Plus One Feelings Club

Short Sands Beach, January 2021

Short Sands Beach, January 2021

I’ve had a lot of thoughts about what to write about after a two-year hiatus. In the past, I mostly covered topics that touched on Problems With The Internet and how we might change them. In the months since, I’ve had a million thoughts a day about that unanswerable question and written basically nothing except for this. I’ve been lucky to ask and answer fascinating questions at work—for clients, and for the company I work for. I’ve parented my child and re-parented myself. I’ve participated in the transformation of my long-term romantic relationship into a co-parenting relationship. I’ve moved towards a love I can only describe as expansive and enormous and deeper than I ever understood could be possible. I’ve listened to a dozen books and read a handful too. I’ve taken to ignoring Instagram and leaving Twitter behind and calling my friends more to tell them that I love them and need them, to hear them talk and cry and share their own joy. I have become a person, maybe I have returned to the person, who can’t really write just about ideas anymore. I have to write about feelings, too.

Am I ready to do that? No, not yet. (Or as my kid would say: No thank you, not right now.) But I still feel like I want to share something with you, so I’ll share what I’ve read that’s moved me a little bit:

In tending to myself, the most important thing I’ve done is listen to Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, both to understand how I parent and to understand how the parenting (and guidance from those in roles of mentorship or leadership) I’ve received has shaped me. Do it, listen to it, read it. You will find something there.

And in the same way where you, after years and years of tedious likes, RTs, follows, and blocks, can finally curate a Twitter feed that serves exactly what you need, I’ve taken to subscribing to (and actually reading) newsletters. Here’s who has my intimate attention right now:

  • alicia kennedy: food, culture, politics, climate change, labor (do it)

  • benedict evans: what matters in tech this week (do it if you want to)

  • camila coddou: art, love, sex, memory (for sure do it, also sidenote: this is who i’m talking about when i talk about moving towards love)

  • nisha chittal: good things to read, good things to cook. (yum)

  • vanessa friedman: friendship, grief, something else entirely (this week’s was really good)

  • zeynep tufekci: smart thinking for puzzles worth pondering? (i don’t know, you probably already subscribe because of course you do.)

  • anne helen peterson: think more about the culture that surrounds you (do it especially if you’ve ever uttered the word millennial.)

I’ll share one more thing. I just got off the phone with a friend in London who said that there isn’t enough space to ask questions anymore, to feel uncertain about hard things or really anything. I told her about Sarah Schulman and I told her about Alicia Kennedy’s take on Sarah Schulman in this week’s newsletter: “She [Schulman] gives us the significance of narrative—especially the significance of seizing it back from these forces of homogenization and pointless universalizing. Indeed, she proves that getting specific to experience is the way to real truths about how the world works; specific doesn’t mean esoteric.” And then I remembered a simpler way of sharing openness to not knowing, from Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous that stopped me in my tracks and made me read it aloud: “I have theories I write down then erase and walk away from the desk. I put the kettle on and let the sound of the boiling water change my mind.”

kate lesniak