Things I don't know for sure, but I do know right now
A listicle, I fear
One of the challenges about committing to this newsletter has been grappling with my understanding of the form it is supposed to take. The majority of newsletters I'm subscribed to are usually a tightly worded vehicle for a long-form "take", a short but meaningful exploration into a particular idea, a particular thought. And it's a form I really appreciate, and at times, when the planets align, can inhabit successfully.
But if I'm honest, writing these thought-through opinion-forward articles has always felt like I am trying on a piece of ill-fitting clothing. Sometimes I can style it out, but at the end of the day it hangs awkwardly on my body. It's wearing a suit that doesn't quite suit.
I've always been a little intimidated by the level of mental fortitude and consistent focus writing such a piece takes. This has always been a struggle of mine, to follow a thought out to its end without meandering into a hundred little detours, inspecting various crevices and nooks on the way. I've since come to recognise and pathologise this tendency (hello ADHD diagnosis) and to try and approach it with tenderness rather than resistance. Writing this week's newsletter is a part of that.
This week I am writing in the way that my brain interfaces with the world - in short, condensed stabs. Thoughts that have come and gone from my brain over the last few weeks and haven't been put down anywhere. I'm taking inspiration partly from Things I Know For Sure (worth a read), Patricia Lockwood's writing in No One Is Talking About This, and hell, Twitter hot take culture. Twitter is where I began to really write anyway, and I'm starting to realise that it's in part because the form suits how I think.
So anyway, here are ten things I don't know for sure, but I do know right now.
Shame doesn't go away in the way you wish it would. It tends to dissipate at the same rate that it accrued, and if that's over a lifetime then your work is cut out for you. I still feel it pool in the bends and angles of my body. I speak to it. I hold it gently. And whenever I feel able, thank it for how it tried to protect me from an unforgiving world.
One of the best ways I've become sensitised to the suffering of someone less privileged than me has been to be in relationship with that person and learn of their particular plight through witnessing the small, repeated ways it manifests in their life. On a one-to-one level this almost always works. But I don't think its scalable without reproducing harmful dynamics.
Gay men have an adjacency to liberated ideals of sexuality that are brilliant and important and revolutionary. We have the freedom to blur the lines in our relationships with each other and experiment with non-normative ways of building intimacy that might not be easily categorised. But also - good old fashioned friends that you don't also sleep with have an important and unique place in our support circle, and we suffer without them.
Once every six months I become utterly convinced that the key to my sustained happiness within capitalism is to convince all my friends to pool together our money and buy a big house within a short commuting distance from a major city and collectively eschew all of the bullshit milestones expected of millennials in their thirties. Then I think of the logistics of communal living and the state of my savings account and let go of the idea until it inevitably resurfaces.
When it comes to going to the gym or exercising frequently, I think few of us can separate the idea of improved health from improved aesthetics because we've grown up in a culture that has intentionally conflated the two in order to make us feel bad about ourselves (and then sell us solutions to resolve that feeling). I enjoy going to the gym because it makes me feel better both in my body (in the felt sense) and about my body (in the intellectual sense) and trying to cleave those two from each other feels futile.
There is no correct way to be witnessing the large-scale depravity and violence of the world around us. There is a responsibility on us to care for the suffering of our fellow human beings, and yet the world is also designed to distract us away from it, and feel dwarfed by the enormity of it, again and again. I am constantly existing in the tension that I am both not doing enough and am also probably doing as much as I can within my capabilities. And all of this is wrapped in the uncomfortable knowledge that to be thinking any of these thoughts at all is a result of having distance from the brutal reality of said suffering, which is the ultimate privilege.
The class dynamics that dictate who gets to be successful at what are the most pernicious of all in part because they're so difficult to make visible. I am yet to operate in an industry where the majority of people at the apex of success haven't been airlifted there by a network of Oxbridge school friends, a wealthy and connected family or partner, or growing up within a particular milieu. This was particularly striking to me as an immigrant in the UK, where even the world of leftist politics, journalism and organising is populated with people who all went to the same schools and quietly uplift each other, all while making a living on rallying against the system that they grew up in.
The quality of my life is dictated by the quality of my friendships (a slight paraphrase of Esther Perel here). The more I allow my friends into the complicated, messier parts of myself, the more I feel alive, and the more I feel at home in myself. To choose someone to be in your life over and over, through the various versions of yourself you become, without anything codified to bind you to one another, is a particular and under-celebrated form of love.
Dating apps have completely fucked up my ability to understand eroticism and romance. A man unexpectedly smiled at me on the metro last week and it dawned on me that more happened within me bio-chemically in that fleeting moment than I've ever experienced in a conversation negotiated by screens and an algorithm. And yet, I for one am baffled by in-person flirtation, having never had to stumble my way through it without the option of logging into what is essentially a game that feels much safer, even if that safety begets a kind of inhuman sterility.
I am convinced that as they get better, none of us will be able to have a healthy relationship with video games. I already cannot have video games in my life without them taking over every waking moment not populated by some other totally unavoidable adult responsibility. Games are so insanely immersive now that you can inhabit and create life in a completely different world. I don't know how anyone wields that power without falling into it.
Thanks for reading! This is the first of these I've shared out beyond my inner circle, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a bit nervous. I'd be super happy to hear your thoughts / comments / feelings, even if it's just a hello - you can either comment on this post within the app, or just reply to this email. I appreciate you supporting this writing experiment.
I liked reading these things. These ten things. I saw a note you posted about writing on Substack for the sake of writing and not being interested in growing your subscriber list. That kind of thing. I concur. I'm still going to subscribe to your newsletter.
Cannot stress enough how much I love reading your thoughts. Though we’re physically (and definitely on my part communicatively) apart, reading these makes me feel closer to you. Miss you xx