I’m writing to you on the evening of the new moon.
It’s apparently a new moon in Sagittarius, which is not something I understand at all but which I have increasing curiosity about. I know it’s said that the new moons are good for starting new projects and intentions, and for questioning old habits or beliefs. This is something I’ve always seemed to have an unusual prosperity for at all times, but today it’s hitting me in particular. Before I even realized it today was heightened by the new.
But you can’t have the new without the old. So I’m thinking about that too.
I’ve been thinking about how much the nearly-here season of winter calls for quiet and turning inward, and how claiming that is presently a radical act. It used to be a given that we would slow down in the winter.
I’ve been wondering about hibernation. It sounds cozy and good to me. A fun word, hibernation. I picture a mouse all curled up but is that what it means?
I’m thinking about why I write.
I’m wondering what I’m wired for right now. What my heart and bones want.
I realized today that I’ve been writing on the internet for sixteen years—more than half my life.
Writing has been a central component of my identity since I was about thirteen. It was a thing I found out I could do, then I found out it could get me something: money, publication, awards, or acclaim.
As I writer, I grew up under the looming shade of the idea that my writing could be a ticket to somewhere, something, some different version of me. I wonder what my brain would be like without that influence.
At thirteen, I knew I wanted to be published author. I wanted to be on the bestseller list. At fifteen, I started a blog for a family trip abroad, which I took very seriously. After that came another blog, then another for an internship in college. In between I wrote short stories that won awards and got published. Next came sharing my life and captions on Instagram.1 Then writing on Medium for a few years.2 All the while, I dreamed of that novel.
I know there are a lot of people singing the praises of Substack right now. I’ll be honest with you: I’m skeptical. That’s mostly because I’m skeptical of the internet. But I have a lot of questions about whether Substack is suited to me, my brain, my goals, and how I believe we should treat our fellow humans. As yet, I don’t have answers to those questions and I like the friends I’ve found here, so I keep writing.
I find myself wondering what would happen if I didn’t have Substack. If it went away tomorrow, what would I do? I want to believe I would keep writing. Writing helps me think and make sense of the world. So I should probably keep at it, even privately.
But I do also really like having my work read. So—in this imaginative scenario where Substack disappears tomorrow—where would I go with my work?
I don’t have any other social media.3 If pushed, I find I don’t want a Substack alternative. Publishing on an website of my own really feels like screaming into the void. I suppose some people are really enamored with the idea of writing a book, and I had that dream too. It’s either dead or dormant now. I haven’t checked which.
I want my writing to land in a place it’s needed. I’m still not sure where that is.
It may not be internet though
The internet world never stops, never slows down. It pays no mind to seasons. It chugs along, doing and demanding the same thing all the time. Meanwhile, my kindred the chipmunk has gone to sleep in the field at the end of my road and I find myself curious about that life. It seems a reasonable response to winter.
I’ve been listening to Danica Boyce’s podcast Fair Folk, specifically the episodes about how the Christmas season would have been celebrated in the places my ancestors came from before the modern era.4 People tucked into their homes, gathered around the fire, and made to-dos of welcoming visitors and visiting each other. They had rituals and traditions for what they would do whilst gathering: story telling, singing, divination, among other things.
No one will just show up to my door unexpectedly during the twelve days of Christmas for “first footing” or otherwise. There will not be a true season of celebrating like our ancestors knew. Most everyone will work up to December 25 and go back to work the day after. No time to mosey over to our neighbors. No time to tell stories.
Before I wrote things on the internet, I was a storyteller. As a young teenager, I told stories for my younger cousins will I babysat them. That is one of the few times I could tell you that I’ve felt some force larger than myself. Never in the church pews, where I was supposed to feel it. I felt it while telling stories on the fly.
Or, if you prefer, it’s one of the few times that I have been able to let my ego and self consciousness fall away. My voice is not something which is comfortable to me, spoken or singing. It was even less so then. But when I told those stories my voice took a shape I could never have given it. And I think we know that children aren’t usually fans of sitting still. Yet my three cousins were transfixed. They requested storytelling. They are all in their twenties now and they still talk about those nights of storytelling.
That felt more wonderful than anything I’ve ever published on the internet.
I have no access to a venue for storytelling at the time of writing though. I haven’t done it since my three cousins aged out of being babysat. Great, I can publish my writing on several different platforms and I can monetize the shit out of it. That does not hit the same, as they say.
I want to sit in a darkened room, in a circle of people, and let something else weave words through me. They don’t make an app for that.
Maybe it’s just where I find myself in life and the internet right now, but I’m seeing more people talk about opting out of Christmas as they’ve known it than ever before. I like it. Let’s keep it up. Let’s re-shape the season because this current form isn’t working for many of us.
I think too that maybe we are stretched thin and this season will stretch us more. Have you read
essay “The friendship problem”? Before I found it, I had been grappling with a problem I was seeing: that no one was getting back to me, no one was inviting me to anything. I am, honestly, quite lonely. I thought the problem was me, but I couldn’t put a finger on why that might be. When I stumbled on Rosie’s essay I thought: there it is.If you haven’t read Rosie’s essay, do. Here is what she says the crux of the issue is:
“We are so burned out by the process of staying afloat in a globalized, connected world that we simply don’t have the energy for the kinds of in-person, easy interactions that might actually give us some energy and lifeforce back.”
I hope I don’t need to tell you that this is an emergency.
I’m thinking about hibernation.
Hibernation, it turns out, doesn’t mean “sleeping during the cold months,” or something like that. It’s from the Latin hibernationem meaning "the action of passing the winter.” Not sleeping. Not getting cozy in a borrow. Just, the action of passing winter.
And it strikes me that within that is the idea that winter is set apart in a particular way. We have no word for “the action of passing spring,” or “the action of passing summer.” There’s something about winter.
So how will I pass this particular season? Will we pass it in a way that matches it particularness?
Right now, I’m passing winter filling my house with the smell of orange, making small things, and listening to what I affectionately call “sad Celtic Christmas music.”
By this I mean the albums Celtic Christmas I and II from Windham Hill. They were two of three Christmas CDS my parents seemed to have. It is a bit of a family joke now how sad I found the songs on those albums. I remember them piercing me to my core with a profound sadness that I couldn’t shake. So I reasonably avoided them.
But a few years ago I realized I really wanted to listen to those albums again. So I found them and played them. Not only did I like the songs—many of them folk songs in Gaelic—they also spoke to me on a strange level.
My surname before I married was of Scottish origin. I didn’t know this growing up because it’s not one of the obvious ones. But nonetheless, it’s a name that hails from Peebles, on the border with England. It’s the only branch of my family that I’ve found myself wondering about.
The cold, dark months in many traditions are a time of considering, honoring and perhaps communing with one’s ancestors. Dark days reasonably prompt a consideration for the unseen and what’s come before. I find myself thinking about mine now, particularly when a traditional tune from the British isles strikes me somewhere deep inside.
One of the tracks is Muladach Mi Is Mi Air M’aineoil.5 It’s in Scottish Gaelic. The first time I played it again as an adult I found that, despite my lifelong inability to hear lyrics clearly, I can hear and form most of the unfamiliar sounds of Gaelic. I’d never purposefully listened to the song, but the sounds came right back to me.
Muladach Mi Is Mi Air M’aineoil. is not really a “Christmas song.” It seems to be a waulking song. Waulking (also called fulling or tucking) is part of the process of cleaning lanolin out of the wool by means soaking it in human urine and then pushing it all around for a good long while. Women did this in a group, pushing either with their bare hands or feet. During the process, they sang together: waulking songs.6
I wonder: how many of my ancestors sat with their sisters, mothers, aunts, and friends, bringing their voices together not for performance or ego but as a matter of course. As a way to pass the time, and keep time. No matter how “good” their voices were, they sang. They sloshed the piss soaked wool around and they sang.
Now. Hear me out. I think I might be missing that.
It’s called the Dunbar number.
That’s the thing people keep tossing around. I’ve written about it myself. Rosie Spinks mentions it in her essay. It’s that comment people make about “we are only supposed to hold the cares of a village, not the whole world.”
It was first proposed by anthropologist Robin Dunbar in the 1990s. Interestingly, he conducted his research the year I was born. He found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size. Dunbar concluded that by using the average human brain size he could extrapolate that humans can comfortably (emphasis mine) maintain 150 stable relationships. Other proponents of the idea suggest there is a range (reasonable) that is between 100 and 250 relationships.
There is of course criticism of Dunbar’s idea, or alternate numbers that are proposed. Even so, I think it’s only reasonable to assume that there is some kind of limit to the number of relationships we can maintain and people we can care about in a meaningful way.
Yet right now, our access to people—to other stories and potential relationships, regardless of stability or “realness”—is absolutely limitless.
There are too many stories in my head now. Stories which are not my own. They’re not even stories I’m holding for people I love. I got them on the internet.
I wonder: could I still weave a story on the fly now or is there too much clogging my head? Do I hit my Dunbar number max by 9:30am?
And then there is the pressure to write another essay. To make sure I keep up with the approved schedule. That’s not even a story. That’s content creation.
This worries me.
Danica Boyce, in that same episode on the Christmas season, talks about how people would be making tiny things for decorating their homes during the holiday season. She mentions traditional miniatures several times.
—a writer and herbalist—recently sent out a newsletter and in it she mentions how in winter people like my ancestors would have been doing small indoor tasks with their hands. Like processing herbs, darning, or mending.I discovered a few years ago that what makes the holiday season tolerable for me is making small things with my hands. It’s the only way I can find the joy everyone seems to be shouting about. So I paint ornaments, cut paper snowflakes, and make felt chains.
Isn’t it strange that the thing which unlocked winter joy for me is the thing my ancestors would have done to pass the wintertime?
I also wonder: did they sing while they darned the socks? Did someone else tell a story while the lining on the coat got repaired, or the mint was crushed and jarred?
What needs did those stories fulfill?
I had already decided to make everything here free.
Spontaneity is not my strong suit, but the evening before the new moon I decided I would get rid of paywalls here. Listening to this great podcast episode shared with my
was the final straw.I can’t do it any more. I can’t push paid subscriptions. It’s creating a claustrophobia for me. My writing needs breathing room that I haven’t allowed it in a long while. It’s been strapped to the demands of the internet production schedule for too long. I want to stop tying my work to payment in a system which really doesn’t care about my history, my needs, or your history or your needs. It doesn’t care about what’s in our bones.
So all content here will be the same, for paid and free subscribers. If you want to support my work, my heart swells with gratitude. But I won’t keep it from you.
I’ve written more about on my About page, if you’d like to read that.
I also happened on this essay by Holly Whitaker on
about removing the paywall. “Turning off the paywall means ease,” she writes. Yes. And for me, turning off the paywall means I’m not beholden to the season-less internet. I can hibernate. I can find my way through winter. I hope you do too.Where are the circles in darkened rooms where people are telling stories?
What are the stories that need to be told?
Where can this echo in my bones be answered?
I want to pass my winter there.
Updated, 12/29/23:
I didn’t mean for this to be my last essay of the year but it seems it will be. I was finding myself aggravated by the amount of emails I was receiving myself and so I decided to not add that to anyone’s inbox. I’m currently weighing how this Substack will continue in 2024.
Seems small but what a mindfuck.
And getting rip apart in the comments sections of my personal essays.
Substack is social media. I see that now.
Outlander fans will of course know of the great scene in Season One of the tv series where this is portrayed. Honestly, I get chills when I watch it.
There is so much here to love. I felt so many tingles of resonance and I love that your decisions about Substack are leading to more ease and expansion for you (and freedom to contract & hibernate too!)
This reminded me of the birchbark house (by Louise Erdrich) about an Ojibwa family in the 1800s and how the grandma would never tell the kids stories during the summer/harvest time. They had to wait for winter! ❤️
Just a little ping I got while reading - what if you told some of your “stories” in an audio format? Maybe here on Substack or elsewhere? I for one would love to hear them!