I’m late with the newsletter this week. It’s okay. I suspect you all managed to have a great Saturday without me.
Also, sometimes you gotta do your Saturdays on Sundays, right? You brought some work home or you had a friend in town and so you gotta squeeze all that rest into Sunday.
There is but one idea I’d like to share with you this week and it’s a big one.
“The angry thoughts document.”
At some point, I will come up with a snazzier name for it, but that’s what I’m calling the section of my notebook where I’ve begun to stash all the shit I’m angry about instead of rage-tweeting.
Whenever I tweet from a really hot emotional state, I usually regret it. Even if I manage to say something biting and clever enough to get some retweets, I almost always wish that I’d done something more lasting with that heat: put it into a book or essay that does not stop at the emotion but that also offers reflection, solution, catharsis.
I’ll then come back to that page later when I’m feeling blah, unmotivated, listless. I’ll remember that I’m super fired up about, say, someone telling me I need to be more civil to fascists or whatever. (I’m all about non-violence, yo, but I also do not think exchanging pleasantries with morally-bankrupt racists and opportunists is the way to build a more peaceful world. But that’s just me.)
The point is, I want to do something with my energy.
I want to explore it, understand it, transform it.
Yesterday we were driving around the city and the traffic was bananas. I could tell that my friend who was driving was getting heated by the amount of times he called lackadaisical pedestrians or clueless drivers “Sweetheart” and I asked him if there was anything I could do to help.
He told he was enraged by what he called the “Me first” attitude of everyone around him. He said that he felt like he just needed to “release a pressure valve”—like he wanted to scream.
I don’t drive in the city, but I realized that the way he felt about the other drivers was exactly the way I feel about so much of modern discourse—especially on social media. Because we’re often responding in a heightened state of emotion, we don’t always see the big picture. We probably first see the thing that is affecting us personally now in this moment. Maybe we can widen our lens a little further to our own communities and loved ones.
But what I’ve never been able to do when I’m in a heated place is go really, really wide—to think about how I might best harness my energy and use it to really get people to think. That only comes with reflection.
It only comes once I’ve parked the car, taken a deep breath, and thought about everyone else on the road. Not just the ones I love or want to fight for, but even those who are lost in delusion and fear.
The angry thoughts document is my way of capturing my very real and very important anger at injustice and hypocrisy so that I can do something more with it than just scream into the void.
I hope you all have a beautiful Sunday. May the day feel long and bright—like two days in one.
xoxox Sarah