The stuff I can't talk about

It's been six months of secrets

There’s a lot I’d love to tell you.

It’s been six months of some pretty big shit. And I’m not being cute. I’m not trying to build a sense of anticipation about anything. Not like, ‘ooo I’ve got this massive project and I can’t wait to tell you about it’.

I mean real, hard, life shit that I can’t speak about in a public forum. It’s been a storm. Three significant, separate instances of shit-hitting-the-fan.

Here’s the thing: usually, I turn this into content.

I know many other creators do this as well. And in recent years, I’ve grown sceptical of it. Substack demands it, but so does Instagram and social media in general. For creators of any stripe, ‘life events’ become synonymous with ‘content’.

There can be a lot of healing and beauty on that path. It can connect you with a broader community. It can make you feel seen and validated.

But it can also be a dark hole. It can reinforce false narratives. It can put you in an echo chamber. Or it can make you vulnerable to sensitive subjects that may not have been best presented in a public forum.

I feel that way about How to Be Happy, the memoir I wrote a decade ago at the obnoxious age of 27.

I’m proud of the book, and proud that it resonated so deeply with a community of readers that needed to hear the message within it. But as I’ve written about before, that version of my own life was played for laughs and to sell to a publisher. My identity and life history became consumed by my creative work. The two were inseparable.

That was fine, as long as I was selling books and having success. But when crappy GoodReads reviews started coming in, or I began to amass a healthy pile of rejection letters for future work, my resilience was shattered. Because my life and content were the same thing, my content’s rejection equalled my rejection. It was fucked.

And yet….

And yet…

Boy, do I want to tell you about the last six months. Or I want to write it down, clearly and precisely, charting the darkness, the trips and falls, and the injustices. The rage. The sorrow. The ambiguity is resolved in a story arc that I control. And I want to put it out into the world so I can be acknowledged and rewarded with some clicks and a sense of dopamine.

But I can’t. So you know what I have to do instead?

Just sit with the feeling.

Just sit and feel the complicated feelings.

Fucking gross.

The rush to document life’s tragedies is a profoundly human instinct. And it’s not an evil impulse. It is a critical part of any trauma: meaning-making. We make something out of the shitstorm that’s hit us.

I guess what I’m more sceptical of is the impulse to publish. To broadcast into the world. Because I know that part of my egoic self very well now. It wants to be soothed, justified, and seen.

And so I sit and breathe. And I look to be seen by those that matter. I book lunch with a few choice mates and mentors. I booked a session with a therapist.

And what is said in those meetings, or in my mind as I breathe, is just for me, just for us and for no one else. It is silent, sacred and untouched.

The rest is left unwritten.