Addiction, Change, and "Can I Also Text Her?"
Plus two comics about love and solitude
Hello, and happy new year! I’m Edith, formerly of The Cut and The Hairpin, and this is a newsletter with links, personal writing, illustration, and comics. It’s a work in progress, and I’d love to know what you think. (Please feel free to reply to this email!) First up are all the links.
David is going to take my darkness away from me, I decide one night at the end of a party.
The Believer. Aude White in “The Toothbrush Dilemma.”
“I’m going to give up on this column,” I just said to Matt, who is reclined on the couch reading a novel. “I’ve got nothing. Anyway, I’ve done 19 of these. Next week I will do another and it will be 20.”
“So you only have another 32 to go until you meet your promise of doing a full year’s worth,” he said.
“Right,” I said. “But 20 is a good round number, so let’s just make next week’s the last of the year and skip this week. It’s really rubbish.”
“I have four more pages in this chapter,” he said. “Why don’t you write for four more pages worth, and then decide.”
As he said this I was 14 pages deep into an eBay search for periwinkle suede pumps.
Got Distracted. This is from my friend Logan’s newsletter, which is wonderful.
Give it up for the 🌶
LukeVincentini/Instagram. This pepper is not a pepper! All of this man’s creations are pure delight!
Let’s move a little more fully out of the thinking brain, into the quiet body.
iTunes/Embodied Meditation. I like Paige Gilchrist’s “Embodied Meditation” audio series (podcast?), which is a guided 15-minute yoga-and-meditation combo. It comes out once a week, it’s very serene, and Paige has a beautiful voice. My initial plan was to only listen to the yoga, and not do it, and wait it out until the meditation, but then it sounded so pleasant and easy (seated stretching, basically) that I rewound it and did the whole thing, and I was glad.
2019 was a year of constant stops and starts. With Jupiter in Sagittarius everything got bigger, bolder and faster. We raced ahead at supersonic speeds. Meanwhile Saturn in Capricorn slammed on the brakes, never letting us hit our cruising altitude. Good work was left unfinished. We got too excited and crashed into walls. At times it felt like nothing would stick!
Instagram/AstroTwins. True.
I decided to write down every question that … my two kids asked me during a single day.
Can I look at your cards?
Can I watch a kid show about a blue fox called Tumble Leaf?
Can we play a different card game?
Can we go back to the corner store and buy more candy?
Which card should I play?
Can we play one more game?
Can we play Old Maid?
What time is lunch?
Will you tell us who you are texting?
Can I text your friend Sarah?
Can I also text her?
Judith Grisel (guest): It was like living in a small closet, with me and my misery.
JG: In a lot of ways, [an addictive substance is] better than a person.
Adam Conover (host): I quit Adderall first ... and then I quit smoking, and then it took me an extra 10 years to finally quit drinking.
JG: One of the things I've learned in 30 years of studying psychopharmacology is that there is no free lunch. That whatever we do, there’s something to be paid back.
Earwolf/Factually. This episode of Adam Conover’s podcast Factually electrified me. Listening to it, I envisioned my own main addiction (so far, to alcohol) as looking like a solid steel ring that I bound myself into and then eventually broke out of.
It was also interesting to think about how, back then, I thought of my drinking as something more elaborate than an addiction — something more like a turbulent and sophisticated love affair. Something tortured, private, and elevated. It’s funny to think that it wasn’t really any of those things. Anyway, this was a great episode. And I will probably wonder for the rest of my life about what exactly happened the day I woke up and thought, “No, I’m done. I’m ready for something else.” I’m curious if that will ever happen to me again. I’ve written about sobriety a lot, but none of it has really touched that central mystery — the thing that just shifted.
The other day, I was sitting alone in a Mexican restaurant and wondering whether it is possible to quit people, and good old Allen Carr came to mind. It’s maybe because I recently ended a relationship … but my body has been experiencing very similar sensations as it did when I gave up cigarettes two years ago; it’s a physical ache that comes and goes, that’s almost painful, a sort of gaping emptiness, a void that needs to be filled. It often seems like the only way to cure myself of this craving is to give in — to return to him, to sleep with someone new. Not until you tear yourself from everyone you love does it appear that you are actually physically addicted to people. The longing for a person is almost identical to the longing for a smoke. It’s weird.
Sheila Heti. While talking about the Factually episode with a friend, I mentioned the Allen Carr book that helped me stop drinking. The friend said, “Oh, have you read the Sheila Heti thing that’s also kind of about Allen Carr?” I hadn’t, and so I did, and it was great. (Even though, as I now see, it was technically linked on the Hairpin years ago!)
1,000 people sent me their addiction treatment stories. Here’s what I learned.
Vox. Still on the topic of addiction, Vox’s Rehab Racket series has been really excellent.
Although I sometimes regret my alienation from the world, I cherish it too. Consciousness, it seems to me, requires separation, or duality, and so does love, the supreme emotion. As the Hindu sage Ramakrishna allegedly said, “I want to taste sugar. I don’t want to be sugar.”
Scientific American. This is maybe hard to excerpt and not even that fun to read, but I liked this part of John Horgan’s exploration into mysticism and the mind-body connection, although I wish he’d spent another line or 20 explaining his thoughts on love.
This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.
Neil Kakkar. The Bloomberg coder Neil Kakkar turned the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind into a long blog post, and I enjoyed it!
An earlier version of this article misattributed a quotation. The lines, “We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race,” were said by a character in the movie “Dead Poets Society,” not by Walt Whitman.
NYT. The year in corrections.
Why did I choose Middlemarch? Well, for one, I’ve been meaning to read it for a while.
Doorstopper. There’s a new newsletter book club, and the pick for January (and hopefully beyond) is one I coincidentally am also reading. Or maybe Middlemarch is just in the ether? Or should I say, in … the … well, I thought something funny or British would come to me, but it didn’t.
Dec. 31
Jan. 1
