#15: An announcement about Maybe Baby
Good morning to all of your personalities from all of mine!
First up, an announcement. Today I’m officially launching a paid subscription to Maybe Baby. The TLDR is: For $5 a month you’ll get my weekly newsletter, my monthly Q&A column Dear Baby, and access to the Maybe Baby podcast. You’ll also be helping keep this space alive and ad-free. If you click this green button and re-enter your email, you’ll see the new options!
A little more background: When I first launched Maybe Baby, I knew I never wanted to compromise it with ads or sponsorship, and I thought that meant it would always stay small, because most readers aren’t used to paying for writing and I wouldn’t be able to invest much in unpaid work. I was also hesitant to pour myself into self-publishing out of fear that it would somehow make my writing less valued. Now, thanks to you, I feel differently. You’ve not only helped me realize that people are willing to pay for creative work they want to exist, but also that self-publishing can be a wonderful opportunity to create a space free of ads, gatekeepers, and limiting guardrails. I can’t thank you enough for that.
To that end, I’ve decided to officially launch a paid component of Maybe Baby that will set it up to be a more sustainable business for me and its readers in the long-term. For that reason I’m winding down my Patreon (if you even knew about it!) so that everything is under one roof. Here’s how the subscription types will now break down:
Non-paying subscribers will receive:
A newsletter every Sunday (as usual!).
Paying subscribers will receive, for $5/month:
A newsletter every Sunday, including my five-part advice column, Dear Baby, where I answer five of your questions in long-form (be they requests for advice or random curiosities). Here’s an example of one question-and-answer.
The weekly Tuesday Maybe Baby podcast, which includes interviews, unfiltered thoughts, and audio readings, usually based on the topic of Sunday’s newsletter.
The knowledge that you are helping keep Maybe Baby alive, uncompromised by ads, and largely free for people who can’t afford otherwise.
Alternative payment methods: You can also choose to pay $50/year, which amounts to $0.96 per newsletter (a slight discount), or become a Founding Member by paying $75/year ($6.25/mo) or whatever amount you’d like! Founding Members will get early access to merch and my genuine gratitude for being supporters from the beginning.
Here’s a graphic I made pretty unnecessarily!
A few other things
For every 100 sign-ups, I’ll be comping 10 sign-ups for people who can’t afford it: So if you can afford it, know that your support will go toward someone who can’t. And if you would like to be comped a subscription, shoot me a message by replying to this email!
I’ll be donating a portion of my revenue to a different organization every month, which I’ll be highlighting at the bottom of every newsletter starting in August.
I’ll be launching a new franchise called “Small Good Thing,” to highlight one small creative thing a week that you might not have seen either because of the way power is distributed in the modern world or because mainstream culture has a way of sifting out the weird. This was always baked into the ethos of my recs but I want to make it more official. If you’d like to recommend your (or someone else’s) thing, email smallgoodthingrec@gmail.com!
Okay, that’s it! I hope you’ll join as a paying subscriber, and if you don’t, I’m still so grateful for your readership!
Moving on to the actual newsletter right this second.
Infinity and Beyond (But About Email)
The other day I received an email from Google that I’ve used 96% of my 15-gig storage limit on my Gmail account, and did I want to purchase extra cloud space for as little as $1.99 a month? I was surprised; I’d never thought of my email as a finite resource. And yet when I heard that it was, I thought, I don’t need more than 15Gs of email! And then my next and more unhinged thought was, I’ll do anything to save every single email I’ve ever sent or received or will for the rest of my life. This is a hoarder’s mentality, I realize, because I rarely dig up anything in my inbox, and when I do I often get lost in a maze of old Gchats that are so unfunny I end up questioning my entire personality. But still, it feels important to know that it’s all there and safe in perpetuity, this incriminating yet invaluable time capsule.
I did not respond to Google’s email, which took up some of my precious remaining real estate.
The next day, like some kind of kismet, I was listening to Leslie Jamison’s interview on Longform, and in it she mentioned how she often searches through her old emails when she’s writing a personal piece about her past. Sometimes just wandering through a particular digital era will unearth something she’d forgotten, like say, the time she signed up for a CSA box to try to convince her boyfriend to love her. She recalled the relationship was going off the rails, she just didn’t remember her delusion in believing she could save it by becoming the type of person who cooks with farm-fresh produce. Sometimes little details like that can tell us a lot more about who we are, or maybe the human condition, than the sweeping narrative we’ve reconstructed over the years.
This is why we need email! Gigs and gigs of email!
Upon hearing Jamison’s anecdote I felt an immediate need to comb my inbox from 2011, the year most venerated in my memory excepting 2016 (when I moved to New York). The first thing I found in my excavation was a text file recovered from an old service I used to use called Oh Life. Oh Life was a robot that sent me an email every day from 2010 to 2014 with just one question: “How did your day go?” My reply—sometimes as short as “Zach is a very good kisser” other times a novella—would then be stored on some faraway almost certainly insecure server, and when it shut down in 2014, I was sent a 61,000-word document filled with every last one. For reference that is nearly the average length of a YA novel, which I guess this kind of is, only much much worse. In fact, after spending 30 minutes skimming it, I can’t stress how much worse.
There are certain things I’ve told myself about these years, which span my senior year of college to three years post-grad: like that in 2010, at age 21, I finally learned how to flirt; or that I questioned getting into a relationship with someone three months before graduation (I would stay with him for six years), or that in 2012 my life in San Francisco would become haunted by the life I wasn’t living in New York. What I found was so much richer. A record of my profound ignorance and unrelenting self-deception, of every lie I told myself with humiliating zeal. To read these entries was more than just remembering; it was about facing who I once was and might still be, if just another version.
The narrative arc of the entries is as follows: girl wants something, girl tells herself she’s not grateful enough, so girl gives thanks and feels better, then girl wants something again. I guess it’s more of a loop than an arc. The obsession with gratitude didn’t exactly surprise me—in 2017 I ultimately suspected it a bludgeon against emotions—but it did feel eerie. Since arriving at my parents’ place in San Diego two weeks ago, I’ve been cataloguing my mom’s design aesthetic, which I’ve dubbed “gratitude-core.” The affirmations are everywhere: Live, love, laugh!, advises a fake stone in her garden; Breathe, demands a wooden sign in the foyer; Live simply, expect little, give much, requests a key tray in the guest bed; Live well, laugh often, love much, implores a plaque in the office (described by Avi as “the live-laugh-love director’s cut”).
In the hallway: “The ABC’s of life”—peak gratcore!
After enough exposure it all starts to feel like a decorative taunt. You can’t help but wonder if you’re a monster for simply existing and being grouchy sometimes because someone threw out your leftovers. I’ve started to consider if this particular aesthetic, beloved mostly by American mothers born between 1946 and 1964, wasn’t pushed upon a generation of women to placate them into asking for nothing more than what they were given. Every time I see another one I imagine my 29-year-old mom, at home alone with three young kids in 1989, exhausted and unsure about her choice to forgo more personal ambitions, mumbling, “Live, laugh, love!!!!” over and over into her unwashed hair. This is clearly a projection, as it’s the same story I saw in my journal entries, with almost all of the details swapped out, but the general sentiment loud and clear: Be fucking grateful you little ingrate!
When I asked my mom if my vision of her was accurate, she laughed and said she didn’t see it that way at all. She believes her commitment to gratitude had and still has more to do with her witnessing the rise of mass consumerism. Also, in the way of defense, she says most of her gratitude-core were gifts. “Do other women my age have that kind of stuff?” she asked, her sparkling eyes unmaimed by years of reading shitposts on Twitter. My mom isn’t ignorant, to be fair—she’s been engaged in activist work since I was young, which I admit puts a bit of a damper on my theory that gratitude can placate. She’s just...grateful.
“But you wouldn’t tell people protesting in the streets to be grateful, would you?” I asked.
“I don’t think rage and gratitude necessarily oppose each other” she said. (Schooled.)
I reminded her of the way I used gratitude as a tool to avoid living more authentically in my twenties— by insisting that my discomfort was simply selfishness rather than an emotion worth exploring—and she said she thinks part of my getting past that phase was waking up to all the possibilities available to me, in itself a form of gratitude. On that one she had me stumped (I’d been gratitude-duped!). She could see my point though—she’d leaned a lot on gratitude in her thirties when she watched friends pursue careers while she’d stayed home with us. “Why hadn’t I cared more about school? About becoming something? I was so angry at myself. But spending your life in regret is a waste of time. Maybe gratitude is the antidote to regret?” She was working things out in real time. She mentioned how her friend who’d emigrated from Mexico and worked two full-time jobs was the most grateful person she knew, and how she found that inspiring and used it as a driving force to give more of herself. As she spoke I felt my idea of her life breaking into pieces and rearranging into something else.
But in the end of our conversation she was intent on clarifying that her decor choices weren’t so serious. “They bring me peace,” she said. “It’s ‘good vibes.’” And when she said that, I imagined an Urban Outfitters store decorated with a neon of that exact expression and realized she was right: Gratitude-core is just “good vibes” for boomers. Nothing more, nothing less. Sometimes the narrative is much simpler than you imagine, even if it takes you a while to get there. And maybe that’s as good an argument as any to hoard emails until you do.
1. This week’s Small Good Thing: My friend Crystal Anderson’s weekly IG Live talk show (Fridays, 7pm EST), Inside Addition, and the extremely-Crystal merch she’s about to launch for it:
2. One of my favorite essays I’ve read in months, “I Didn’t Mean to Adopt a Dozen Pet Snails,” by Rebecca Giggs, published in New York Times Magazine and recommended to me by my old editor and friend Verena Von Pfetten with this appeal to my ego: “I read this, and loved it, and it reminded me very much of you!”
3. Exactly one episode of the new Netflix show Unsolved Mysteries, after which I permanently quit because I was angry the mystery wasn’t solved. Avi sent me this tweet a few days later and I laughed for five minutes:
4. For some reason, several time-lapse videos of someone named Tammi Clarke doing her makeup, through one eye, before I’d properly woken up.
5. In a general sense, a sick pleasure at the failure of Quibi. And this article by Kathryn VanArendonk about it, but moreso the simple satisfaction of watching a cynical, soulless venture capital project fail to make two rich and powerful people richer and more powerful.
6. Another Michaela Coel-related rec because I can’t stop: This lecture she gave at the Edinburgh Festival in 2018 (which I looked up after reading this incredible profile of her by E. Alex Jung that I somehow missed last week). At 50 minutes, it’s an investment, but I’ve given far less worthy things my time.
7. The survivalist reality TV show Alone, which I hadn’t heard of one week ago and am now deeply dedicated to despite the troubling similarities to The Hunger Games. I’m ready to learn how to make a shelter out of bamboo.
8. This helpful graphic by @criticalresistance that details the shortcomings of traditional police reform versus abolitionist reform.
9. This meme, which made me laugh at its accuracy and then reflect on (wait for it) the storytelling power of memes.
10. The made-for-Hulu movie Palm Springs, which apparently broke streaming records, and which I actually found pretty charming despite it saying almost nothing remotely new and essentially being Groundhog Day for hot young people.
11. This highly controversial piece by the typically-beloved Lorrie Moore about Normal People (and really, millennials), which is outrageous, full of bad takes and great one-liners, and is pretty fun to discuss (and also annoying!).
12. This hideous $100 massage cushion affixed to a chair in my parents’ house, which I initially made fun of for being embarrassing and am now...obsessed with. It’s a full massage chair basically? For $100?
13. The potentially life-changing trick that you can simply type “docs.new” or “sheets.new” into your Chrome browser to open a new Google Doc or Google Sheet.
14. A light blue pair of Patagonia Baggies, which I’ve now worn for four days straight.
15. It’d be more honest to say this consumed me but: The overwhelming desire to squeeze an animal. (I miss Bug.)
Lastly, if you have a question for Dear Baby, drop it in the comments or reply to this email (feel free to make me uncomfortable)! The next edition will hit your inbox next week. And if you’re remaining a free subscriber, I’ll see you the first Sunday of August!
Thanks for reading I’d be lost without you,
Haley
and hehe i've seen that poorly worn slippers meme across the internets, but it was always with the context of growing up in an East Asian, Desi, Latinx, or Black family. I guess some things are both specific and universal!
that normal people essay!!! never have i been so overwhelmingly stricken by something i so whole-heartedly disagree with. it’s so bad that i’m immediately printing it out to keep it for posterity.