Great Expectations

We begin today with a comment from a disgruntled paid subscriber:

Don’t know if Miranda reads this chat1 and unsure how to communicate this with her- hope this works. My subscription just reupped and honestly I am disappointed (lately) in the new posts and content. I am also a writer and content producer so I get that it is hard to keep up the pace BUT if you have paying subscribers you have created an expectation of consistency and excellence - I’m not trying to start a massive thread here. Just hoping Miranda sees this and can take it to heart.

I posted a reply in the chat, but I realize many of you probably feel this way so I’ll put it here too:

I know, I know. Unsubscribe, of course, I get it. It’s not even that I’m too busy to be bothered (I wish!) – in fact usually I’m not posting because the satisfaction and relief that comes from putting something/anything out there and getting a response is too beguiling. So much more enticing than struggling with emptiness, with not knowing what to do, with my body, with the anxiety of no audience and no productivity. But I have to get lost like this, go into the awful unknown – not stay in constant + reassuring conversation with the public – in order to break new ground. It’s uncomfortable (for me) and I’m sure it’s boring as a subscriber. This may ultimately be why I end this Substack.2 But my hope is that I will still somehow provide 6 dollars worth of honesty a month, however erratic, and thus manage keep this thread going. If I can get away from the sense of pressure/regularity, I believe there is a whole world of ways to engage with this technology and this wonderful group (even if it becomes a much smaller core group of paid subscribers) and I think these experiments will organically occur if I don’t try to match anyone else’s pace or approach. The Estate Sale But I’m Alive Sale is one such experiment; it’s only for you.

That was the end of my response but I’ll add: on Friday I painted this, below, which will become a yellow sticker on everything I sell (assuming the I do the sale! I’m forever trying to avoid feeling trapped, even by my own decisions — actually this is probably the real answer to my dissappointed subscriber: I will not “keep up the pace”! I am forever rebelling against commitments! Only to commit to something much harder.)

Cats, horses

One of the first things I ever wrote, as a teenager, was about my parents having eachother but the cat and I being single – we had no one to call our own (the cat and I weren’t close.) Being single now brought this to mind.3 The last time I was single I was still married, if that makes any sense (I was still living with my then-husband) and the time before that I was twenty-nine and completely under the hoof of all the things I wanted and would somehow have to make happen within the next ten years. So this is pretty interesting to me, to be on the other side of all that and with very few preconceptions about what things should look like going forward – love-wise.

And also work-wise, no preconceptions. I used to see a great movie or performance or piece of art and be seized with determination to make my own great movie, performance, art. I still feel stirred up by other people’s work, but now I just kind of endure the pain of inspiration, feel it. Same with grief and all the other feelings – I don’t try to convert them into ideas. (I’m actually lying here. I do still take notes on everything, but to what end? I’m now less sure that’s the right and good thing to do.)

There is a Deborah Levy quote: “Ideas come to us as the successors to griefs, and griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some part of their power to injure the heart.” I guess what I’m saying is that the unchanged grief itself has more value to me right now; I’m less eager to protect my heart from it. And I’m a little wary of my ideas, like a person who has been dragged for miles by a horse (I’m picturing one foot caught in a stirrup) (incredible how one comes up with these metaphors without having any personal contact with horses.) Anyway, right now the person prefers to walk even if it takes longer, even if she never gets there. She will eventually get back in the saddle but it will be on a very different animal. I’m picturing one of those giant worms from Dune.

Transcendental Meditation (first time noticing the word dental in there. Seems like dentists would have gotten more out of that.)

TM was a big part of this year for me. It helped me alone but it also helped me when I was with friends and ran out of energy but didn’t want to stop hanging out. I’d just take 20 min and go do it. Often my friends would meditate too, TM or some other way. And then we’d just jump right back into the hang. (I even meditated at Balthazar the other week, with my sun glasses on, while my two friends chatted next to me. Corner booth. I thought: this isn’t going to work, there’s no way I can do this with the din of the restuarant chatter. But I was wrong — I felt like a sweet little child at a party of adults and quickly passed out in that trippy TM way where you’re still awake, still mantra-ing. )

I mention all this because the David Lynch Foundation is offering TM training scholarships for survivors of gender-based violence. They offered these earlier in the year and they are ready to do it again. Here’s the link to apply. (They also have a scholarship for people displaced by the LA fires and first responders.)

I posted about this last winter and it was an unexpected joy to hear (from the David Lynch Foundation) that so many of you not only clicked the link but really did the training. I wonder how it’s been for you? I have ebbed and flowed but somehow I haven’t lost it. I think my brain and body mostly accepts that this is just something I do now — not like eating or sleeping but kind of like wearing sunblock? Anyway, it’s a good way to end or start a year.

Ok, I hope we all have a good enough week. Still reading An Afterlife (pictured below) and getting a lot out of it. I took this picture after getting home from a party at 2am on Saturday (it was a party that involved a live reading of A Christmas Carol; that can take awhile.) Even though I’m no longer newly divorced I still marvel at this life sometimes. I had just met a woman at the party who was in the very start of a difficult divorce and I imagined showing her this picture and saying: A snack and book in the bath at 2am?! All this will be yours!) (Only now am I seeing the little rotten spot in the apple.)