I came to the idea of a newsletter because I started to understand that shorter forms of publication—specifically, those I used daily on the internet like Twitter or Tumblr—were not helping me process and express thoughts as well as I wanted to. This has become abundantly clear to me over the past two weeks, when a variety of mentally and emotionally challenging current events seem to have wreaked serious psychic damage on both myself and on fellow internet citizens. What I think and feel doesn’t fit into one hundred and forty characters any more.
Many people wield Twitter as an effective communication tool in itself; I am finding I am not one of these people, and can use it more effectively as a platform for longer-form, or, ideally, in-person communication. Having found methods that suit me better, I like the effect the discovery has begun to have on my expression. My processing takes a longer time and requires more distance and space from the furor of external discussion. But the result feels calmly authentic and confident in a way that my immediate Twitter or comment thread reactions never did.
So I am concentrating on this now: quiet thinking and deliberate expression. And epic IRL conversations that have more profundity and precision than they did before. This newsletter is the first step into exploring if that will have an impact, and it’s already been feeding longer articles and essays my website will soon host.
It’s surprising how much you can have to say when you finally figure out the right way to say it.
Hopefully you’ve found that, too.