May 2026: "I’ve been getting this whole thing wrong"
Reflections on this month’s posts + what I’m reading/watching
This is my monthly paid recap post where I share reflections and process notes from that 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.
This one’s coming a little later than usual because the last essay wiped me out and I had to take a few days off. But here it is!
Posts covered:
This Month’s Writing
This was not a piece that I “wanted” to write, but it needed to exist. It was an exercise in self-expression, an owning of my life and its pain. The fact that I can write about it means I can look at it matter-of-factly and it doesn’t rule me anymore. I’ll carry it across the cusp, to the beginning of the rest of my life.
I had missed the emotional warmth from my earliest Substack posts. For a while I looked at those posts sadly, as if they were artifacts from a bygone time of innocence. The years after were very hard in some ways, and I think a part of me saw my younger innocence as the culprit for the difficulty that followed, so I locked it away. But I’m glad to have recovered it. I don’t feel like it makes me weak anymore.
At first this may look like an essay about suicide, but it’s actually about desire. I don’t think I’ve let myself openly want things for a long time. It’s a vulnerable act, because it’s never entirely in your control whether you get it or not. We can ask and act to make them real, but that final swish, that little movement of the world, eludes our conquest and understanding. But it is that very possibility of being denied which breeds aliveness.
I constructed the first half to be about escape. I wanted it to feel depressing and suffocating, and then disorienting in the middle, then full of warmth and possibility. It transitions from wanting to escape to wanting to stay.
I did not realize this at the time of writing it, but my roommate pointed out that several times in the beginning I start a section light and end it dark, or start it dark and end it light, and that flip-flopping creates surprise. A little bit of whiplash for fun.
The beginning and ending are both strong. I’m proud of that here. The last line is a nod to Macbeth, but I reverse the original nihilist take. Most of the second half is significantly weaker. One reason is I had a lifetime’s worth of material to draw from for the first half and only a year’s worth for the second. If I had more time I could have sharpened it, but I had to get it out the door.