The Point

Hello, I'm starting a newsletter, will you come?

I neither planned nor expected to live part of my middle age through a massive culture-shifting pandemic – I guess no one expects that. As a result, I've made discoveries. To start with, the pandemic meant I was spending far more time at home.

(Really, Lesley? You’re writing about staying home now, two years after the topic was thoroughly exhausted? Please bear with me, reader, it’s been a long time since I wrote about myself.)

I hadn't been much of a homebody, in the years between getting divorced and COVID. I was very much a homebody when I was married; whether I actually chose this is a matter for internal debate. I was not forcibly restrained from doing my own stuff outside the house – outside the marriage – but one of the mythologies of Lesley in Wife Mode was that Wife Lesley was socially awkward, socially anxious, and she hated gatherings and people. This was very much a myth, but it took me a long time to recognize it, and to recognize the other myths about myself that I'd comfortably bought into. 

Fact was, I'd thought about divorce as an opportunity for at least a year before I said the word out loud (and even when I said the word out loud the first time, it was to myself, to the mirror of a bathroom in an Airbnb on the opposite coast). It seemed clear for awhile that divorce was the best outcome for me. The problem wasn't in accepting that truth. The problem was in realizing that I was actually capable of initiating and surviving the process itself. And so, as it happened, the thing that gave me the motivation and the confidence to begin was an experience I had in which that myth – the myth of myself as antisocial people-loathing homebody – was shattered so completely that even I, invested as I was in this concept of myself, had to recognize the falsehood of it. (This is another story, for another time.)

But I digress. (I expect I will do this a lot, without an editor, or a boss, or anyone keeping me on point.) The point – is that I ceased to be a homebody when I realized I was only playing a homebody role. There's nothing wrong with being a person who likes to stay home, to be clear. But I had spent years pretending to be a person who likes to stay home, because that's why I thought I was expected to be. So understandably, when I was able to drop the act, drop it I did. In my post-divorce era, I went back to clubs and concerts and traveling like a starving animal. At one point I even got a part time retail job working in a sex shop, in which I was compelled to interact with strangers on intimate and fraught subjects for several hours at a stretch. (There may be stories about my time amongst the dildos here, or I may save those for the screenplay.) The point – is that I left the house, all the time.

This went on very successfully for a few years. And then COVID. I don't want to get into all the ways the pandemic has impacted my anxiety – oh yes, I definitely have anxiety, it's just not particularly social – but it did have an impact and I took social distancing and lockdown very seriously. Not like I had a choice, living beside a municipality in Rhode Island that at one point early on had the highest recorded infection rates in the entire world. I stayed home. I revisited old hobbies I once explored when I was married and home all the time: reading, sewing, breadmaking, crocheting, gardening. I opened up new hobbies I hadn't tried before: pickling, fermentation, kombucha making, jam, birdwatching. I didn’t mean to be a cottagecore poster crone, but apparently that’s what happened. I stayed home and sunk comfortably, deeper and deeper, into a bog of mostly harmless obsessions.

While I've been in excellent and extremely necessary therapy for several years now, I am not aware of any particular diagnosis that may have been applied to me. I don't know if I have ADHD or if I'm just surviving through a very complex and difficult stage of history. I am not sure it matters, for me, or to me, either way. I do know that I hyperfixate on things. I've done this my whole life, and for the most part I think of it as a strange quirk, but not a worrisome one. I hyperfixate on foods, on hobbies, on TV shows, on narrow bits of history and culture, on specific types of clothing and footwear. I get obsessed. And what do we do with obsessions? We talk about them.

All of this is coming, again, to THE POINT: many years ago now, I had the luxury of a job in which I could write and publish virtually anything I wanted to, for an audience of… you know, I don’t even remember how many people it was now, and I’m glad that I don’t. At any rate, this scenario worked out well for me, as it meant anytime I was particularly obsessed with a thing – like a skincare product, or the comically depressing history of Mother’s Day, or a TV show that was canceled fifteen years ago, or my really passionate specific feelings about foods – I could just go and write about it, and lots and lots of people would read it, and then I would get feedback about it. The feedback was usually at least 30% trolling but still! I was paid money to think and write words! That was glorious, and the writing I did then was far more focused than this scattershot introductory essay you’re reading right now. 

So. I’ve thought about starting an email newsletter for awhile. This one is free, and unless a lot of people ask me to add a paid tier so they can support my ridiculous efforts, it’ll probably continue to be free. Its value to me is in creating space where I can write about why hard boiled eggs are a perfect food, or why blue jays and grackles and starlings get a bad rap as “bullies,” or why Deadwood is still my platonic ideal of a prestige drama, or why lacto fermentation is important wizardry you too can participate in, in your own kitchen, especially if you are thinking a lot about being middle aged and dying eventually. Do none of these topics interest you? That’s okay, I hope you’ll give this a chance anyway, as one of my professional skills is making stuff you don’t care about seem vaguely interesting anyway. There will be a lot of personal storytelling too. Why am I hard selling this? I have no idea. You’ll read it or you won’t. 

(I’ve just discovered that Substack has an option for you to import your massive email list from Patreon or TinyLetter or whatever other place you’ve successfully built an audience, lol lol lol this is just going into the void, isn’t it?)

You know what? That’s fine. Consider these essays a public document of the conversations I have internally with myself. It’ll be like when personal essays ruled the internet, except all of the essays are by me, and a lot of them are very banal, and also some are brutal ruminations on divorce and aging and personal transformation. I am hoping to publish weekly, but some weeks I may publish more, and some weeks my actual job – another wild life twist in which people give me money to help wrestle absurdities through the metaphorical creativity-vagina into life – will probably prevent me from writing at all. But there will be writing. Because I miss writing, this kind of writing, the stuff that is just me talking to you, and you listening because somehow my rambling makes you feel less alone, which is what we all want, right? To feel less alone. 

Until the next one.

Lesley