grounding down.

The emails are coming in at a heavy clip and I just realized I booked two meetings for myself today, the first of which begins in twelve minutes. I also have a Zoom call this evening that I am not 100% sure I am not the facilitator of, and my 90 minute Spanish 3 class after that, which always delivers a healthy blow to the ego. Monday.

I don’t know what this will be. I don’t know how to condense or frame all of the things I want to say. If you’ve ever stepped into my apartment, you will bear immediate witness to the maximalist windstorm that is my interior design aesthetic. It’s a pretty accurate reflection of my brain. 

Even as I type, I think, no one needs to know that. No one asked. 

I quite literally wouldn’t be writing if it weren’t for a beautiful sister of mine who very recently gave me the kick in the ass I needed about getting back into the saddle. So, in a way, someone did ask. And, selfishly, I feel small and lazy and dysregulated when I am not writing. Journaling is essential, but; I’m talking about something else. 

Case in point, I am beginning this paragraph almost a week after writing the first two. I have been thinking about what I want this space to be. More than anything else, it needs to be honest. Not an oversharing. I stopped writing essays for profit because I began to have misgivings around sharing so much of my parenting journey with the level of detail that flowed naturally. My daughter couldn’t consent to all of that. I thought, this is my life too. Maybe this is helpful for somebody else. Multiple things are always true. 

I know how to manipulate language in a way that influences others. I’d like to think I use this power for good: my main hustle is creating publicity campaigns for books, so I’ve written a staggering number of emails meant to sway their recipient, encourage them to pull whatever media levers they have access to in order to help a book find its reader. It’s a capitalist mandate, of course – ultimately, I have to sell my services; ultimately, an author needs their books to sell – but also, I hope, a worthy one. I believe in books and the power of access to transformative literature more than I believe in a lot of things. So this is my trade. I trade in words and exposure. And I have been feeling the call to infuse all of my work with a level of honesty that is, at the outset, a little uncomfortable. But I think that’s healthy, that friction. A spark creates heat, light. I’m alive, right? I need that.

I dislike the idea of a newsletter because no matter what I do, no matter how many times I open an email and click “Unsubscribe,” my inbox is an utter mess. Eating storage space that Google keeps threatening to make me pay for, once I’ve run out. I don’t relish the idea of some missive I write, with all of the best intentions, becoming a part of that morass for someone else. This is no shade to newsletter writers, which describes quite a few of my dear friends or people I admire. I understand all of the reasons and I might eat these words someday. I am of the literary world (lol). 

I suffer from frequent crushing bouts of aversion to being perceived. This is only counterbalanced by a deep internal recognition that speaking truths aloud is what moves society, what creates the world, what connects one soul to another. It’s elemental and ancestral. 

I am re/starting with this…a blog. I’m not going to think about who may or may not read it. I used journal publicly with vigor and aplomb. Just returning to my digital roots.