I really enjoy writing my little notes to you, and if you like reading them too, you can find these mini-essays archived here.
I’ve managed to spend more time reading and writing and drawing (for pleasure!) this year than I have since college. From age 18-20 I would fill notebook after notebook with musings and poems, botanical sketches from the steamy greenhouses in the agriculture department, and figure drawings of art studio models and my friends. I read voraciously for an english degree and also in my free time. Poetry, classics, ancient history and chapbooks from young local writers. I read the New York Times that I took home from my job at Starbucks. I read everything by Michael Pollan and a lot by Susan Orlean, and I thought that maybe I wanted to be a journalist, since I doubted I would make a career as an artist. I loved to hear a story and try to write a person down. Their story and persona. I loved the way Steinbeck wrote real people. Poor people, blue collar people, farm laborers, shop owners, the kind of people I knew.
I worked a lot of jobs, walked a lot of places, and rode my bike around in between the writing and reading and drawing and painting. I made cappuccinos for business folks in the downtown cafe, folded jeans and t shirts in the mall, dropped fries and hollered into a speaker in the drive thru, and lifted up cars to change their oil and rotate their tires, smelling like motor oil. I tele-marketed alongside folks in addiction recovery, typed out phone calls for the deaf, worked in a non profit assisting folks with disabilities, and secretaried for health insurance salesmen, answering calls to sort out the very complicated system of co-pays and coverage. I spent my 30 minute lunch breaks reading and drawing and writing.
When I plunged into motherhood, I had a tiny business selling paintings on Etsy while I learned to bake bread, and rode my bike around town with my kid in a trailer. I read only bread books and cookbooks. Motherhood and bread took over my life, my time, and all my thoughts and dreams. I biked the kids to the library every week, reading every bread book and cookbook on the shelf, 5 or so a week. I was studying for a test, and the test was my life. I wrote only recipes. I doodled funny drawings with my kids, and our homeschool lesson plans. I designed my website and drew my logo and wrote descriptions of bread and drew little drawings of my menu items. I wrote a cookbook for a year, and then another one for two years, and I read cookbooks and books about grain and wheat and read and endorsed the cookbooks of my peers and food memoirs in between. When that dust settled, I mostly wrote instagram captions and made photos of bread. Then I made more bread. Then I made even more bread than that. Then I made even more bread than I ever thought possible. I wrote and read nothing. I doodled nothing. I made things for the internet, and I read the internet.
The voracious hunger for creation and information hadn’t left, but it had been transformed subtly and imperceptibly almost without my knowledge. A necessity for work, turned into a compulsory habit that sucked up my limited free time, energy, and creativity into a never ending scrolling spiral. Depression, I feel often arises from a feeling within that you aren’t living authentically, or that there is a break in the self that you believe yourself to be. I wrestled through this season of a break with myself, and an addiction I had never realized could come for me “an intellectual”
Breaking the habit wasn’t really enough, if I wasn’t reading instagram, I read the new york times app all the way through, if I didn’t do that I read every page of substack, every email I got, or every listing on zillow, every post on nextdoor dot com, or something else in my phone. I couldn’t seem to get out of the place where I wasn’t deciding what I was staring at. I had to replace it with something else completely.
I downloaded an app (irony of ironies) that locked me out of the apps on my phone for half the hours of the day, and checked out more books than I could possibly read at the library so I wouldn’t run out. I read classics, new fiction, science, memoirs, everything. I was in the middle of 5 books at a time, one on the couch, one by the bed, one in my bag, and one on the kitchen table. I tore through them in 10, 15 and 20 minute jags, and my attention span slowly healed. I rode my bike down the trail all summer along side my son. I ripped through hour long sessions laying on the rug on the floor. I fell asleep with a book on my face instead of a phone under my pillow. After four months I started to write again, after 8 months I started to draw again. I detoxed, I rehabbed, and my brain started to feel better.
These email newsletters have brought me more connection to many of you. They have also brought me back to myself as I write my way out of the wet paper bag of the distraction age. If you feel like something is calling out to you from the heart of this letter, we can talk about it any given Thursday, or just send me a reply to this email.