three hundred letters

i’ve been writing weekly for a while

Feelings come, feelings go, people come, people go, everything from the sky to the sea comes and goes. And somehow I still continue, somehow the letters keep flowing. Through each year of college, through moving across the country, through a pandemic, through three different jobs, some loss, and even more joy, as the hummingbirds beat their wings hundreds of times a minute and the wind whispers pollen and dust through the air. How have I written for 300 weeks? How have I written 300 editions of this newsletter over seven years? Inconsistently at times. Often lazily. And lovingly, when my best efforts succeed. 

Splash sprung from a single desire many years ago. At age 19, I was in search of relief from the constant anxieties and confusion that haunted my teen years. I was blindly stumbling through the dark, seeking anything that might make the world even a little more comprehensible. My hands moved across different possibilities: self-help books, religious texts, electronic dance music, self-isolation, romance, walks in the park, weightlifting, writing. They all worked a little bit in short bursts, but writing felt good; writing was easy; writing felt like something I could keep up with. I started the weekly newsletter, thinking it would last for a few weeks, maybe a few months. I was unsure what it would turn into or if anyone would ever read it. 

Of course, at the start, my friends and family read it because they are lovely people beyond belief, additional kindnesses onto a lifetime of filling my life with sweetness. And because I wrote, and because they expressed interest in reading more, I kept writing. Writing and pausing for a bit and then writing again, week after week (after week after week). It’s because of them, because of you, that I still do this thing almost seven years later.

But what has it all brought me? 

Now, I can no longer imagine a week without writing. Splash is a newsletter, but it’s also a system central to how I live my life. It’s the most consistent thing in my life, more than most of my friendships and relationships, staying the same through both changing life stages and the prosaic day-to-day. It gives shape to my weeks, a skeleton for my time to latch onto. 

Every seven-day increment is defined by this newsletter: Wednesday nights are sacred, Thursdays are special. I’m never free on a Wednesday night, when most of the actual writing occurs, and Thursdays are days of relief after the letters go out, the only days that I let myself not think about the next one. And there’s the rest of the week. Whatever I read, whatever I watch, whatever I think, I’m searching for threads that might be interesting, that might make it into a notes file that gets turned into something more.

When I write it all out, it sounds strange or even stressful to dedicate so much thought to something like this — a newsletter that goes out to a pretty small audience, one that doesn’t have a clear purpose or value proposition, for no money and for a good amount of time and mental space. Multiply that over three hundred weeks, and the opportunity cost seems pretty significant.

What is it all for? What’s the point of writing every week? Let’s start simple. In a given week, if I do nothing else, if I barely leave bed and eat only Saltines and drink only Fever Tree Ginger Ale™ for a week, I will have still accomplished something. I would’ve written something, made something out of nothing, left another imprint on the world in the way I know how. And that helps me. It helps with the fear that the sands of time are slipping through my fingers and I’m willingly wasting precious seconds. It helps me escape my solipsistic tendencies and think of others, when I bounce from one idea to another, asking myself, “Does anyone even care about this thing?”

It helps because my writing practice is how I live my life. In trying to write better, I’m made more curious about the world and people, more thoughtful about how I approach everything I do, more hardworking in the effort I want to give to things. I could just be growing up, but the process of growing up to me is inextricably linked to trying to make sense of the world every week in front of an audience, in front of you. In my writing, I’m processing work and friends and tragedy and sin and bliss and trying to find beauty in the world. And man, life is just better when you can trace lines between the facets of your life and call them constellations. 

Things go wrong, I have bad days and weeks like everyone else, but art asking for pity is boring. I already ask for your time; how could I ask for pity? Instead, I dig into whatever I can, searching for silver linings or lessons or direction or providence within everything that happens to me. The digging was a way for me to write in a certain way until it became the way I live my life. In each heartbreak and each rainstorm and each bad salad and each broken bowl, I quickly or slowly find something worth cherishing and celebrating, my eye trained for beauty from years of looking for it everywhere to bring to your feet. 

Would I even have any of this, would I have gotten here without the help of those who read me at the beginning? I’m grateful to have any of this growth, this change — the results of your attention. Some of you have watched me grow up in these weekly letters, slip in different complaints about whatever I’m thinking about, copy a new influence every few months or years, and use the word “maybe” an absurd number of times. I was a teenager at the beginning, and now I’m in my mid-twenties. My weekly practice is the doorframe in a childhood home coated in pencil marks, dates, and heights. Look how much bigger I’ve gotten, week by week. I can almost touch the ceiling now.

I plan to continue for as long as possible; I plan to keep growing. Maybe it will look completely different some day. Maybe it will look completely different next week. Who could know? Like I said about this newsletter in Splash No. 1 in July 2017, “I'm not sure what I'll do with it. Which is fine. We're gonna figure this out together.”

Hope you’ll stay around for the ride.

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We must do what we can to push back against the genocide in Gaza. Consider calling your US representatives to support de-escalation and a ceasefire, donating to Care for Gaza, a grassroots organization delivering food to Palestinians, or buying e-SIMs to keep folks connected to their families.

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💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• ALBUM - Tomorrow Was the Golden Age by Bing & Ruth - lovely ambient record that has kept me floating through the last few days

• POEM - “Answering Her Question” by Alice White - “Mama, will I die?” / I just drive. Try to keep the car tethered / to the earth.