Snow and Letters
The Friday after Halloween
It’s snowing as I write this. I woke up at six to take my medications (thyroid pills have to be taken on an empty stomach and you can’t eat for a few hours after, so waking up to take them and going back to sleep is the most logical method) and as I passed the back door I noticed the thin sheen of white on the trampoline, at first thinking it was just the reflection of the moonlight. But no, on closer inspection it was definitely snow. I went back to bed, and when I got up properly at nine it was still snowing. Wet snow, fast falling and unable to accumulate on the wet roads, but undeniably snow all the same. It’s very early for snow here, and I’m crossing my fingers that this won’t be the only snow we get until early spring, as if often the case.
But, just like that, fall is over. I can feel the cold and dark closing in and I have this sense of urgency. A need to prepare. Winters are hard for me, though I can’t say I dislike them. Even though I struggle with the darkness that comes just before dinner and an insistent anxiety that comes with it, I can’t help but romanticize the snug scenes of home as the temperatures fall outside. In truth, my personality is suited to the dark months. I like being bundled up in my home, I like coziness and quiet. So my natural inclination is at odds with my mental disorders during this half of the year. I want to enjoy it. I feel like I SHOULD enjoy it. And yet my pulse quickens and a looming dread cloaks the months in a shroud of unhappiness.
I’ll be alright, of course. It’s the same every year.
I’ve started writing letters again. Not just here, I mean literal letters that you send through the mail. Years ago I went on a pen pal kick and started writing to everyone in my address book (admittedly not many people. Who even has an address book anymore?) but I fell out of the habit as quickly as I fell into it. This week I was feeling that particular kind of loneliness that only letters can solve so I wrote a couple and sent them out. I never know if I will get a response. Sometimes just a text saying “hey I got your letter” is all I get. That’s fine, of course. By sending a letter I don’t want to also be sending an unwanted to-do list item.
Writing letters seems to me to be the best way of fostering closeness to another person. Even better than face to face communication, in some cases. Simply because letters encourage rambling. Unlike text conversations where the annoyance of typing on a phone encourages quick and to the point communication, and unlike spoken conversations in which the speakers tend to overlap each other and meander in various directions, a letter has the unique property of being a solitary pursuit as well as a communal one. In a letter, we are given the free reign of privacy to write as long as we need to, beating around the bush, talking in circles, and avoiding the truth until we dig down to it without being interrupted or distracted. Eventually, even if only at the end of a long letter, we get down to what we really wanted, what we really needed, to say.
If you decide to start writing letters after a lifetime of digital communication, it will be difficult at first. You will find that you don’t have enough to say, and you will fluff out your letters with as many minute updates about your life as you can come up with. It will feel like a long, disjointed string of tweets. But don’t worry. You’ll warm up to it with time and eventually your letters will evolve from status updates to journal entries, something private and true and capable of showing yourself to your loved ones in a more real, more honest way.
It’s a little scary, but I think it’s worth it.
I was thinking this week, as I did my normal routine of procrastination by wandering down various online rabbit holes, that I might add a section at the end of my weekly letters for links. Sometimes I come across articles or even videos or things like that that influence the way I’m thinking or seeing the world that week. I wonder if that would be of interest to you? I know that, for me, the links at the bottom of a newsletter are often one of my favorite parts.
Oh, you may have noticed there was no Slow Reads essay this week. My excuse is that I was sick, though in all honesty I was not too sick to write. I just didn’t try. I realize that no one else is holding me to a rigid writing schedule, and it truly doesn’t matter if I have slow times and fast times. I hope you understand. (I’m sure you do.)
I sincerely hope that you are doing well and that you’ll drop me a line in the comments here or through social media. I tell the government that I write to make money, but secretly I only write to make friends. So tell me, is it still fall where you are?
What I’ve been Reading This Week:
Social media’s goal is saturation; it wants to be no less than everywhere. Here is a world where everything is all about you, and where you aren’t ever supposed to look away from the mirror. This mandated, obsessive self-focus makes it much too easy to take everyone else’s youth or age very personally. Struggles between the young and not-quite-as-young, the inevitable process of aging and all the questions that come with it, grow louder and sharper than they might have been in an offline world, where we had neither the opportunity nor the seeming obligation to look at ourselves and one another constantly.
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that “the algorithm” knows you better than you know yourself.
The Creepy TikTok Algorithm Doesn’t Know You
In these shared cinematic nightmares that emerge from the projector, the occulted world that terrifies us is given image and sound. As we face our dreads and desires surrounded by others that we only faintly perceive in the dark of the theater, we are in some way reenacting love’s crowded theater. The monsters and maniacs that stalk the silver screen are all found in eros too. Sex contains the madman’s anxiety, the slasher’s brutality, the demon’s possession, the werewolf’s bestial transformation, the vampire’s exchange of bodily fluids, the zombie’s mindless insatiability, and the ghost’s persistent looming.
I’m new here! And this letter sums up everything I feel about the coming winter months. Although where I am is currently 18 degrees during the day for November, I know it’ll change just as quickly to colder temperatures. I’m really glad that I subscribed to these letters, I’m a follower of yours on Instagram and this seemed very much of something that I needed <3
You know a bit about my feelings this time of year. You captured exactly how I feel about it in your letter. I truly wish I could even want to enjoy it, like you. I’ve written letters this year myself. Three, actually. And all to a family member who both appreciated them and some how began to hate me a little. Perhaps I should seek different pen pals?