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TL;DR is a monthly digest summarizing the vital bits from the previous month's "How to Live" newsletter so you don't miss a thing.
JULY 2024
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July 10th, 2024 Was a Piece About 10 Norms You Don’t Have to Meet.
I’m preoccupied with challenging the norms and arbitrary measures society deems worthy.
Our culture reveres the wrong things, prioritizing capital over community, hierarchy over equality, and individualism over the collective good. We overpay the wrong people, and deny those who most need our support.
I take deep, personal offense that those who "fail" to live according to a random set of conditions get penalized by society, rewarding only those who comply with outdated systems and notions of achievement.
This narrow framework insists there is only one right way to be a person and penalizes those who don’t fit.
Many people are miserable because they lack the external markers of success.
They are trapped inside the tyranny of the "should." They should be happy but aren’t; they should be married but are single; they should be wealthy but are struggling. These egregious "shoulds" convince people they’re doing life wrong and that they’re failures.
It’s time to take stock of the values our culture considers worthy and weigh them against the values we consider worthy, then see which list rewards and which list punishes.
Today's post is about six universal norms we often believe we should adhere to, despite a misalignment with our authentic selves and despite not serving our well-being, but we’ve been mislead.
July 17th, 2024 Piece Was a Report From the Front Lines After One Year Of Being Therapy Free.
I spent 23 years in therapy with an absolute genius.
My therapist took my disorganized thoughts, synthesized them, and reflected back. She made me feel known and like I counted. She taught me how to self-reflect, how to take myself seriously and stand up for myself.
She helped me understand that the way I process things is first as an experience in my body (which we all do, but my body-mind is very sensitive and excessively loud) and that things feel much easier once I turn the embodied experience into language, which she taught me how to do (and is part of what I try and do in this newsletter).
This past year, I have come undone, really undone, twice.
I am currently in the second undoing.
As I’ve been trained to do, I study the inner workings of my distress and despair, taking stock of the patterns and textures, the contours of my internal anguish.
As I’ve studied myself this past year, I’ve noticed how I’ve changed, and how I haven’t.
Talk therapy helped me deal with the symptoms of my panic and anxiety and my clinical depression. It helped me grow up, draw boundaries, know when to end a relationship, stop putting other people before myself, say no, communicate, and rely on myself.
It’s an effective treatment for the thinking mind. It’s a wonderful tool for processing thoughts and stuck beliefs.
But here’s the thing—having a lifelong panic disorder means suffering somatically (in the body), and if the body itself doesn’t get therapy, also, only one part of your condition is being treated.
The thing that has remained the same, all this time, are the negative beliefs about myself that my panicked body absorbed as truth.
This Piece From July 24th, 2024 Is Filled With Things I’m Loving.
You asked me to do more of these, and I listened! Here are the latest things I’m loving.
On July 28th I Sent Out a Bonus Post For Paid Members With Author Leslie Jamison’s Syllabus For Her Archive Fever Seminar.
I’m always eager to see how expert craftspeople do what they do, and if they teach it to others, there’s nothing quite like getting your hands on their syllabus.
Especially when it’s Leslie Jamison’s.
Leslie Jamison teaches a thesis workshop and seminar in Columbia University’s MFA program called “Archive Fever.” In it she guides writers to think about different ways to respond to archival material, and how to incorporate it into their work.
Jamison is a highly prolific writer interested in hybridization. Her work relies on archival research which she seamlessly integrates into her work. Her books include: Splinters, The Recovering, The Empathy Exams, Make it Scream, Make it Burn, The Gin Closet and Peggy (which is a book by the late Rebecca Godfrey, which Jamison finished after Rebecca’s death.)
We are constantly archiving our lives, even if we don’t realize it. Our digital photo albums take up all our storage, our notes apps are collapsing under their own weight, and we’re in the process of reading sixteen different things at all times.
Today, as a bonus, I offer Leslie Jamison’s Syllabus for her workshop.
July 31st, 2024 Was About James Baldwin’s Little Known Book Nothing Personal, and His Views On Facing Reality.
The literary icon, civil rights activist and glorious public orator, James Baldwin would be 100 years old this Friday, August 2nd, 2024.
I have been a “Baldy” (Trademark Pending!) since 1985, when I was assigned Go Tell it On the Mountain, Notes to a Native Son, and The Fire Next Time in the 10th grade.
Baldwin believed, as I do, that we cannot change what we don’t face.
For the uninitiated, Baldwin was an American-born intellectual, whose novels, poems, essays, dialogues, and debates explore the societal conditioning of hierarchical structures based on race, sexuality, and class.
As a black, gay intellectual in 1940s America, Baldwin was an outcast his entire life.
He consistently argued that the issue of race was at the core of America's identity and its most pressing moral challenge. He believed that until the country honestly faced its history of racism and its ongoing impact, it could not truly progress or fulfill its democratic ideals.
We have, as it seems to me, a very curious sense of reality—or, rather, perhaps, I should say, a striking addiction to irreality.
I have no God, no spiritual or mystical calling, but my core beliefs are centered around a concept that comes from both psychology and Buddhism: Suffering comes when we push back against reality, pretending what’s true isn’t.
When we avoid facing what needs to be confronted to control our emotions, we soon realize that the invisible forces we fear are actually controlling us.
This is one theme Baldwin wrote about.
EXTRAS…
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Amanda
VITAL INFO:
Nope, I am not a licensed therapist or medical professional. I am simply a person who struggled with undiagnosed mental health issues for over two decades and spent 23 years in therapy learning how to live. Now, I'm sharing the greatest hits of what I learned to spare others from needless suffering.
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