Issue 5 - Vulnerable
I made my first small mistake with this newsletter last week. The easiest way to create a new issue using the list-manager I’m on, ButtonDown, is to “reuse” the previous edition, which just copies and pastes the whole thing into a new entry.
But, of course, when you do that, it’s real easy to forget to update small things like the issue number. So everyone got a second issue 3 last week; hopefully it wasn’t too confusing.
…and the above admission is actually a pretty good lead-in for the topic I’ve been thinking about most over the past week – vulnerability.
It started with the journal I’ve been semi-successfully keeping since the new year, which is housed in the exquisite form of a Hobonichi Techo planner book, which I learned about from Robin Sloan, who is spot-on when he describes these books as…
pleasantly and reassuringly Japanese, as much about noticing small moments as getting things done.
I struggled for the first few weeks of the year to decide what was “worth” recording in an analog, paper-and-pen journal before getting over myself and deciding that whatever made sense to enter on a given day was just fine. And this means that the journal so far is a mix of personal revelation, straight diary-entries, reminders, and records of things like whether or not I got proper exercise and/or kept to my intermittent fasting hours that day.
And I really like the “jumble of ephemera” feeling which is developing. But my Techo also makes me feel really vulnerable, and when I realized that it was doing so, I felt an intense need to investigate just why.
For starters, as a very personal thing, I have a fairly intense learned fear of being vulnerable, which stems from various long-running and deeply unpleasant experiences in my childhood. I learned, deep down in the squishy lizard-bits which are beyond reason or logic, that sharing my true self with people could get me deeply, dangerously hurt; that it was better to stay small and quiet; to mirror others back at themselves.
I’ve made a lot of progress unlearning (or at least redirecting) those instincts in the past couple of decades, but some of that stuff is still embedded deep down, and probably always will be.
So, that’s an overarching narrative. And then, layered on top of that, is the fact that I (as do most of us, I think) have multiple “selves” who appear in different contexts. Not that they’re completely incongruent – if you know me as a friend, you’d perfectly easily recognize who I am in a professional context. But there are parts of that self which might surprise you if you’ve never worked with me.
And, needless to say, there are significant parts of my life, my beliefs, and my self which I tuck away out of sight whenever I enter the office (much more so now I work in South Florida).
So, things like the Techo or, in fact, this newsletter, are very vulnerable places, precisely because they’re not compartmentalized. If I leave the Techo out on a desk at work, anyone could rifle through its pages and see an entirely different Simon. And the archives for this newsletter are all online. As far as I know, no-one from my work life has yet subscribed. But they can, and I’m deliberate in embracing that fact.
Does this mean that I have a “Vague Mountain face”, alongside my “raver face”, “DJ face”, “writer face”, “stepdad face”, and “professional face”? Inevitably, yes. But I hope by thinking carefully about how vulnerability intersects my different selves, I can thread the line between being painfully transparent, and being authentic to myself.
Project Updates
In which I attempt to keep myself honest by talking about things I’m thinking of making, or have half-made. Or perhaps, have put successfully out into the world.
A lot of thinking happened this week; not a lot of doing. A colleague I respected very much passed away a week ago today, killed by a drunk driver who slammed into his car. He was 35. The suddenness of it knocked me flat for much of the week.
But it also reaffirmed why my guide-word for 2020 is “create”. We really don’t know how long we have in this world; why spend too much of it doing things we aren’t passionately obsessed with?
I probably have 20 ideas kicking around in various states of incompleteness right now; my goal in the next month or so is to prioritize them, and commit to working on one at a time, until they reach some state of “complete” (whether that’s satisfyingly-abandoned, or out-in-the-world). If the focus isn’t clear by March 8th’s newsletter, please send me mocking emails in response… :)
A Thing of Beauty
Okay, fine, so, here’s more on the Techo planner I’ve been using. It’s beautifully compact - A6 size, with paper which is thin enough to lend it a lightness without turning into a complete mess when you use it. And it’s sprinkled with lovely quotes and tips, including a section in the back about various Japanese customs.
You can also get little templates for it, to draw symbols, lines and so on.
I promise, I am not being compensated by Hobo Nikkan Itoi Shinbun for this issue. But if, after all this raving, you want a Techo of your own, JetPens still have them (and no, they’re not paying me either. Pure enthusiasm only, I promise).
Ephemera
Snurk. It took until Issue 5 before I couldn’t remember whether I’d already linked something in this section or not. I will probably have to keep a list in a spreadsheet soon…
First up this week, in case you didn’t understand what size “A6” is, because America’s weird insistence on measuring things like a 1600s-era Caribbean pirate has corrupted your brain… Papersizes.io is beautiful, and simple, and simply beautiful.
If you are an onlinophile, you’ve probably already heard that there are new emoji coming. The new foods still appear to be arbitrarily-chosen, and “pinched fingers” should’ve been called “Italian hand gesture”, but what strikes me most about these continual expansions of the visual language which has crept into every corner of the culture is how it simultaneously reflects the sheer bonkers vitality of human culture, and still somehow can only reflect the merest edges of it. (unicode.org)
So, The Good Place said farewell this week, cemeting itself as a carefully-plotted show which chooses to bow out when its story was told, rather than drag on for 15 seasons. I hope everyone reading this has already seen it, but if not… just add it to your watching list. It will likely remain the funniest exploration of moral philosophy and the meaning of life for… possibly ever.
Our Friendlandia family is drifting back into town for Love Burn this week. 2 things here: we (well, Amy’s sister Kari) finally coined the perfect name for our house – Resortlandia. Also, it’s possible that I’ll be too tired to put together an issue of this show next Sunday so you might have to wait a day or two.
Speaking of friendship, lots of interesting tidbits in this Atlantic piece about the influence of your middle-school friends on the rest of your life. Particularly topical for us as Landon is rushing towards the middle-grades at a startling rate. But, also, interesting for anyone who’s been a middle-schooler (presumably every reader of this letter) (The Atlantic)
Endnote
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