’s easy to focus on the positive effects of meditation, especially if you experience a change as drastic as the one I did, but it wouldn’t be the full story. The grief and disorientation were just as real to me as the ecstasy. I want to talk about these things.
As Hemingway wrote:
I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way.
Reality is so rarely as tidy as we’d like to tell it.
In terms of technique, this essay was more ambitious and difficult to execute than the resentment one. It’s told in a non-linear manner: it starts with the night in the airport (last July), jumps to a few months prior to explain the shift (last March), implicitly traverses the rest of the year, and ends in the present (March). On top of that, I wanted to do a conceptual tie-in with Augustine’s distentio animi but somehow make it feel natural jumping to and back from the concept. It needed to feel seamless, because it’s cognitively demanding for readers to switch contexts. Eyes start glazing over when you throw in quotes and references unless the relevance to the point is made extremely clear.
I’m pretty happy with how I did it, but it did introduce a challenge. After I explain intentio as the opposite of distentio, I present writing as the main focus of my life.
The problem was it didn’t happen as neatly as that. I didn’t read Augustine, get the sudden revelation that I needed a central organizing principle, realize writing was the answer, and instantly reverse the time blindness. For over a year now, I’ve been obsessively thinking about writing and slowly orienting my life around it—the most recent step was simply formalizing this commitment and creating structure to support it. There was also more to it than just the writing—things like yoga and socializing helped ground me so that I could ease back into structure.
So I had to make a decision. Do I tell it exactly as it happened (which would be messy and harder to follow), or do I tell it in a way that ultimately takes the reader to the same conclusion via a smoother reading experience of a simplified (but not dishonest) account of things? I chose the latter.
Another problem was that I needed to express my love for writing without doing some soapbox speech about how passionate I am. I kept talking about my feelings and what writing meant to me, but it seemed unconvincing. At that point I had written like 80% of the essay, and I loved what I had. But that part was so weak it made the whole thing fall flat. I remember being 14 hours into that writing session, losing my mind. I couldn’t publish it as it was, but I also couldn’t turn back.
A few days prior to that, I read Intimations by Zadie Smith. In one essay, she mentions how she never gets manicures because she can’t read a book at the same time, how even when she gets her eyebrows threaded (which only takes minutes) she tries to hold a folded New Yorker above her head, and how she never gets massages because she tried balancing a Kindle in her hand under the hole in the table before and it didn’t work. She doesn’t say: I can’t stop reading. I do it anywhere and everywhere. She shows us her life instead, and it’s obvious that she’s obsessed with reading.
So I settled on the “show, don’t tell” method. Instead of explaining how much I loved writing, I would share concrete examples like how I drafted essays on retreat and journaled while standing next to the tennis court, and they’d do the talking for me. It worked well enough.
I told my roommate that the same way you get stronger in the gym by lifting close to failure, I think that’s the way you get better at anything. You get better at relationships by ending up in situations where you don’t know what the right thing to do or say is, but trying your best and getting through it anyway. You get better at essays by thrashing around not knowing how to make certain parts work and finishing it anyway.
Other thoughts/fragments
Grounding activities like yoga and socializing helped me become functional again. Feeling my arms tremble against the mat in downward dog pulled me into my body. Making more plans to see friends forced me to show up at certain places at certain times. These were anchors against my tendency to let hours go by.
I stuck to the ADHD analogy but another comparable experience is time distortion on psychedelics. I wanted to work the time knife meme into the essay somehow, but it didn’t fit.
I could have elaborated more on the negative effects. One was that my sleep schedule got even worse than it already was, because I never wanted to go to bed. I’d get excited about a rabbit hole or stay up writing and before I knew it, the sun would be coming up.
E. R. Clay coined the term “specious present” to describe the short duration of time we experience as the immediate present. William James expands on it in “The Perception of Time,” likening it to a saddle-back:
The practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time. The unit of composition of our perception of time is a duration, with a bow and a stern, as it were—a rearward- and a forward-looking end. It is only as parts of this duration-block that the relation of succession of one end to the other is perceived.”
Augustine’s discussion of time in Confessions is in Book XI. The emotional climax occurs when he realizes devotion to God is the antidote to fragmentation of the mind:
But because Thy loving-kindness is better than all lives, behold, my life is but a distraction, and Thy right hand upheld me, in my Lord the Son of man, the Mediator betwixt Thee, The One, and us many, many also through our manifold distractions amid many things, that by Him I may apprehend in Whom I have been apprehended, and may be re-collected from my old conversation, to follow The One, forgetting what is behind, and not distended but extended, not to things which shall be and shall pass away, but to those things which are before, not distractedly but intently, I follow on for the prize of my heavenly calling, where I may hear the voice of Thy praise, and contemplate Thy delights, neither to come, nor to pass away. But now are my years spent in mourning. And Thou, O Lord, art my comfort, my Father everlasting, but I have been severed amid times, whose order I know not; and my thoughts, even the inmost bowels of my soul, are rent and mangled with tumultuous varieties, until I flow together into Thee, purified and molten by the fire of Thy love.
When my life started moving again in early March, I was overwhelmed with a sense of urgency and awareness of my own mortality. It made time feel precious in a way it hadn’t before. I started selling things I didn’t need, reaching out to people I would regret not meeting if I moved tomorrow, and going to spots in SF I’ve been meaning to see. But mostly I felt the desire to write all the things I’ve been meaning to, as if I were dying.
What I’m Reading
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson – Fictional story told through letters written by a dying minister to his young son. Easily becoming one of my favorite books. It reads like a prayer.
The Drama of the Gifted Child by Anne Miller (finished) – Classic self-help book. I agree with the main ideas, but found it simplistic and moralistic at points. Worth a read if you grew up in an emotionally difficult home.
The Forgiving Self by Robert Karen (finished) – Already mentioned earlier, but great book on resentment and forgiveness if you’re actively wrestling with these themes. Mostly therapy vignettes. Extremely slept-on.
Slow Days, Fast Company by Eve Babitz (finished) – Lush and expressive writing about Hollywood in the 60s. Struggled to make it through the last third after the novelty of the writing style wore off; too much gossip for my liking. My favorite chapter was “Heroine” in which she talks about fame.
Intimations by Zadie Smith (finished) – Essay collection written during the pandemic about race, class, creative work, and life in NYC/London. It’s good. The way she writes is respectable, measured, and widely palatable, but not risky enough for me.
The Abundance by Annie Dillard – Incredible essays about nature. No one does it like Dillard.
Cormac McCarthy’s Secret Muse Breaks Her Silence After Half a Century (Vanity Fair)
The Radical Woman Behind “Good Night Moon” (The New Yorker)
Emma Kunz: The Researcher Who Refused to Become a Guru (Frieze)
Agnes Martin: the artist mystic who disappeared into the desert (The Guardian)
What I’m Thinking About
Things I might write about. If you’d be particularly interested in reading any of these or have other suggestions, please share in the comments.
More on meditation effects, like my mild dark night of the soul experience
How having an essay go viral taught me I feared success more than I feared failure
How I use LLMs for therapy (anyone want to share their experiences with me?)
Learnings from using psychedelics therapeutically
Comparing frozen broccoli brands in the Bay Area
Phenomenology of different menstrual phases
people with negative therapy results keep asking me how to use LLMs for therapy it's worrying
All the options besides frozen broccoli brand comparison seem super interesting and I'd love to read those!