hiiiiiiiii i’m back again and as always i make no promises but given what i know about who i am and what i am up to i think i can say you should expect to hear from me more. last year around this time i was staging a newsletter comeback and then my day to day existence took a serious involuntary year-long+ rearranging that i’m still figuring out how to write about properly (and process lol).
the below essay probably has ~familiar themes~ if you’ve read other things i’ve written about semi-recently… convinced i’m just trying to (gently) attack myself from a variety of angles until i manage to INTERNALIZE THE MESSAGE. if you don’t want to read more of that i did interview the lovely lyz lenz for the release of her excellent memoir this american ex-wife. i also have a review of sable yong’s debut, die hot with a vengeance (about beauty and vanity), coming out soon.
here are two concert photos i took recently that i am quite proud of. as always, plug for my instagram.
I am a consumer of pseudo-therapy Instagram Reels. I nod at descriptions of being parentified as a child, I feel seen by lists of avoidant attachment behaviors, I have teared up at pep talks about healing from childhood trauma, and I have googled “how to feel your feelings” more times than I would like to admit. I scroll through more Reels, vaguely looking to be called out, validated, seen, hurt, entertained. I see a therapist, and I embarrassingly quote Instagram Reels every now and then as a jumping off point for our conversations.
In the comments sections of these posts, there are dozens of flustered “Ok but now what” comments–what do I do with the fact that this random stranger has somehow clocked me and my emotional dysfunctions? Why do they never tell me what I’m supposed to do now?
Well… they only really have a vested interest in you scrolling through more of their videos, perhaps signing up for their newsletter, coaching sessions, pre-ordering their forthcoming book. Consume more! It’s not with malice that they withhold your top-secret cure. The cure is simply too complex to be able to flatten into a quick vertical video with a visual or verbal hook. And also not really a cure. Many of these content creators openly point out that social media is not therapy, but it’s too easy to pretend it is. There is also a lot of misleading or oversimplified information bouncing around, causing confusion regarding terms like trauma bonding and imposter syndrome.
You’ve probably heard the phrase “Admitting you have a problem is the first step.” Admitting we have problems feels like all we ever do these days. The phrase actually originates from the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-Step program, which you’ll note has more than the one step.
It feels true, but has also been adopted and twisted to a point where it seems to be treated like the only step. Or the admission of the problem is weaponized as an explanation and exoneration. At a certain point, “what next?” is an extremely personal question both in terms of determining what to do and determining whether or not it gets done. There’s no quick fix. No acronym or coupon code for BetterHelp or particularly killer well-worded two-paragraph summary of your deepest sadnesses that can substitute for trying to break out of your well-honed coping mechanisms, your defensiveness, your well-worn habits.
Problem identification is a good skill to have, but it needs to come paired with figuring out what to do. It should not end the conversation. Even less myopic takes about mental health that are quick to point out systemic harms, economic precarity, and social isolation and alienation are often used as depressing enders of conversation. Instead, how can we use our identification of the problems to inform where we channel our energies? While a perpetual state of paralyzed overwhelm is pretty appealing to anyone benefiting from society as-is, starting to break that for ourselves can be beneficial psychologically and politically. I use “benefiting from society” in the loosest sense—many people are not having a good time but resigned to perpetuating current conditions because it is what feels safe and less risky. It can be more comfortable to relinquish agency and maintain inertia.
It’s hard to get started and even harder to build momentum, but both will suck less than continuing to bear the costs of this downward trajectory. I have good news and bad news and they’re the same news: Everything is connected.
Not every problem needs a name and a clearly outlined, pathological explanation. There is a limit to what frameworks can do for you. Sometimes I find having an explanation too similar to having a reasoning for why I behave the way I do, and it’s easy to tumble into stubborn self-righteousness. I am constantly irritated by my friends’ small inattentions because I was emotionally neglected as a child. I can feel myself begin to point fingers. It also fixates on personal struggles, but if these feelings are so relatable to such a broad swath of people, it should be grounds for greater sympathy and more social forms of discussion and healing. We should be able to be more forgiving of each other instead of so eager to pathologize from afar. Ideally, relationships with others involve both accounting for each others’ weaknesses as well as pushing each other to be better, even as the progress is gradual and nonlinear.
Our current iteration of pop psychology has us trained to pin up the red string between our parents, our childhoods, our mental illnesses, and our behavior too quickly. What can feel like solving the grand mystery of the pains of your life easily becomes a tangle where you trap yourself in current state understandings. Tying everything back to your past is probably not inaccurate in many cases, but it can start to resemble a strange sense of predestination or stuckness if you believe you are who you are because of how you were raised. We can’t keep normalizing mental health by reducing mental health issues into permanent categories of being. It is daunting to even be up against 18 years or more of childhood when you’re only 26 like me, but learning to better live with your problems, even if you cannot eliminate them, is worthwhile.
There is a local minimum where you recognize these problems but don’t know where to start. The best place to start is wherever you can find the wherewithal to start! Nobody has an answer key.
You do not need a grand unified theory of yourself or other people. And you definitely don’t need a grand unified theory of yourself or other people before you can make changes. It misunderstands both theory and yourself—you are context-dependent, you are in flux, you are getting better and worse and also moving laterally and in every direction because you’re not a self-optimizing capitalist machine.
The journey of what to do next will not be found in the continual scroll. These videos temporarily soothe a kind of deep loneliness or discomfort, but they do not and cannot help to process and integrate our experiences so that we can carry them forward with less suffering. Nobody is all the way along for the ride with you as you figure out how to stake your self-worth on less shaky grounds, learn how to address a conflict head-on with your friend instead of sulking indignantly, or take the risks inherent in trying to build a new version of a relationship with a family member. Aphoristic advice is easy to toss out. I’ve seen a million versions of “be soft on yourself” and “forgive yourself” but I am still deep in the throes of trying to figure out what that means for me personally and how it exists in tension with my assumptions about life.
Following through, operationalizing in the specific contexts of your life, is the hard part. I am the only person who can catch my instinct to self-isolate in response to disappointment and work against it, the only person who can make myself stop making myself busy as a way to avoid grief. This isn’t meant as an individualist bootstraps statement, it’s just that only you have all the context for yourself, and social media content about mental health tends to formalize common human experiences into set categorizations with sweeping generalization.
I think often of a dichotomy I learned from reading a book very often recommended on mental health social media – Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay Gibson. What has stuck with me the most was the dichotomy that the author draws between internalizers and externalizers. Internalizers blame themselves for all that has happened to them, try to run scenarios and figure out how to be better, hoping that will fix the problem. Externalizers eschew taking responsibility, blame others, turn to distraction. Neither of these sounds very good, though the author suggests that internalizers are the ones reading this book and externalizers are out in the world making a mess without questioning themselves. Both extremes seem very self-centered; the internalizer falsely believes they have such agency and control that they alone can make things better while the externalizer falsely believes they are the victim of outside circumstances that drive them to be the way that they are. Popular pseudo-therapy can feel like it’s intensifying both ends of the spectrum: you’re unwell because of childhood trauma that you alone can reprocess and grow from or you’re unwell because of systemic forces out of your control.
It can genuinely be very validating to have someone else encapsulate your feelings in a 15-second video, to hear from a stranger that what you’ve experienced or what you’re feeling has an explanation, that the mess has a name, that perhaps someone, even if’s not you, has figured out how to make it manageable. The problem with social media is almost never that it’s completely rotten to the core; it’s that the means become the ends, the artifice becomes all there is. The endgame is not a list of problems nor is the endgame the list of problems all neatly crossed out, to-do list complete. There’s no 1% better everyday compound interest self-help strategy to this. “What do I do with this information?” is an excellent question to ask, but not with the expectation of commenting “GUIDE” on an Instagram Reel to receive the answer. The rectangle in your hand has its limits.
Have you ever been frustrated with your friend (or yourself) because they keep bringing up and complaining about something or someone in their life? It’s taking up all the air in the room, they’re rehashing the same problems, and you’re sitting there wondering why they don’t just do something? You can almost map out their mental gymnastics like a sports commentator. You might even question whether on some level they are taking pleasure in the complaining, in whatever is grating against them? When I am alone at night and I open Instagram and I see the fifty millionth video about relational wounds and puzzling over if I could somehow solve my relational wounds outside of any and all relationships, I think the posts about how what you dislike in others is what you dislike about yourself have a point.
content (not derogatory)
sophie vershbow discovering the amazing AIDS activism legacy of her cousin
america doesn’t know how to read the work of black writers
this is so old but i was just introduced to it… dream job
yt video: #1 solution for self doubt lol
recently watched hank green’s (yeah crashcourse guy) standup comedy special (you can 3-day free trial the service it’s on) about getting hodgkin’s lymphoma. it took me so long to realize that my #1 top coping mechanism for life is treating the worst things as an absurd joke but it’s validating to see other people do it too i guess
the girl, so confusing version with lorde by charli xcx makes me emotional… is it a universal experience to get a weird vibe from someone and be convinced they hate you only to find out they’re too busy being personally unwell to have realized this was going on?
“downhill” by pom pom squad
books-wise i am reading the atmospherians by isle mcelroy and enjoying it! the premise is a cancelled wellness influencer gets invited to start a cult with her childhood best friend where they try to rehabilitate antisocial/bad men. extremely up my alley for a wide variety of reasons. also recently read cultish by amanda montell which was quite fun and interesting in terms of mapping out the variety of cult and cult-adjacent things that have risen, especially in the decline of organized religion