On tapping into the well, chaotic possibility, and craving what we fear
Saturday, September 20, 2025 through Tuesday, September 23, 2025
Dear Eva,
My process before beginning today’s letter was to first read your letter from last week. That led me to my own letter from the week before (week 199) because you referenced it in your writing. It was just over one month ago, but I had already forgotten about my mid-shower revelations about needing to give more tenderness to my body and my future self. I followed the thread to my week 200 letter, where I went through a bit of a journey of sorts in the letter as I contended with what it means to prioritize my art, ending with my decision to invest in a writing class. All of which to say, it is spellbinding to be able to observe oneself in the way that the archive of these letters allow. The story that the reflections of our interiority tells is not complete, of course. As I wrote about last week, my letter would be wholly different depending on what particular day and time I choose to write it. But each letter takes a snapshot. Together, the sequence of snapshots reveals certain arcs, patterns, and loops.
Because of the nature of my day job, I cannot help but think about how this perfectly encapsulates the way our richly textured, multi-layered lives can be imperfectly distilled into factual bits and concepts that artificial intelligence technologies could gather and process. When things are fixed into a form, no matter the substance, they become data, both in the sense of the content itself and in the patterns, themes, and other information about the content. To me, this is a visceral lesson in an uncomfortable truth – we are all collections of facts and concepts when you zoom out far enough. This is a disturbing reality to me, because one of the fundamental precepts in my area of law is that facts and ideas cannot be owned; they are free as the air to common use. This is a concept I fully believe in; it is foundational to democracy and free speech. But what does it mean for the bits that make up my life, interiority, and creativity to be so free? We so often think of property as the only way to protect anything we care about; the toddler version (“mine!”) of organizing our society. I think there must be other ways to limit corporate pillage, decontextualization, and misappropriation. (But even the terms I used there suggest ownership! Misappropriation: “The fraudulent appropriation of funds or property entrusted to your care but actually owned by someone else.”) Can there not be some frameworks for upholding certain expectations of privacy, dignity, and decency, even if there is no “owner” on the other side? Capitalism prefers ownership and the slick lines it purports to convey. You either own it and can do what you will, or you do not, and I can do what I will. That is a far easier model than one where we have to co-create rules for stewardship of shared resources. But sheesh, it sure feels hollow.
Pretty much everything in public life feels hollow right now. You asked in your letter whether it was your mattress or the world that is broken, and I do not know about your mattress but the world surely is. Lately I have been digressing in my efforts to stay unplugged, and my wellbeing has suffered as a result. Sometimes the gleaming little device in my hands really does feel like a drug. Why can’t I put it down? The weirdest part of all is that the “hits” are not even remotely satisfying. I scroll and scroll through screaming headlines and apoplectic posts, searching for… what?
It is probably no coincidence that lately I have also been feeling anxious in ways that have made me temporarily lose my connection to my writing practice. It is fascinating how this ebbs and flows. There are patches where I am in it - regularly tapping into a well in my mind and putting words on pages. Then, there are stretches like this one I am currently in, where any kind of flow feels distant and impossible to reach. As I am reflecting on this, I’m realizing I haven’t actually tried to write since this anxious period began a few days ago. Apparently I just let the feeling of impossibility deter me from even giving it a go. This is somewhat amusing to me – my thoughts were daunting me, and I hadn’t even realized that was what was happening until I wrote it in this letter.
Old Sarah might be tempted to say that was embarrassing, but like you, I am working on getting more comfortable with embarrassment. Embarrassment is a potent social force, and I want to strive not to give the rest of the world that kind of power to shape my behavior. And besides, I am pretty sure our own minds create more than half of the obstacles in most of our days, most of the time.
The ways in which you have managed to reclaim and reconstruct time in your life feels like it illustrates this phenomenon. Most of us think the time structures in our days are immovable, non-negotiable scaffolds. You are demonstrating this is just a product of our minds. We can do whatever we want! We just fear “the consequences,” which most of the time are nil anyway. I will admit there is also a part of me that fears the expansiveness of treating my days like an open field. I am thinking back to that week where my office was closed and my kids were at sleepaway camp. The unstructured time can almost be scary to me, at least at first. Can I be trusted to find my way through the minutes and hours without someone or something dictating when I do what? Funny how much I crave agency, and yet how I can also fear it.
I had lots more that I had planned to write today, but I am going to call it a wrap. There is always next time! Thank you for your patience on this one! I look forward to reading your words soon.
All the best,
Sarah
Tuesday September 23 2025
Dear Sarah,
Your last letter sent me into an immediate flurry of note-taking! I’m dating this letter today, but really it started taking shape as soon as I read your words. I had responses to some specific phrases in your letter and I am going to share them here in the shape they took for me. I was fascinated by the feelings that seemed to give you pause, when I think that those feelings may be the most exciting part about writing. Maybe you are feeling the bracing wind in your face as you stand at the precipice of your project?
S: I am recently hyper-aware of the variability of how words appear on the page or in my mouth. Absolutely exciting aspect of writing and why we should spend as much time writing as possible. Writing is not simply a matter of knowing what you want to say and saying it — it is tapping that endless stream and experiencing both the breadth of the self and the breadth of what is possible in conversation, verbally and on the page. Tapping the endless stream of language and ideas! With each other here (and theoretically in conversation with others) the possibilities show themselves as vast, which is both intimidating and thrilling. We’ve written about this before — the variable selves that appear on the page — (I went to try to find some relevant letter links from the past and I feel that the act of linking back has gotten away from me; even with our last letter I know I was bumping into some past letters about this very topic!) — and perhaps our moods shift as to how we see these selves. I think I am fascinated that each of us contain these many selves. There is no single self, unless the single self inherently contains the many possible selves. We are technically delineated as solo organisms by our separate sets of skin and bones and organs and brains, but in a project like the letters I believe we’ve also come to see how connected we can be, how much it means to have a sustained long-term connection between our minds.
S: It is unsettling to me to know that my inner thoughts are so dynamic. Welcome to the great unsettling! If on some level you are striving for certainty / control / perhaps a desire to control how I see you — I must report that you cannot control how I see you, no matter how much you may be able to control the language you release into the world. Haha! I have been thinking a lot about how language is so primary for me, and how I have felt or presumed that the way that people “know” me and see me is through my words and the power of my mind. Words are part of it, but so much is ineffable. The words seem so firm and fixed, but you have been leaking words all your life and even if you were following one long script precisely to the letter, you would not be able to control how your words are heard, understood, retained. And you aren’t working from a script, so you’re already saying all kinds of things to all kinds of people in no particular order. Unsettling! Invigorating! Full of chaotic possibility!
S: I feel destabilized by not knowing exactly what I will say. I think to be alive is to feel this destabilizing force or potential and to invite it into daily being — it is part of being alive — why would we squash the hard and complicated parts of being alive? Back to the idea of the script above — even if you knew exactly what you were going to say to start any conversation, if you are in real interaction with the people around you, you have to be ready for the fact that they might say something you didn’t expect, and then you are going to have to come up with something to say that you didn’t plan, and there you are, in a real exploratory conversation. I think I’m getting at the idea that writing doesn’t necessarily need to be so different and separate from conversation. It is, of course — I’m certain that our letters have touched on the fact that what writing allows is different from spoken conversation — but I think I’m also suggesting that the written page doesn’t need to be as firmly buttoned up as we think of it. It doesn’t need to be so planned. Anything can be on the written page! Why not! As I think about this I am realizing that I really have been fairly dramatically influenced by the practice of clown. It is helping me to access more (all???) parts of myself, and to understand that sharing them is part of the experiment of being alive. Clown is helping me to be more receptive and less judgmental of other people showing the complex and variable parts of themselves. The spirit of clown is about bringing oneself vulnerably to a moment and also paying attention to the people around you and responding to how they are receiving you — it is meant to be a dialogue, not necessarily a spoken dialogue, but a dialogue between the parts of ourselves, human to human, that don’t get as much air time and that are harder to express. The more I spend time with the practice of clown I find that I crave interactions where people can show and communicate themselves, and I feel that something is a little hollow if people aren’t yet tapping into these parts of themselves.
S: I want to figure out how to ignore the part of me that is continually whispering in my brain that there were other (better!) things I should have said, other (better!) ways I could have conveyed the information. There is no better or best way to be — particularly in communication — I am thinking about the difference between a script and an improvisation. We move through a lot of life as though there is a script we should be following, like we are just trying to perform our lines — the lines we feel we should have memorized! — without a hitch, and at the end of it all, at the end of the show, we will be placed comfortably in our graves and everyone will be sad to see us go, we who performed our lines so perfectly! By the book and flawless! Is our life for ourselves or is our life for other people? If we improvise, we are bringing ourselves — we trust in the fact that we know so much in both mind and body — we trust that we are here for each other instead of here against each other — we are not meant to compete with each other for scarce resources — we are meant to band together with each other to ensure our joint safety and security.
I am interested in your response to my reflection about losing interest in a piece of writing after I’ve put some time into it; you said you feel that way about single ideas or lines of thought. This made me think about a session in the essay class I took earlier this summer; someone asked about the difference between figuring something out in conversation and figuring it out on the page, i.e. what gets talked about with friends and what gets written about. I cannot recall the exact way they phrased their question but it made clear to me the fact that people come to know their own thoughts in different ways. I find that it helps me to write down a thought or an idea in order to actually “have” it. If you lose interest in an idea or line of thought before you get to the page with it, maybe it means that your actual thoughts are clearer somehow? Maybe it means that you are doing more of the work in your mind; you are “having” clear thoughts right there inside your head. I think I have learned over time that getting things down on the page helps me untangle what is in my mind and also to “remember” it; just having thought about something does not seem to mean that it will be available to me in words later. This is why I’ve taken up the practice of my daily diary-type documentation. I’ve shown you some of these pages — it’s not a straightforward “diary” (is there any such thing?). It’s not meant to be a catalog of what’s happened during the day, but rather a daily documentation of anything that moves through my mind. I also realized in response to the essay class question above that I might figure out more things in conversation if I could, but there are not enough hours in the day or people who are willing to listen to my endless talking, so it’s me and the page! I talk and text a lot and I write more! I just need to get everything out and into words. Stat!
This letter has so many things in it but I cannot finish without noting that I was struck when you mentioned in your letter the book that an author took 38 years to write — and I realized that those words were in reference to a book I was reading at that exact moment! On the Calculation of Volume I & II by Solvej Balle — I’ve just finished the second book in the last week or so. I was fascinated and in some ways relieved to learn that it took her so long — the series is seven books and two have been translated thus far, with a third coming out this fall and I think another in the spring, and the rest to follow. I really liked these books and have a lot to say about them if you ever find you want to read + discuss! I always feel relief when I read about projects that take authors years and years to complete: Ok! That is one of the ways that things can go! I’m also very interested in the book you mentioned — Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vauhini Vara — and I’ll be curious to check it out and to see how it supports your process.
On the ongoing question of audience and public: Maybe there is a version of public that is simply, I would say these words in front of other people, or I don’t mind if other people hear these words. Thinking of our letters: they are not really for an audience — the main for-ness has been between the two of us. But at the point when we decided to conduct this conversation online — without knowing where it would go or what we would say to each other every week! — we made a choice that we were comfortable with the possibility of people listening in on what we would say to each other. It’s like words overheard in a public space. I’m fairly certain one of us said this to the other somewhere along the way in these pages: We’ve been speaking to each other in a corner of the online public square. We’re out in public and saying things that there’s no particular reason to keep from other people. Whether anyone is nearby and can hear us is almost none of our business.
If it’s not clear from my letter here, your last letter really blew up my brain! I am curious to hear how you’re feeling this week and to see what you think about my words here. My sense is that you’re on the exciting edge of your project! Or maybe you’re fully in it and also feeling the edge of it, a new way of working and thinking. Tell me what’s going on inside that busy brain where the thoughts are crisp and clear!
Much love + talk with you soon!
Eva