#100: private delight with an open door

why I write to you

Good morning,

This is my 100th letter to you. I am not sure where in this journey you signed up or what you expected to receive. But, as milestones invite us to, I’ll tell you what I’ve learned along the way.

I think writing is the only way for me to gain authentic perspective on life when I am unable to zoom out. On the ground, I’ve always been a “miss the forest for the trees” sort of person. On the page, I am all forest.

Mostly, this is why I write.

This newsletter, which I prefer to think of as a series of plain old letters, has a modest following—a little under 1k subscribers, which, in the world of “internet media” is not very big. But in the life of a writer who is still young, still learning her craft, and still hatcheting a path carrying private burdens through a world that, most of the time, feels complicated and large and a little bit scary, that is a lot of people to be speaking to.

I see myself as a small person, mostly because I don’t like to take up very much space. Feeling compact, accounting for my presence, these are my natural state. I am always a bit flattened in the presence of people who are unabashedly expansive.

Over time though, I have come to see this flattening as something I could enjoy. In earlier chapters of my life, flattening felt like erasure. In this one, it is my preferred form of art.

Writing, for me, is an attempt at precision, my own version of surgery, my way to access those parts of my body that are also inside yours—my incision tool, if you will, in a way that feels safe and quiet.

Here are a few things I have felt while writing these letters:

• It took me about 25 letters for the self-doubt to emerge — I wondered why I was writing at all

• By 75, I started to find the courage to be selfish—writing on the internet tends to force one to pursue growth, but truly, I’m writing for me the most

• Now, at 100, most weeks I feel rather dependent on this little text editor to ensure I have not stopped walking…to wherever it is my body seems to want to go

And here are the brightest spots that have come with developing a public practice:

• I have made countless friends through writing — someone reads something and thinks of someone else and the reciprocity expands and suddenly we are a circle of friends. This has happened on so many themes. It is my favorite proof that processing the world in public is one of the rare ways to both work and steward at the same time.

• I have read (and found myself remembering) more than I could possibly digest in silence. I feel like I am always in school. And I love this way of learning.

But most of all, putting this stake in the ground has allowed me to grow around it, rather than wither under the weight of the hundreds of private notebooks from my first 30 years of life that are piled in my office. In the last 5 years, writing to you, I have learned to keep my windows open.

Someone told me recently that it is difficult for readers to connect with ambivalent protagonists, that they want emotion, stakes, politics, advice. But in hearing this list, I felt immediately that those are the very things that discourage me from reading: emotion, stakes, politics, advice.

I prefer to locate myself in someone else’s ambiguity. It is most exciting when, in that ambiguity, a loud, clear, precise voice emerges to say one urgent and timely thing.

When I first began practicing Buddhism as a shy teenager, this is the passage from my mentor that reached me most deeply:

True individuality and character never come to full flower without hard work. I feel it is a mistake to think that who you are right now represents all you are capable of. If you passively decide, “I’m a quiet person, so I’ll just go through life being quiet,” you won’t ever fully realize your unique potential. Without having to change your character completely, you can become a person who, while still basically quiet, will say the right thing at the right time with real conviction. In the same way, a negative tendency toward impatience could be developed into a useful knack for getting things done quickly and efficiently.

But nothing is more immediate, or more difficult, than to confront and transform ourselves. It is always tempting to decide “That’s just the kind of person I am.” Unless we challenge this tendency early in life, it will become stronger with age. But the effort is worthwhile in the end, as I believe that nothing produces deeper satisfaction than successfully challenging our own weaknesses.

In this sense, I suppose writing is my hard work. An active effort to challenge my own desire to be a quiet person while at the same time, inviting more people to be quiet.

In that spirit, if you stay for the journey, let’s move together toward 200 letters and in them, I hope you, too, find a simultaneous safety and thrill in our search for precision through ambivalence. If there are knotty things you, too, feel ambivalent about, especially regarding your relationships with care and media, let me know and I’ll try to follow them down the road alongside my own knots.

Because without ambivalence, we cannot be quiet and without quiet we cannot hear and without hearing we cannot be precise.

This illustration by the French artist Cécile Metzger captures what most days with this text editor have felt like—private delight with an open door.

Thank you very much for reading.

Jihii