This week I would like to submit, as evidence and verbatim, all 15 notes I took down for this newsletter that I could not manage to cohere into a single worthwhile idea.
I so appreciate this newsletter! As a writer myself, I often hyper-empathize and worry about the pressure you must feel writing this weekly. This week's edition was a shrug in honesty that still delivered the most delicious considerations and slices of humanity.
Thank you so much for saying this bc I was getting anxiety from someone who replied to this week's letter saying my work was decreasing in quality and I was a grifter for having a paid component. The internet is so stressful. Anyway thank you!! Appreciate this and you
Wow, fuck that. I (and I'm sure so many others) truly love a swath of content style and approach that reflects an actual human brain and heart. This week really inspired me and reminded me of how much I love brain shards and bits.
Agree! Also, Haley, I always took MB to be about you writing for yourself as much as others, so there will be have to be ups and downs in the flow of your mood as you express yourself. Plus your recent article on Emrata was one of the meatiest things I've read in months! As far as I'm concerned I'm paying to not have you endorse products that don't really work, and I'm paying to not have thousands of blinking ads all over the page.
Your work is definitely increasing in quality (I was pretty critical on your last newsletter and I wouldn't have bothered if this wasn't the case), and wanting to get paid for your work without resorting to ads =/= being a grifter. You know this but it helps to hear someone else say it.
(10) Saying hi to strangers -- it may be one of the most ordinary things you can do, but I love it! Truly one of the best things about a long weekend bike ride is saying hello or good morning to cyclists passing the other way, or smiling at old people walking the back country roads, or greeting friendly horse riders. I almost always cycle alone but saying hi means it never feels lonely :)
your newsletter is genuinely a highlight of my week. in the absence of meaningful social interaction and having just graduated from college without yet finding a job, i feel myself missing thoughtfulness. your writing scratches that itch for my brain in such a specific way and it really means a lot to me!
my entire phd dissertation was on how we struggle with maintaining identities during political upheaval through our fashion choices (what does “In group” even mean if no one sees it, oh shit, do these skinny jeans make me look like a fat (bourgeois pig) and will someone going to maybe attack me because of it and I mean, I know the city is burning but have you seen my sequin mini skirt?!!). I studied it through 1920s Russian modernism, but still, pretty interesting to think about it now. Tl;dr to be noticed is to be human. Clothing is so near the body it becomes an easy conduit to forge connection and during upheaval we have this friction of guilt for caring while doubling down on caring to keep building connection and maintaining identity.
I’ve been running an online vintage shop with my partner with a deep angle on old millennial nostalgia (see: dancing coke can, Alf for president tee), and we did our first pop up since the pandemic yesterday in Oakland. And wow, it felt so much more substantial and like their purchases felt very consequential for them. We try to create a feeling and energy and want to sell that as much as the items themselves, and I think people were really craving it.
Would love to know what other newsletters you read! I absolutely love yours, which is to say I love your perspective and thus interested to learn which ones are your favorite! :)
Excited to hear the pod on Emily in Paris! I had reservations walking into it, and couldn’t help but cringe during many parts of the show, but I also enjoyed it in an escapism, not-thinking-too-hard-about-it kind of way. Where do you draw the line between when to enjoy "lighthearted fun" and when to think critically? Very open to hear the discussion. Hope you're having an okay day too x
This newsletter has been so relatable in so many unexpected ways.
Palpitation diary
Last year due to stress I started to have what I call quiet panic attacks. I could feel my heart going crazy and having a sort of out-of-body experience so my doctor suggested I track my heartbeat. I bought a Fitbit as I gave up on properly learning and remembering how to properly monitor this stuff. HERE WHERE IT GETS FUNNY: Fitbits are programmed for sports and my Fitbit nicely congratulated me on my workout session, spending almost 20 min in a fat-burning state. Needless to say, it was just my heart rate going wild during a panic attack. My heart-rate was so high for such a long period of time that I guess it counted as fat-burning. I know this sounds very dark, but it made the entire situation extremely funny to me at the time, as I couldn't remember also the last time I had actually worked out. It was pretty much one of those moments when you think the universe has an interesting sense of humor.
Fast forward today, I quit my job and never had a panic attack ever since.
I hope you can get figure a solution to your palpitations soon <3
Everything Emily in Paris
I can't wait to hear the podcast. Needless to say that living in Paris, we are all so mad at it for many different reasons, and I'm not even French!
Among many things, it definitely keeps on pushing this weird stereotypes of Parisian women.
I'd have too much to say about it, but I'd like to leave you with a few suggestions/things to consume that are actually Parisian or making a great impact to fight those stereotypes:
- Lindsay Tramuta's The new Parisienne, the go-to chronicle of the joyful, progressive, pioneering women of Paris. https://www.thenewparisienne.com/.
I highly suggest following Linsday on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/lostncheeseland/). She is very active on everything-French, so lots of great content (pictures, podcasts, articles) to enjoy.
- Tales of Paris by Pénélope Romand-Monnier, a collection of stories about living in Paris that follows people as they go through the ups and downs of their Parisian life.
I am currently lying in that exact position you wrote about, so thank you for making me feel like I am not alone in this.
I’d love to read about getting dressed and identity (have experienced that ”loss“ as well over the past months).
And lastly I‘ve also been thinking about Emily in Paris a lot, mainly the fact that friendships develop so easily and that she becomes popular so quickly. I guess this artificial ”acceleration“ of relationships and the sense of constant progress, of moving forward is really typical for movies or series, but it’s the first time I’ve really noticed it (maybe because I‘m so desperate for making progress and especially for feeling that progress at the moment...).
Loved this one, especially the things you consumed this week. Going through them as we speak.
Also, hypervigilance! My therapist and I talk about this often. I have a trauma oriented therapist, so they lean more towards trauma instead of formal diagnoses. As a result, we often frame my generalized anxiety disorder in terms of trauma. She mentions how exhausting it always is to have anxiety / exist in a state of hypervigilance, how ancestral it is, and how much sense it makes given.... everything. I'm not sure where I'm going with this comment. But hypervigilance is a wild one, and I am starting to understand how truly ancestral it is. You know, needing to be hypervigilant because of war, famine, being refugees (I'm of Vietnamese ancestry). And how that hypervigilance is part of my central nervous system, and how during a global pandemic, that every day state of hypervigilance is heightened even more. It is exhausting !!!!
Wow this really feels like it was written for me this week -
I temporarily moved back to my hometown and the transition to being somewhere where everyone says hello to each other on the street (like all the time) was actually really delightful. It also makes me love Buffalo in a way that I did not appreciate the last time I lived here.
I recently got diagnosed with ADHD, which is helping make sense of so many things in my life, but one of the biggest symptoms that isn't that talked about very often is time blindness. Apparently the pandemic is causing a lot of people to experience time blindness, and I have mixed feelings about how much everyone is talking about it. I've been trying to get people to understand my relationship with time for years - its kind of great that people might actually finally understand. But sometimes it feels like everyone can't wait to get back to normal and I'm going to be here forever. It's fascinating to me how much we do rely on time to anchor us and how unsettling it can be when it's different.
I know what you mean, especially with ADHD as a lot of the symptoms are, on the surface of it, extremely relatable, and it's hard to describe how the symptoms are different from what everyone is experiencing, and the ways in which they're distressing. Time-blindness is a typical example.
At the same time, I've seen a lot of stuff online about how most people are experiencing elements of what disabled people experience all the time, isolation and its consequences, including time-blindness, being one of those things. And it's irksome to see people write about something you experience all the time like "wow it's the apocalypse why do I have to deal with this make it stop". But at the same time, I'm not sure they're experiencing the same thing - just like, someone who has trouble following a difficult book might use the same terms as me to describe the experience, but they're almost certainly not experiencing the physical, neurological impossibility of focusing on one thing at a time that people with ADHD experience, and they won't be able to help it with a pomodoro timer and loud music - the same as if I seek out somewhere quiet and use a dictionary and conscientiously take notes I'm definitely hating it, falling asleep and never doing it again.
Plus, there isn't a pandemic all the time so, really, we're all experiencing something totally new - arguably, maybe, apocalyptic. No one is ever going back to how things were before. Which, in itself, personally that makes me find the urge to want to go back to how things were annoying cause it's like, that world was fucking brutal for most people anyway.
In any case I think there's maybe too much focus on experience and the idea that people who are such and such can never understand the true experiences of such and such people, which is the major thing that makes breezily-pondering writing about feelings in general hard to take for me, because by being quasi-religious about feelings and experiences people can end up only ever considering their own.
The article about sex work was so well written and argued. Definitely shifted my perspective, which wasn’t super aligned with a single side of the debate in the first place. This piece does a great job of challenging who writes the sex work narrative that gets placed at the forefront of liberal feminist beliefs. I sent this to a few friends who align themselves strongly with both the pro-sex work movement and socialism to see what they think. Thanks for sharing, haley!
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE write about number 4. I work in fashion and deal with the every day “stress” of figuring out what to wear with still trying to be myself and not trying to be someone else because 10 minutes later I’ll hate what I’m wearing and I’m already half way to work. Tbh it throws my whole day off and I feel less productive. I would love your thoughts. I thrive for your talks on self awareness, it’s MY favorite thing to consume every week lol.
I will definitely give this some more thought! Sometimes I don't want to give the topic air because it feels fairly low-stakes but I do think there is something jarring about losing access to a mode of communication (even to ourselves) we typically engage with every day. (Also thank you!!)
Other people hyper focus on their heartbeats too! I freak myself out all the dang time.
I also get palpitations and ended up wearing a heart monitor over the summer to log them, all to find out that it’s normal and most people don’t even feel them! Hyper focusing = palpitations?
I've watched every season of Love Island UK in the past six months, it's a tragic way to spend my time, but there's something comforting about watching other people in their own form of quarantine
I so appreciate this newsletter! As a writer myself, I often hyper-empathize and worry about the pressure you must feel writing this weekly. This week's edition was a shrug in honesty that still delivered the most delicious considerations and slices of humanity.
Thank you so much for saying this bc I was getting anxiety from someone who replied to this week's letter saying my work was decreasing in quality and I was a grifter for having a paid component. The internet is so stressful. Anyway thank you!! Appreciate this and you
Wow, fuck that. I (and I'm sure so many others) truly love a swath of content style and approach that reflects an actual human brain and heart. This week really inspired me and reminded me of how much I love brain shards and bits.
Agree! Also, Haley, I always took MB to be about you writing for yourself as much as others, so there will be have to be ups and downs in the flow of your mood as you express yourself. Plus your recent article on Emrata was one of the meatiest things I've read in months! As far as I'm concerned I'm paying to not have you endorse products that don't really work, and I'm paying to not have thousands of blinking ads all over the page.
Thank you so much! You're a generous reader
You nailed it. I LOVE brain shards as well as variety in format and content.
:') thank you again
Your work is definitely increasing in quality (I was pretty critical on your last newsletter and I wouldn't have bothered if this wasn't the case), and wanting to get paid for your work without resorting to ads =/= being a grifter. You know this but it helps to hear someone else say it.
Tbh I *do* want a Substack on AC fall fashion 😂
Just came here to say the same thing!
hahaha bless you both......maybe I'll do one on my IG story
(10) Saying hi to strangers -- it may be one of the most ordinary things you can do, but I love it! Truly one of the best things about a long weekend bike ride is saying hello or good morning to cyclists passing the other way, or smiling at old people walking the back country roads, or greeting friendly horse riders. I almost always cycle alone but saying hi means it never feels lonely :)
your newsletter is genuinely a highlight of my week. in the absence of meaningful social interaction and having just graduated from college without yet finding a job, i feel myself missing thoughtfulness. your writing scratches that itch for my brain in such a specific way and it really means a lot to me!
:') thank you for reading and commenting! Congrats on graduating. Been thinking of people your age a lot, I imagine it must be so tough
my entire phd dissertation was on how we struggle with maintaining identities during political upheaval through our fashion choices (what does “In group” even mean if no one sees it, oh shit, do these skinny jeans make me look like a fat (bourgeois pig) and will someone going to maybe attack me because of it and I mean, I know the city is burning but have you seen my sequin mini skirt?!!). I studied it through 1920s Russian modernism, but still, pretty interesting to think about it now. Tl;dr to be noticed is to be human. Clothing is so near the body it becomes an easy conduit to forge connection and during upheaval we have this friction of guilt for caring while doubling down on caring to keep building connection and maintaining identity.
I’ve been running an online vintage shop with my partner with a deep angle on old millennial nostalgia (see: dancing coke can, Alf for president tee), and we did our first pop up since the pandemic yesterday in Oakland. And wow, it felt so much more substantial and like their purchases felt very consequential for them. We try to create a feeling and energy and want to sell that as much as the items themselves, and I think people were really craving it.
Wow this is so interesting!! Thank you for this perspective going to look into this more!
I can tell you there’s not a whole lot written on the subject haha
I really want to know more about this: your dissertation and the pop-up. Where can I find both/either?!
Would love to know what other newsletters you read! I absolutely love yours, which is to say I love your perspective and thus interested to learn which ones are your favorite! :)
I need to make a list some time!
Excited to hear the pod on Emily in Paris! I had reservations walking into it, and couldn’t help but cringe during many parts of the show, but I also enjoyed it in an escapism, not-thinking-too-hard-about-it kind of way. Where do you draw the line between when to enjoy "lighthearted fun" and when to think critically? Very open to hear the discussion. Hope you're having an okay day too x
This newsletter has been so relatable in so many unexpected ways.
Palpitation diary
Last year due to stress I started to have what I call quiet panic attacks. I could feel my heart going crazy and having a sort of out-of-body experience so my doctor suggested I track my heartbeat. I bought a Fitbit as I gave up on properly learning and remembering how to properly monitor this stuff. HERE WHERE IT GETS FUNNY: Fitbits are programmed for sports and my Fitbit nicely congratulated me on my workout session, spending almost 20 min in a fat-burning state. Needless to say, it was just my heart rate going wild during a panic attack. My heart-rate was so high for such a long period of time that I guess it counted as fat-burning. I know this sounds very dark, but it made the entire situation extremely funny to me at the time, as I couldn't remember also the last time I had actually worked out. It was pretty much one of those moments when you think the universe has an interesting sense of humor.
Fast forward today, I quit my job and never had a panic attack ever since.
I hope you can get figure a solution to your palpitations soon <3
Everything Emily in Paris
I can't wait to hear the podcast. Needless to say that living in Paris, we are all so mad at it for many different reasons, and I'm not even French!
Among many things, it definitely keeps on pushing this weird stereotypes of Parisian women.
I'd have too much to say about it, but I'd like to leave you with a few suggestions/things to consume that are actually Parisian or making a great impact to fight those stereotypes:
- Lindsay Tramuta's The new Parisienne, the go-to chronicle of the joyful, progressive, pioneering women of Paris. https://www.thenewparisienne.com/.
I highly suggest following Linsday on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/lostncheeseland/). She is very active on everything-French, so lots of great content (pictures, podcasts, articles) to enjoy.
- Tales of Paris by Pénélope Romand-Monnier, a collection of stories about living in Paris that follows people as they go through the ups and downs of their Parisian life.
https://www.talesofparis.com/ or on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/_talesofparis/
thank you for these paris recs!! also your fitbit tracking panic attacks as exercise 😭 kind of nice to get credit for them...
I am currently lying in that exact position you wrote about, so thank you for making me feel like I am not alone in this.
I’d love to read about getting dressed and identity (have experienced that ”loss“ as well over the past months).
And lastly I‘ve also been thinking about Emily in Paris a lot, mainly the fact that friendships develop so easily and that she becomes popular so quickly. I guess this artificial ”acceleration“ of relationships and the sense of constant progress, of moving forward is really typical for movies or series, but it’s the first time I’ve really noticed it (maybe because I‘m so desperate for making progress and especially for feeling that progress at the moment...).
Loved this one, especially the things you consumed this week. Going through them as we speak.
Also, hypervigilance! My therapist and I talk about this often. I have a trauma oriented therapist, so they lean more towards trauma instead of formal diagnoses. As a result, we often frame my generalized anxiety disorder in terms of trauma. She mentions how exhausting it always is to have anxiety / exist in a state of hypervigilance, how ancestral it is, and how much sense it makes given.... everything. I'm not sure where I'm going with this comment. But hypervigilance is a wild one, and I am starting to understand how truly ancestral it is. You know, needing to be hypervigilant because of war, famine, being refugees (I'm of Vietnamese ancestry). And how that hypervigilance is part of my central nervous system, and how during a global pandemic, that every day state of hypervigilance is heightened even more. It is exhausting !!!!
Wow, this makes total sense, I want to read more about this!
Wow this really feels like it was written for me this week -
I temporarily moved back to my hometown and the transition to being somewhere where everyone says hello to each other on the street (like all the time) was actually really delightful. It also makes me love Buffalo in a way that I did not appreciate the last time I lived here.
I recently got diagnosed with ADHD, which is helping make sense of so many things in my life, but one of the biggest symptoms that isn't that talked about very often is time blindness. Apparently the pandemic is causing a lot of people to experience time blindness, and I have mixed feelings about how much everyone is talking about it. I've been trying to get people to understand my relationship with time for years - its kind of great that people might actually finally understand. But sometimes it feels like everyone can't wait to get back to normal and I'm going to be here forever. It's fascinating to me how much we do rely on time to anchor us and how unsettling it can be when it's different.
I know what you mean, especially with ADHD as a lot of the symptoms are, on the surface of it, extremely relatable, and it's hard to describe how the symptoms are different from what everyone is experiencing, and the ways in which they're distressing. Time-blindness is a typical example.
At the same time, I've seen a lot of stuff online about how most people are experiencing elements of what disabled people experience all the time, isolation and its consequences, including time-blindness, being one of those things. And it's irksome to see people write about something you experience all the time like "wow it's the apocalypse why do I have to deal with this make it stop". But at the same time, I'm not sure they're experiencing the same thing - just like, someone who has trouble following a difficult book might use the same terms as me to describe the experience, but they're almost certainly not experiencing the physical, neurological impossibility of focusing on one thing at a time that people with ADHD experience, and they won't be able to help it with a pomodoro timer and loud music - the same as if I seek out somewhere quiet and use a dictionary and conscientiously take notes I'm definitely hating it, falling asleep and never doing it again.
Plus, there isn't a pandemic all the time so, really, we're all experiencing something totally new - arguably, maybe, apocalyptic. No one is ever going back to how things were before. Which, in itself, personally that makes me find the urge to want to go back to how things were annoying cause it's like, that world was fucking brutal for most people anyway.
In any case I think there's maybe too much focus on experience and the idea that people who are such and such can never understand the true experiences of such and such people, which is the major thing that makes breezily-pondering writing about feelings in general hard to take for me, because by being quasi-religious about feelings and experiences people can end up only ever considering their own.
The article about sex work was so well written and argued. Definitely shifted my perspective, which wasn’t super aligned with a single side of the debate in the first place. This piece does a great job of challenging who writes the sex work narrative that gets placed at the forefront of liberal feminist beliefs. I sent this to a few friends who align themselves strongly with both the pro-sex work movement and socialism to see what they think. Thanks for sharing, haley!
Thanks for reading! I felt the same way when I read it
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE write about number 4. I work in fashion and deal with the every day “stress” of figuring out what to wear with still trying to be myself and not trying to be someone else because 10 minutes later I’ll hate what I’m wearing and I’m already half way to work. Tbh it throws my whole day off and I feel less productive. I would love your thoughts. I thrive for your talks on self awareness, it’s MY favorite thing to consume every week lol.
I will definitely give this some more thought! Sometimes I don't want to give the topic air because it feels fairly low-stakes but I do think there is something jarring about losing access to a mode of communication (even to ourselves) we typically engage with every day. (Also thank you!!)
Other people hyper focus on their heartbeats too! I freak myself out all the dang time.
I also get palpitations and ended up wearing a heart monitor over the summer to log them, all to find out that it’s normal and most people don’t even feel them! Hyper focusing = palpitations?
ah this makes me feel better!!
I've watched every season of Love Island UK in the past six months, it's a tragic way to spend my time, but there's something comforting about watching other people in their own form of quarantine
Fully agree!
I resonate with your words so much, Haley. Thanks for making me feel that way.