Dear reader. Happy Saturday afternoon. I am going to do something a little different with this post. I am taking thirty minutes to do a retrospective on this blog I have been writing for many years and hit send afterwards so I can enjoy the rest of my Saturday afternoon.
Substack tells me there are 7,000 people who have subscribed to this newsletter, of whom about 3,000 actually engage with it to some degree. Who are all you people?? I am so honored to be in your presence.
Here is my secret: writing this blog is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. It feels strange to say that, because it’s such a silly little thing. But it makes complete sense. It is hard because I care. This blog is one of the things I have cared most about in my entire life.
If you’re not familiar with it, you can take a look through the post archive. I’ve written a lot of very vulnerable posts, and a lot of very effortful posts. I wrote ten thousand words trying to refute the philosophy of a famous physicist and writer. I wrote about my best friend moving away and how hard it was to say goodbye to him. I wrote thousands of words about all the things I have learned from meditation.
For today’s post I was originally going to write about “social media as a spiritual practice.” That is how I’ve been thinking about social media lately – engaging with it as another dimension of my spiritual and creative practices. Friends have been telling me that they’re enjoying my instagram stories a lot, so it seems that I’m doing something right. But before I hit publish on the draft, I saw a tweet about “let’s make a map of which spiritual teachers are to be trusted and which are fake.” And I remembered, I don’t like the way people talk about spirituality on the internet and I hate it when people present themselves as a spiritual authority. And even though I always try to preface my posts by clarifying that I’m figuring it all out myself, I still don’t feel good talking about spirituality. So I decided to defer the post to another day.
That is the kind of thing that makes writing a blog like this hard. There is so much you want to say, but there is so much that you are afraid of. I want to share about my life, and all the things I find beautiful, but I don’t trust the internet. The internet will take what you care about and rip it apart. I don’t want people’s stupid opinions to taint my own sense of what is beautiful.
I always have the backup option of posting stuff I don’t really care about. Sometimes I do that – I post something less personal, or something I wrote a while back and gave it time to gel. Something I got feedback on from multiple friends so they can confirm that I am not coming across as insane. But it is clear that there is something worthwhile in skipping all of that and coming into direct contact with this core fear of being seen and having no ability to control the other person’s perception of me.
There is so much I do want to say. Life has really been good in the past few months. Not “good” as in “I am feeling good all the time,” but “good” as in “I am falling in love with everything,” both the good parts and the bad parts. I want to tell you about that, but something about talking about it feels wrong. Like I still need to give it time to just be. I don’t like the way that the Algorithm distorts my own sense of what is important and what is worth speaking about.
I gave myself a challenge of publishing weekly for the past ten weeks, and this is counting as my tenth weekly post. This seems like a good spot to take a bit of a break. I have an intention of pausing for a few weeks and getting back to publishing in August. But something tells me that the form factor of this blog is just not quite right anymore. I started it 6 (!!!) years ago and I feel like a completely different person. I don’t like the title much anymore either. I don’t just want to give you little “bits” of wonder, little bite-sized doses, I want to blast your face with wonder, I want you to see the way that wonder already completely envelopes you. Blasts of Wonder. Lmao.
In the draft I had about “social media as a spiritual practice,” I was going to talk about how “posting on the internet is jumping off a cliff.” That is really the part that has made all of this hard. It is a direct exposure to the Blinding Light of the Unknown. You can publish a post and it can go number one on hacker news and random friends you hadn’t talked to in years are texting and emailing you about it. You can publish a vulnerable essay that you put a lot of effort into and no one responds, and your Saturday is ruined. There are ways to help cushion the fall, by being a bit more cautious, by turning off the notifications, not cross-posting on other social media platforms, distracting yourself with weekend plans. But you really can’t escape the fact that you’re falling.
I am so grateful to all of you for reading! I hope to be back soon. Also you can reply to these emails directly and I will respond, I would love to hear what these posts have done for you if anything.