Facing the Strange
I’ve always liked January, for the same reason I like new notebooks and stationery generally. But I don't need everybody else to agree...
Tom Cox is one of my favourite authors, and the reason I turned up here in the first place. Yesterday morning, he published a list of what he doesn’t miss about Twitter now Substack is his digital home. Among the bullet points I enjoyed the most was:
Substack is certainly a much nicer neighbourhood to explore the best way we explore anywhere new neighbourhood: by getting lost in it (I stand with Margaret Atwood in recognising there is further that needs to go). Fundamentally, what I enjoy is the expectation of the in-depth. You get the literary equivalent of a genuine friendship: nuance, flavour combinations, quality time to discover personality rather than racing for a 2D, goodie-or-baddie verdict. We don’t ever to agree with everything any friend or family member ever says – but that’s not the end of the friendship or world when you have depth, nuance, a fundamental level of trust or respect. It can be the same with writers.
All the same, my first week of January has had a sour flavour.
I’ve always liked January, for the same reason I like new notebooks and new stationery generally. Yes, every day can be (and is) the first day of any change worth making, but I’ve always enjoyed the Gregorian 1 January and the Hebrew 1 Tishri (Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year). Just like the first blank page of a notebook reminds me I get to decide what goes in it, a new year feels like a clean page, external validation that what comes next is not defined by what’s come before.
(I don’t need you to feel like I do, by the way. Most people – or at least lots of people – don’t. I do, though, and I’m not hurting anybody by feeling it. And I trust you enough that I don’t try to turn my opinions into yours by using you as the mirror you’re not, instead of the friend I want you to be).
This is the first year I’ve noticed myself feeling ‘got at’ for enjoying and utilising new year. It’s down to me to work on that, because we all have our own opinions and as long as we’re expressing them as our own truth rather than evangelising to feel better about ourselves, that’s fine. But when I window-shop my feed, I’ve been feeling overshadowed by a gathering cloud of articles looking down their noses at articles they think are looking down their noses at people who want to enjoy and utilise new year’s resolutions. The fashion to knock the previous fashion to be positive about the new year is replacing the toxic positivity it claims to resist with equally toxic negativity. That doesn’t feel like an improvement to me. To others perhaps it does, and I’m not getting at those writers. I’m not even stating a fact. I’m sharing my feeling.
I’m also sharing how easy it would be to look at my feed and blame it for how it “makes” me feel, or blame myself for putting myself in a situation where I experience those feelings. But instead I’m seeing it as useful data about myself and how social media is making me feel right now. Only I own my social media feed. Only I can change it.
Something isn’t working for me, right now. So here’s what I’m changing this week:
- My notifications. I’m taking a break from Substack emails. I check the app when I want to, and read and reply to what feels aligned. I don’t let myself feel summoned by it. I turn up on my own terms, in my own time, to interact with the people who reinforce my sense of what I’m here for.
- My feed itself. It’s always possible to mute without unfollowing. It’s also always possible to unfollow. We don’t owe anyone anything on social media. Like shaky boundaries in any area of life, the resentment that builds in us isn’t the fault (or the responsibility) of the people we’re saying ‘yes’ to.
- My offline time. If I feel I’ve shown up with my whole self, it’s easier to log off. I’m here to write and to connect and I do not to feel like everyone has to agree with me for me in order for me to be me or them to be them. The mirror of a feed needs to be maintained, or it becomes an out of date reflection. Who we are today and who we choose to be tomorrow are reinforced by what we read, see, prioritise, write. We have the right to enjoy that, and the responsibility to not leave it on autopilot.
Substack, friendship, anything with depth means we aren’t going to agree all the time. We’ll have days we feel ‘seen’ and days we don’t. What I don’t want to do about the bad days is blame the mirror, or cover it in fear or shame of being unaccepted. Every time I’m tempted to let myself play small, wait for permission, fear change, fear being seen, copy or limit myself to what I saw in the mirror yesterday, I remember the one constant of any authentic life (or any authentic body of work) is change.
On which note, happy birthday to one of the most important people in my life that I never met (and who, as it happens, has been dead for two days short of eight years).
David Robert Jones (1947-2016) was a writer first. In spite of his exceptional ability and how he constantly educated himself as a mime, dancer and singer he started performing his own songs because he didn’t have someone to sing them. On new year’s eve I shared Neil Gaiman’s version of this:
David Bowie’s version is not just the first lyrics that have probably already come to your mind and I try to keep in mine every day – “Turn and face the strange” – but in his career path. He never let something working well mean he stayed put. He never typecast himself. He never stopped changing aesthetically or artistically. Yet he was a version of himself, in each new change, over and over again.
Whether you’re a fan of new year’s resolutions or new years or not, I wish you an unapologetic new year, a curious one, and that you treat every stage as a chrysalis for the next. Because if we are kinder on Substack than we are on Twitter, it’s because we have the space and time to think and feel. Let’s use the data the mirror provides, and keep on changing.
Write with me at Riverside Studios from Thursday 11 January.
I think this is an artefact of social media, where everything seems to be so endlessly, tiresomely, combative (I remember times both on Twitter and Facebook where I asked a genuine question and it was taken as some kind of pugilistic challenge--this wasn't on controversial subjects, mind, one, for example, was me really not ever having encountered a turn of phrase someone used in talking about the TV show "Ozark" and asking what they meant). And we seem to have lost the ability to read in a spirit of generosity and of trust, always assuming that we must challenge the author or that the author is challenging us--I think this attitude is fatal to writing (as is having to insert endless disclaimers: I AM NOT DISLIKING SUPERHERO MOVIES *AT* YOU I JUST DON'T CARE FOR THEM OK.) It's certainly fatal to friendships, and most in-person exchanges tend not to take on this tenor. I don't know why online conversations are so vulnerable to it.
All of this is to say, I hear you, I get it--and I do think Substack , by design, is an antidote to a lot of that, but habits inculcated in us over the last decade or so die hard. And also, I like new years for the same reasons you do.