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Good morning. How are you doing at this point? I know it’s a crime to ask but it’s been a while and now I’m curious. Let me know in the comments if you’re in the mood. My answer is below.
Stimulants
I knew I’d jumped some kind of shark last week when I told Avi I was thinking of taking a sliver of an old Adderall I had laying around. I don’t even drink coffee anymore for fear of getting too anxious, but the thought of sitting down another day in front of a blank page made me want to change my name and move to the woods. He gave me a look I couldn’t quite place. Eyebrows raised in surprise or maybe suspicion. “It might help!” I said defensively.
The first and only time I’ve taken Adderall for work was in 2008, when a friend in my freshman dorm gave me a 25mg pill—her daily dose, per her doctor—to help me cram for a final. I spent the day ripping through what felt like my entire textbook at the computer lab where I worked, gripped by a mania I’d never experienced. Whenever a student asked to buy a scantron, I would trade them one for a dime as if I were being timed. My knees bounced so enthusiastically I had to swap out my rolling chair for one without wheels. Twelve hours later I was still awake, imitating sleep in my twin bed until 7am, eyes wide like buttons, a crystal clear sense that something was wrong and that thing was me. The next day I vowed never to do it again.
“Are you sure distraction is the reason you’re having trouble writing?” Avi finally asked.
“It’s impossible for me to focus,” I said.
“I think that’s because you’re depressed,” he said.
“But what’s more distracting than depression?” I said.
I decided not to take the Adderall.
I’m ashamed for being depressed in my cocoon of relative safety, the impetus some combination of personal and global problems: a pandemic, a post-election hangover, a paucity of optimism. Maybe most of all, the internet. A few days ago I sent a friend eight consecutive texts about someone whose political posturing was annoying me online. After writing the last message, before she’d even replied, I swiped to my home screen and deleted Instagram and Twitter. These apps, my personal IV drips of cynicism, were gone before I could second-guess myself. My texts had been that deranged. I wasn’t at rock bottom, but I was somewhere halfway down, in free fall, blaming gravity when I was the one who’d jumped, which must be the other definition of insanity.
The next day I was on the phone with my mom and she told me she’d deleted Facebook. She couldn’t take it anymore, she said. I told her I’d just been through the same. She was walking on the beach in California, the wind occasionally cutting out her voice. I was curled up under an old pilled blanket in New York. Politics were driving us both insane. Filling us with hatred for people we didn’t know and loathed, and rage toward people we did and loved—her, republicans; me, centrists—fracturing whatever sense of community the internet was supposedly made to foster. Haha. Five minutes later we were arguing about Obama—her defending; me criticizing—and we had to laugh at the irony. We stopped ourselves and said we loved each other. Five minutes later she texted me saying I should be a speechwriter for AOC. “Haha,” I replied, and she said back: “I’m not kidding.”
It’s been five days since I incited my social media ban and it’s so far proved strange. With nowhere to scroll during idle moments, my fingers swipe to my camera roll and comb through it like a feed of memories: a three-second clip of Avi eating ramen downtown last year, a minute-long saga of my brother and I trying to get our baby nieces to say “mama,” an algorithmically created montage of a trip my friend Nora and I took upstate for a writing workshop in 2018. I’ve been reading the backs of shampoo bottles. I’ve been reading the Bed-Stuy local news: Popular Acai Bowl Chain Opens First Brooklyn Shop. NYC Suspension Numbers Plunged During Remote Learning. Man Who Pushed BK Grandma Onto Subway Tracks Arrested.
Avi’s been keeping me abreast of any important Twitter happenings, as per our agreement. “They’re trying to cancel Baby Yoda for eating an endangered species of eggs,” he told me earlier today. And then 30 seconds later: “Mind if I turn on some ambient forest noises?” We all have our copes.
I’ve been thinking about the moment in a movie theater during the trailers when you exchange looks with a friend as if to say, We have to see that, or, Holy shit that looks awful, after each one. You’re sitting in the dark. It’s cool and comfortable and you wonder if you’re going to love the movie, or when is too early to open the M&Ms. In two hours you’ll emerge from the theater, squinting in the sun. Maybe you’ll get a drink. Talk about the movie. Decide what you want for dinner or whatever. But the moment during the trailers specifically feels important. That brief, electrifying connection, shared in silence, utterly private and without stakes.
On my desk in front of me is a ripped paper towel in which I’ve written, lowercase in blue ballpoint pen, “boundaries.” This is the single note I took during therapy last week. I told her I was worried my bad mood would always transmit to my writing, and then transmit it to all the people who read it, and then maybe I would hurt people and have to shut down my newsletter because of my bad mood. She suggested I didn’t have enough boundaries between myself and my work, and so I wrote that down on the paper towel I’d recently used for a piece of toast. boundaries. As if I didn’t already know that. As if writing it down might make it stick. Now I’m sharing it with you, testing it.
“I need to delete social media too,” said my friend whom I’d spammed with angry social media texts. “The problem is I’m addicted.” That phrasing made me laugh—the spelling out of something so obvious it needn’t be addressed. Like saying “I want to eat candy at 2pm because I’m bored.” It’s implied, isn’t it? But maybe it’s useful to say it. To acknowledge there’s something good about social media that we don’t want to give up, even as we lament its unrelenting ravaging of our mental health. For instance, one hour ago, when I saw the below video of a stupid egg hack in this article about my favorite YouTube channel, Five-Minute Crafts, there was nothing I wanted to do more than post it everywhere with a caption like, “weekend plans.” I wonder what I’d get out of that? I’m putting it in my newsletter now, does that count?
I wanted to take the Adderall—just a sliver, like my grandma used to take, but of Ambien at 2pm—because I thought it might enable me to write about something other than being mildly depressed. I thought maybe it would light a creative fire within me that would help me explore parts of my mind and the world that don’t amount to “I’m in a bad mood because of everything.” That’s not really how stimulants work though, is it? I don’t think they’re so specific. For instance, I had a coffee this morning for the first time in two months and essentially what it’s done is help me write this essay about my bad mood, but faster.
Things are looking up though. I finally got my period. Trump lost. A vaccine is imminent. It’s almost Thanksgiving and I’ve been told my shampoo’s gentle formula helps to reduce dryness and restore the scalp’s microflora balance without stripping or drying hair. There’s plenty to read and do and be. Good music persists. Optimism finds a way, I’m sure, if we just give it a little space to grow.
1. This week’s Small Good Thing is this video, sent to me by a reader, of a man feeding 700 hotdogs to a nursery of raccoons on his backyard deck.
2. The Google results for “what do you call a group of raccoons?” (it’s “nursery,” in case that wasn’t clear)
3. The aforementioned article about one of the most popular YouTube channels, Five-Minute Crafts: “The Egg Is Bigger Than Before, or, the Cosmic Mysteries of YouTube’s Third-Most-Popular Channel,” an incredible read by Max Read for The Cut, published in 2019 and therefore perfectly irrelevant.
4. The movie Columbus, after several internet strangers suggested it to me as a movie that is calming/ASMR-producing in the same way that Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Phantom Thread are. It didn’t give me ASMR, but I can confirm it’s calming and beautiful, albeit slightly corny (script-wise).
5. “The True Cost of Keeping a Restaurant Open During a Pandemic,” an Eater interview with SF restaurant owner Pim Techamuanvivit that lays out the complicated specifics of running a restaurant right now.
6. The consistent source of a nourishment that is my weekly donation run with FIG, a non-profit that coordinates meal kits for New York families facing food insecurity. You can donate to the effort here if you have any dollars to spare this month.
7. The website aptly named DoINeedaCovid19Test.com, which allowed me to make an appointment to get tested exactly one hour later at the pharmacy down the street from my apartment.
8. “The Black Elite Are an Obstacle Toward Black Liberation,” an essay for Teen Vogue by Kandist Mallett, published the day after Lil Wayne’s meeting with Trump, that deftly explores the problem with de-emphasizing class in the movement for Black lives (and all political movements that seek to liberate the marginalized).
9. This interview I did with Oenone Forbat for her podcast, Adulting, about choice feminism, which similarly homes in on the problem with de-emphasizing class. A kind of follow-up to my Emily Ratajkowski essay. (Warning that my audio sucks!)
10. “Let’s Just Lie on the Floor and Scream Together,” an essay by Jess Zimmerman for Slate that explains “adult tantrums” in terms I’ve never thought of and completely relate to this year.
11. The documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston, suggested by my friend Michelle for being a jarring depiction of the interplay between art and suffering. (It was.)
12. This unexpected Guardian profile of Gabriel Byrne by Catherine Shoard. Unexpected because I haven’t thought about Gabriel Byrne even once in my spare time and yet thoroughly enjoyed it/him:
“Seven years on the west coast left him unsmitten. ‘One of the most depressing journeys I think you can make is to go across the canyons in LA, down to where the studios are.’ He never got used to going to parties where the likes of Michael Douglas would open the door. ‘It’s a ridiculous place to want to be accepted. Like going into a hardware store and looking for a pizza.’”
12a. The definition for the word “splenetic” from the above profile, meaning bad-tempered; spiteful.
13. “Sade Saves,” a beautiful essay by Danyel Smith for NPR, and a good excuse to put on some Sade:
“The boy who had just as much sex with me as I with him has no decision in his belly, and he hasn't called. I am jealous of his freedom yet refuse to leave my neatly made secondhand mattress. My head is between a landline and my booming system. I am abandoned and loudness is a weighted blanket. The twirling cassette, from a girl named Sade, is called Diamond Life.”
14. Against my better judgement, yet another bag of white cheddar Cheeto Puffs.
15. And as dessert, infinite particles of dander from my beloved pet, straight to the face.
This has been Maybe Baby #32, officially one unit older than me, and perhaps a sign of better things to come.
Haley
p.s. On the podcast this week will be Nora Taylor, she of perpetual melancholy and beautiful fucking hands. We have a story to tell you about that writing workshop…
This month a portion of subscriber proceeds will be redistributed to Palante Harlem Inc, a New York-based nonprofit working to reduce poverty, end tenant exploitation, and advocate for safe housing in Harlem.
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Hi Haley,
I want to quickly respond to your concern that you might be transmitting bad vibes and hence that maybe you should shut down the newsletter.
The only thing I want to say is that I really hope you don’t because your newsletter is something I look forward to all week. To me, your writing doesn’t transmit negativity, rather, it does what you predicted a few weeks back ie. it gives colour to all the things we might be feeling in these unprecedented times and hence does a whole lot of good.
Have a wonderful week!
Love from Belgium,
Eva x
Haley hi!
just here to leave a humble comment about how your sunday newsletter is always something to look forward to. your essays are always the best company and a big thank you because being lazy and prone to procrastination i rarely read as much as articles or essays i’d like to and you always have the best suggestions in relation to what you’re reading. as phoebe bridgers would say i feel like a “punisher” for leaving a comment like this one but good work must always get congratulated!
have a great week,
greetings from greece!
marianna xx