Your serpent cannot be denied
On coming back from self-imposed exile
They should invent a way to exist on the Internet that does not involve an eternal, almost karmic cycle of retreat, announcement, and demi-embarrassment. Maybe this is something entirely particular to me; at any rate, I’ve typed and retyped this single paragraph 20-odd times, and every attempt at earnestness feels trite. What I want to say is this: Hello, I’m writing again. I hope you’re well. And if I want to break any kind of cycle, I might as well leave it at that.
Leaving Substack was not a conscious choice — I have been so singularly focused on the book (this book) that I just haven’t been writing anything else, including freelance work, writing for money, writing for pleasure, or just simply scribbling down indecipherable notes and ideas. I don’t think I’ve written a sentence without the words “California” or “denim” in it since last January. Writing fiction, you come to an agent with a full manuscript, meaning you are beholden to your own timetable, luxuriating and ambling and simply finding time to write before and after your day job; writing non-fiction, you present an idea and hope for the best, and if you’re lucky enough to get a contract, you gotta MOVE until it’s done. Everyone’s eternal patience with me while I bang my head against the wall trying to get the Byrds out of my head is very much appreciated.
I just turned 26, and am worried, as many people are, about getting dumber. I do my little rituals: coffee, Sudoku, mushroom chocolates, learning Italian, a ““brain games”” app I refuse to fork over a full subscription for. But I often sit down to write and can’t figure out my way into a sentence. It’s as if the rules of grammar and syntax have been corkscrewed out of my head. And as much as I could blame this on stress, or fatigue, or simply getting older, I know the rub: I’m not doing the capital-T Thing That I Do, which is write. (And actually read fiction, which I haven’t done since last summer, instead pumping my head full of longreads and ‘70s biographies.)
I have always been a perfectionist to the point of self-sadism, and as I think about my New Year’s goals (a turn of phrase I find kind of grim), one of them must be untangling my relationship to excellence. I feel genuine pain at the idea of putting something out into the world that is half-baked, unfinished, or fermented with soured creative juice. I shudder! I wince! I am now a hot girl who writes occasionally, which is obviously the worst thing a woman could be. But just like writing the book: I gotta move. My hope in getting back to Substack and putting out work that is vulnerable and decidedly imperfect is not only to wake up some dormant creative muscles but also to see what gets revealed in the process.
The snags, though, are thus: a) I’ve been feeling a bit deracinated from fashion recently, and can’t seem to get back into my usual mood with it, which is another essay for another time, and b) I really can’t publish on a consistent basis. After tossing it back and forth in my head for a while, this feels like a fair arrangement: once in a blue moon, I’d like to do some paid stuff again, and many larger letters (like the shopping roundups) require an insane amount of time and energy, more than anyone might think. I’ll turn paid subscriptions on if you’d like to support my work, but there are no hard feelings on my end if delivery inconsistency is a dealbreaker. OK?
2025 was a mélange of blissful joy and extreme pain for me, quite literally — I climbed many mountains (reckoning with therapy, my body, driving, getting out of my own head) and fell down so many goddamn ravines (a PCOS diagnosis and chronic abdominal pain that can’t be diagnosed). I’m still a little scraped up. Wherever you are, the crevasse or the Hillary Step, I ask: if you want some company, can I join you this year? 𓇢𓆸
Lovely way to learn what the Hillary step is. Good stuff!!