Edition #98: When the Ghosts Come Knocking

Plus, can companies force themselves to do good, a rationality quiz, and an audition

Jan 13, 2022

Ghost Painting by Mary Hayes | Saatchi Art

A Note From the Editor

As a kid, I wanted to be anywhere but in the house. We didn't get out much unless it was to go to school, or to the dance studio, or to the grocery store on Sunday afternoons, so getting out was a real occasion. Out to eat, out on an adventure, out any place that felt new. I craved it; the newness, the experiences that “out there” held.

One evening, I was at our neighborhood park with my mom. It was a Saturday and the sun was just starting to set. I could feel the night coming to a close, the start of another dreaded loop looming. I didn’t want to go home. My mom pushed me on the swing and I asked if we could go to Old Town. Old Town was nothing special, really, just a cheesy amusement park-style place with a few crappy carnival rides and a General Store that sold little glass bottles of coke for a quarter. I went crazy for those little cokes.

But we couldn't go, my mom said, because we didn’t have money. It was free to get in, I knew that, and I promised her we wouldn’t have to do anything when we got there. We could just sit and watch the parade of vintage cars that rode through every Saturday night and it would be free. But it was the physical act of getting there that was the problem, she said, for we didn't have gas money to make the 20-minute drive.

It didn't phase me, the not having gas money. It was so normal for me back then. We didn't have money for a lot of things—no money to pay for dance classes, so my mom and I spent our weekend mornings cleaning the dance studio in exchange for my free tuition. No money for new clothes, so every time we went to the mall, as mom waited in line at the register, I'd always walk away with a nervous stomach, watching from a distance, for there was a good chance the card would get declined. No money for excess, for extras. And sometimes, no money for essentials, like gas.

It mystifies me, now, from a distance. No money for gas? Not $10, $15? And yet it was my life, for a long period of my life, and it is the life of many, many Americans still. We humans are so resilient, we are so adaptable. We don't have money for gas, we get used to going nowhere, to only being able to escape our inauspicious reality through books and our imaginations. We have money for plane tickets, we get used to jetting off every other month. To Morrocco, to Paris, to Tokyo, to all of the places a little girl who just wanted to go to Old Town could have only dreamt of visiting. And yet this, too, becomes commonplace. It isn't that seeing the world ever stops being wonderful, it's that it ceases to inspire wonder at the fullest effect, for things become attainable. You're no longer as hungry as you were because you know, you've proven to yourself, that you can do all those things, see all those things. Where once you only wanted to leave your house on a Saturday night, where you only wanted a full tank of gas—hell, you’d have taken a quarter tank, just enough to get you away, down the road—it now takes much more gas. Fuel, the sort that powers big planes, big enough to traverse the Atlantic. Big enough so that the sun might be rising, where you are, as it sets back home.

Our wanting knows no bounds, and our adaptability, once we have the things we wanted, knows no reasonable timeframe in which to rebound. It is the romance we pined for that becomes the body in bed next to us, the one that clips their toenails and occasionally forgets to floss. It’s the job we dreamt of, the one we were so proud to announce on LinkedIn, that we changed a hundred times for, on that first morning of work, because we wanted to look perfect; the one we were so relieved to walk away from. Everything is new until it isn’t, and yet nothing can remain new. Sometimes we let ourselves get distracted by newness, if only to evade a cardinal truth, one we find in every television show, in every book, around every corner: That life is, sometimes, monotony. Someone’s got to unload the dishwasher.

Whenever I’m feeling especially antsy, when I’m unable to access the wonder in the world around me because I’ve let my mind sink into this sticky quicksand, sucking me down until nothing delightful can reach me, I try to remember variety. If life is sometimes a masquerade ball, then it is also a square dance. I try to get myself to be more patient and to pay closer attention. You begin to notice the small, wonderful things first—the bird singing on your fire escape, the chubby toddler rolling down a hill—and before long everything can become wonderful. When I feel like I have to move, like I have to get on a plane and get away otherwise I’ll melt into a muddy gray puddle of vapidness, I try to sit still. To not go anywhere, to resist the urge to seek external stimulation in any concentrated form. Resisting can work like that conversational tactic, the one where you wait a few seconds before responding only to discover, inevitably, that the person you were talking to had a bit more to say. More always comes out, more of the important stuff, when you don’t rush to fill the silence with your noise.

Occasionally, when I’m lying down to bed at night, my legs nestled in the space between my comforter and my tightly tucked sheets like a piece of paper slid into an envelope, I squeal aloud. My whole body wiggles in delight, for my bed is so soft and my sheets are so clean and it wasn’t always this way. It happens other times, too, like when I’m sitting on my couch and I look around my apartment, with its dark, cozy cave walls, and I laugh out loud because I live here and it’s still absurd to me, all these years later. I don’t know if these moments of astonishment, when I’m visited by the ghosts of who I’ve been, would have the chance to find me if I didn’t, every so often, resist the urge to get up and go. To move, to evade. Sometimes you just have to sit in the lukewarm pool of it.

Cheers, my dears, and as always, thank you for reading. I like you a lot. If you like today’s edition, please share it with someone you like, whether it be a friend or a romantic interest. I’m not here to judge. And on an entirely unrelated note, I’ve caught the listen-to-a-song-800x-in-a-row bug this week, and this is the song in question. Enjoy.

Three Pieces of Content Worth Consuming

Can Companies Force Themselves To Do Good? This headline might not sound sexy, but this piece is fascinating and well worth the read. Companies are participants of capitalism, and capitalism goes by a set of rules that focuses on maximizing profits at the expense of all else—employees, integrity, etc. But there are business owners who choose to do things differently—think, donating a sizable chunk of their profits to nonprofits, allocating another chunk to employee profit-sharing, and reinvesting the rest back in their company. Since those alternative operating methods are not the norm, what happens when said company owners want to retire, but are hesitant to sell their company because of the cutthroat nature of capitalism? That's where the Purpose Foundation comes in. This is a really cool concept, especially for any business owners out there.
52 Things I Learned in 2021. I promise I won’t always recommend lists here, but the start and end of the year were made for big, sweeping listicles. I particularly liked this one because it is the opposite of advice. Instead, the author shares 52 facts, most of them quite fun, a few truly surprising. A few favorites: Trump got a diet coke button installed in the Oval Office, people age at different speeds, and there are three types of fun.
How Rational Are You, Really? Do you consider yourself a highly rational person? I don’t, and this 21-question quiz proved that I was right (I scored 44% of the highest rationality score, lol). What I love about this quiz is that it classifies your reasoning style with 16 archetypes so that you can better understand the way you think (I got the Journalist; intuitive, subjective, and skeptical). The results also help you identify specific blind spots in your rationality and provide tools to help strengthen them. Very cool stuff. Took me about 15 minutes to complete.

Perhaps You Should…Audition for My First Video Project

I’ll be doing a lot more writing for the screen this year and I’m kicking things off with my first mini video project, to be released during Valentine’s week. I’m casting 2 or 3 open roles this weekend. If you’re interested in being considered, you can find a scant bit of more information on my Instagram story, or you can shoot me an email. Open to all ages, but you must identify as a woman and have previous acting experience. Excited to share the end result with you next month!

Bonus Content (Candles Candles Candles)

My ultimate dream is to have a stock of so many candles that my apartment looks like a seance. Unfortunately, I burn every single candle I own all the way down and never keep more than one or two extras on hand because I am utilitarian by nature. This list, and the current weather, make me want to change my ways and blow it all on these little pots of joy. In conclusion, if you ever need to buy me a gift please, please make it a candle.

A Quote From A Book You Should Read:

“But there’s nothing to be done about it. All I can do is put in time waiting for the inevitable, observing as the ghosts of my past rattle around my vacuous present. They crash and bang and make themselves at home, mostly because there’s no competition. I’ve stopped fighting them.”

-Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

This newsletter is best served with a side of conversation, so drop your opinions, reflections, and thoughts in the comments below and let’s get to talking.

that's so interesting

Discussion about this post