Hello! Today is April 2nd, 2021 and you have found yourself party to the most recent dispatch from in here — the dikes of my deepest, most soft-edge thoughts. Last week, I conducted the first of what will become a recurring open thread advice convo on style. Subscribe if you’d like to participate, it enables your ability to comment — and if you have broader feedback on any of the writing I’ve sent out through this newsletter, do me a solid and tap the reply button. In particular, actually, I’d love to know if you’d like some shorter form writing — like actual e-mail updates you might get from a friend (we’re friends, right?). In the meantime, let’s fly.

Do you ever have those weeks where it starts to feel like you’re filling up your brain with so much new stuff that if you don’t let some of it out, your head might explode? The connotation is usually positive. When bad stuff clogs the passageways, I tend to feel like an overripe tulip that is starting to sag, petals falling to the surface on which the vase stands while it watches itself die.

Not to be dramatic or anything!

But I do wonder if these sensations — both of them — are like a synonym for being conscious of the ways you’re changing or growing or staying exactly the same. If actually, the feeling that my head might explode is an outgrowth of former opinions or beliefs — the seductive newness of change! — and the overripe tulips with dangling petals are what happens when you’re stuck but really want to move.

Sometimes I am just like, But where do I go? So I take to the pen (not to be confused with knife — the double-edged sword of “stuck” and “still”) and start to write. At best, I push through something and then feel like I can unclench my asscheeks. At worst, I sit and I sit and I labor and sit and at the end, I’ve got nothing but resentment for the time I wasted pulling teeth from my dick.

That is a description of writing that David Rakoff once wrote in a book of non-fiction essays called, Don’t Get Too Comfortable. There is none more fitting, even from a vagina.

Passover started last weekend and I am surprised at how much I’ve been thinking about it. Not technically as in, “Wow, this matzah is really constipating the s**t (hehe) out of me,” but more like, the story of Exodus is the ultimate Jewish tale of redemption — a consistent reminder built into the religion that we were oppressed and now we are free.

What can be gleaned for a more secular perspective from the purported 40 years spent wandering a desert, the first taste of freedom following centuries of enslavement?

Is that very desert a metaphor for the boundlessness of optionality that is inferred by the notion of freedom?

Does the golden calf (an idol the Israelites created while Moses was up at Sinai waiting for the commandments) represent what happens without an internal compass of ethics to guide you, when the freedom becomes too much to bear?

And per those commandments — are they it? The aforementioned compass of ethics, your morals?

On Saturday night, I went to my mother-in-law’s for the first Seder. On the walk over with Abie (son of said mother-in-law), I asked him all those questions basically, but in different words: Is it freedom that sets us free, or is it the choices we make once we get it?

He said he’d never thought about it before and needed one week to come back to me, which is perhaps the most Abie answer out there. One evening on our honeymoon, we were eating white fish and watching the kind of sunset that might truly convince you there must be a God and I asked him what the happiest moment of his life so far has been.

I did not expect that he would say, “Right now,” which, to be clear, he did not. I was more hoping for something like, “On our 4th date, when we were at that small sushi place on Macdougal street by the park, you put your hair behind your left ear before lifting your glass to take a sip of water and I just thought to myself: how could I, Abie, revel in the quotidianness of watching this stranger tuck hair behind her ear and feel such intense passion? This must be it: The Big Love!”

What I got was, “You need to give me a couple of weeks so I can recall every memory in the mental log of my ever having felt happy.”

Can you believe this is the kind of person I married? In so many ways, I can. He would never stage such an indulgent digression, taking you back to his honeymoon on a quest to answer a completely unrelated question, and thank goodness for that.

I still have another 24 hours of waiting time on his answer though, so let me ask you the same question, this time somewhat differently: what do you value more — your freedom or what you do with it? I think this is also on my mind because I’m at some kind of psychological inflection point. A lot of st is changing up here. It’s like, I’ve never been this conscious of my own sense of self. Sense of responsibility for myself.

I once heard this distinction drawn between the different ideas that live in our brains — some are active, alive in our brains and some are in theory up there. I think the one that is waking up, that I’m like, clicking into is about how much f*g control, power, etc I have over MYSELF. I could literally blow my whole life up tomorrow, which for whatever reason seems like an easier thought to sit with than the reverse, which is true too: I could also blow it OUT OF THE PARK. (I mean water.) Do you think it’s easier to imagine failure than it is to imagine success because it’s more sure? Like, surely one won’t fail at failing. But man, to fail at succeeding…

You know, I was going to write, “it’s rough,” which it is, but I also did it very publicly not so long ago and I’m still alive and standing and on balance, probably (no, definitely) better for it, so who is really to say what’s what? The more valuable point to convey is really that when you come into the consciousness of the magnitude of control you have over your own life (or at least your own mind), it sort of forces you to stop pointing fingers because suddenly no one is responsible for what you do or don’t do. And fk that’s a lot “to hold.” (Did you read this story on therapy speak in pop discourse, btw? I felt v “seen.”)

It’s where the mental freedom thing comes into question. It’s like, you become hyper-aware that either you have it or you don’t and if you see that you don’t, you start building this path towards it, and as you inch closer, there’s this euphoria about your proximity to it. And then once you’re on the other side, once you’ve FREED yourself of some “limiting belief,” you’re left to make choices and the choices are scary because this is the precise thing that you choose to do with your freedom.

I don’t undermine or shrug off or question the different quality of obstacle that stands between you and your destiny or me and mine but I think to a degree, we both have this opportunity to like, embody this notion of responsibility, charge ourselves with the tall task at hand, crawl out of the trenches or if you’re ready, finally do the thing — circle the body of water, spread your arms eagle and dive.

That was intense for me, u?

Signing off but not without first giving you this:

Love,

Leandra

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