Quitting Can Be Fun

Writing advice, an essay, recommendations & more

It’s a warm Halloween, and I’m wearing: blue eyeshadow; candy corn perfume; one to three Fenty Skin and/or Fenty Beauty products; ye ole Jordan 4s (Retro OG Bred from 2019 but based on a colorway he wore in the ‘89 playoffs, don’t worry about it); a blue bra that nobody else can see; black Bricks & Wood gym socks; and a black T-shirt with a white fluffy cat licking its bloody front paw. I’ve also got an evil eye bracelet with a tiny silver charm featuring the Virgin of Guadalupe. My hair is half up and half down. I just did three conference calls in a row and didn’t have to be on camera. I’m sitting outside at a coffeeshop I really like, no jacket necessary.  I quit Twitter. It’s a good day.

I feel relaxed, but I woke up in the morning like I always do: running disaster or crisis scenarios in my head and working backwards on how to deal with them. These can be personal dilemmas, historical battles, future natural disasters, conflicts in fictional shows or films that haven’t been written yet. It’s a cacophony in there already.

I love my morning meditation, laying on my back in bed, to help calm my mind so that I can get up and use the bathroom and commence my day.

I know my own addictive tendencies. Over time, I learn how to manage them and still be a person in the world. For example, I still go to the bar to socialize, to write, to have a soda. I just don’t drink alcohol anymore. It was fun for a long time and then my behavior with it became unhealthy, so I stopped. Staying stopped is sometimes hard and sometimes easy and sometimes medium difficult and sometimes a thing I don’t even think about.

I’m still on social media. But years ago, before I was sober or had an idea that alcohol was bad for me, I realized Facebook was bad for me. So I stopped. And today I stopped being on Twitter, too.

It’s not the site itself, necessarily. It’s not the 110,000+ accounts that followed me (many of which are being deleted every day, many of which are bots, many of which are inactive, many of which belong to really fucking cool people.)

It’s not that man, either. It’s me.

I was in the park this weekend for a dog costume contest (more on that below) and a woman clocked me, smiled, and said, “This is an imposition, but – are you Very Online?” It was very friendly and silly, and the best confirmation I could’ve wanted from the universe that it’s good to let old things go. That it came in the form of a friendly local dramaturge was even better.

Of course I made her talk to me for thirty minutes, and then made her talk to my friends. She was cool. Or scared. Maybe both.

We got into Sondheim, and people who dress up their dogs in elaborate costumes, and I asked her what she thought about being Very Online. I’d been thinking about it for, well, years.

Focus has been harder for me, and perhaps for you, in the past few years. I got so much out of Twitter: income; fundraising for charity; friends; butts in seats at live shows when I did a lot of those; talking head spots on TV shows; punch-up gigs on scripts; probably a few book sales; certainly most of the subscriptions to this newsletter; job interviews; dates; entertainment; frustration; rage; fear; laughter; death and rape threats; bizarre messages to my representation and friends; realizations that some folks I used to personally love were pieces of shit; realizations that I was sometimes a piece of shit in ways I had not previously contemplated…as Zorba the Greek said of Friendster, “THE FULL CATASTROPHE.”

I felt that on balance the good stuff was better than the bad stuff. But as time went on, my brain changed. When I took alcohol out of the equation in 2018, I found that things to which I’d previously been relatively numb seemed to matter more. Oddly enough, other shit that I really enjoyed when I was fucked up seemed to lose some of its allure. And for me, after producing a lot of work consistently, I suddenly found it much harder to focus.

This is not a condemnation of the platform, which is often fun as fuck. It was a brilliant invention for many reasons. But - as Cal Newport explains quite accessibly in Digital Minimalism and other places, and as a zillion people have already said in a zillion ways - it’s addictive by design.

Sobriety taught me that you lose some people when you stop doing the thing that brought you together, whether in real life or online, but you probably weren’t really each other’s people for the long term anyway. And that’s okay.

When you spend at least a few minutes a day almost every single day doing A Thing for 14 years, it’s going to feel odd to not do that thing anymore. Would it be more embarrassing if I were talking about alcohol or Twitter? (The latter. And that, sadly, is what I’m talking about!)

Over 5100 days in a row, most of them somehow involving that imaginary but real place. How odd.

I’m not here to preach to you or anybody else, acting as if this is a noble decision. I’m hardly some pure angel of excellent consumer behavior. Who do I think made these Jordans? Did I check the label on these vintage jeans to make sure they were manufactured in a country that upholds my personal ideals when it comes to labor practices? Did I not order household supplies from Amazon, the very entity that (along with Wal-Mart and Target and the now-dead Borders and the not-yet-dead Barnes & Noble) has put many of my beloved indie bookshops out of business?

I love the Internet. But with too many outlets available to me, I have trouble focusing on some stuff that’s important to me: writing these newsletters, writing books and scripts, painting stuff that nobody ever sees, just for the fun of it.

Plus, I have a full-time job, and a new home in an old city where I want to make more real-life friends instead of pretending I’m socializing by telling somebody their ass looks great or I’m in love with their pants and adding a gif. I want to sweetly bother these people IN PERSON and then be asked to LEAVE the KNITTING CIRCLE or SEX DEN.

Social media might not light you up like it lights me up. Chances are, you can have a drink or two and not fuck your boring but nice neighbor Tad’s wife Lucinda OR get into a boundary-crossing relationship with your boss’s boss’s boss (also Lucinda). You know, not everybody takes a sip of whiskey and finds to their surprise that they’ve got an entire pinball machine inside their head, with bells and whistles and dings and cool imaginary prizes. Some of us do. And then all we do is go to the arcade. And it gets kind of weird, and then it gets really bad.

I’ve known for years that I would leave Twitter eventually. I have great memories (and some scary ones) from my drinking days, my Facebook days, and my Twitter days. And that’s all they are now – memories.

It’s Halloween. The leaves are decaying and they smell great. (So do I – this candy corn perfume is really working.) Death and endings aren’t always sad. Sometimes they’re even a little bit hilarious.

I’m happy to be here, sharing this newsletter with you. I hope you’ll stay here with me, and if you like it, tell a friend about it. Twitter was the place where most people found out about this newsletter, and now it’s gone, so I hope word of mouth will help the people who would enjoy this work find it.

I get that I’ve chosen to grow my self-published work more slowly by removing access to so many potential subscribers, but the newsletter will hopefully be better as a result. Maybe I’ll even write another fucking book one of these days. Sadly, as much as the publishing industry tried to believe it, Twitter doesn’t move the needle on bestsellers. You know what does?

Word of mouth. That’s really it. Anyway, please do tell a friend that this newsletter is a fun or at least mostly painless read. I appreciate it.

On to this week’s recommendations and this week’s writing advice. This week, I’ll send a separate essay just to paying subscribers (I figure this issue is long enough already). If you’d like to upgrade to a paid subscription, I’d love that. There’s also the option of going over to Patreon and joining there, where you get the full newsletter issue every week as well as a private podcast episode every week.

Or stay here without paying and enjoy these little moments we have together. I’m grateful to you no matter what.

Thank you for being here.

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Recommendations

Boots - Just in general. Have you considered the humble boot lately? A cowboy boot. A wellie. A galosh. An ankle boot. A bootie. There are so many more! I read this list of boots on Wikipedia (well, I glanced at it) and was briefly transported to the Costume Institute at the Met exhibit of my dreams.

I couldn’t make it to Dollywood for my planned birthday excursion, because I was tired from a week of cold and flu followed by a week of the popular girl of the season, respiratory syncytial virus a.k.a. RSV (NOT SWV ALTHOUGH IT DID RENDER ME “WEAK”!!!!! DO NOT CONFUSE IT!!!!) , so my mom went with our dear family friend and the girls got some boots. The glittery ones above were handmade in Mexico by the J.B. Dillon Company, which seems to be based in Nashville and run by a man called Rick.

Meecham Whitson Meriweather - Meech is a delight on Twitter and Instagram but where Meech really soars is right here on your Substackington. Here’s a vital roundup of the aforementioned dog costume contest in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, New York.

My brother and youngest nephew in those outfits - Enjoy that documentation above. If you see them hustling tourists in Times Square, know that one of them is absolutely hiding a baggie of some good stuff your sister’s cousin said she’d pick up in the Times Square Taco Bell bathroom at the appointed moment (it’ll be behind the toilet after the first daily cleaning, you know the one). Now I can’t tell you which one it is, Jayanne should’ve said something to you and if she didn’t, maybe you don’t have what it takes to be in this business, anyway I’m not even involved.

Hot apple cider - I’ll never get over it!

Buying vintage clothing for sale in shops that do not customarily vend vintage clothing - Now we know these boots are new. I would never pair them with this outfit. However. When we went to the coffee shop, I saw a vintage clothing rack (why not?) I said no thanks to the $200 black leather jacket that surely would’ve made the hot girls talk to me. But I said yes to the dress, a.k.a. a $10 size 14 boys’ Lacoste shirt from who knows when. I changed into the shirt at home and promptly realized I looked like Where’s Waldino giving Drop Dead Frederika energy.

It’s good to remember that we don’t always need to be sexy. Sometimes we are the unappealing yet strangely whimsical figments of children’s bizarre imaginations because of a.) a troubled home life or b.) the kids aren’t troubled, we are just ghosts and kids can see ghosts.

The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Kondo - Using Miss Marie Kondo’s method, which in her book is very clearly described as emerging from childhood dissociative episodes (she talks about being so stressed about cleaning that she passes out, and maniacally going through all her family’s belongings to discard stuff - Marie! I’m worried!) combined with The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning (this book has some really wonderful passive-aggressive digs at the elderly author’s five adult children and multiple grandchildren), I went through my clothes. All of them. And now it’s time for the books.

Now those are most, not all, of my books. Rest assured that Octavia Butler (see right side of photo for one example of her genius!) shall always have a place in MY adult home. As will this novelization of the 1980s and 1990s video game series King’s Quest (by my foot) and some of my own books (three of them are in my hands, and I don’t have the fourth one, oops.)

By the way, if you’re a paid subscriber and want me to sign and mail you one of my own books, let me know. You can email saratoninnewsletter@gmail.com. I appreciate you! It’s on me, kid.

Janet Jackson - Always. The video for Love Will Never Do (Without You) still kills me even though one of these male models is a FOOL and I am not talking about Benin’s own Djimon Hounsou, I promise you that!!!

As an aside, if you think the number of people who has assumed my family is from the Republic of Benin (est. 1975, formerly the Republic of Dahomey, est. 1958, also the year Djimon Hounsou was born) is zero, you would be sadly mistaken. This is a very specific type of conversation I get to have about once every three years with somebody who is drunk but feeling geographical. It makes me want to put on last year’s Halloween costume, Carmen Sandiego, and teach everyone a lesson!

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Writing Advice: Take a Very Short Break

Take a one week break from one (1) social media application and see how it affects your ability to write what you really want to write. This could be a dating app, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, one of those astrology apps, or whatever you want. Just see! It’ll be there when you come back.

You may find, as I sometimes did with Twitter, that you missed reading stuff from some of your favorite teachers. They don’t have to know they are your teachers in order to be your teachers! Jon Kabat-Zinn wrote the book Full Catastrophe Living and he is, in fact, one of my greatest teachers. We’ve never met. I think he tweeted at me once to thank me for something nice I said (see, Twitter can be good.)

Anyway, if that happens, consider whittling down the folks you follow, and making sure to give special preference and attention to those whose work really enhances your life.

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I’ll send this week’s essay to paid subscribers separately. Happy Halloween, babies.

Love,

Sara

Patreon / Medium / Instagram /my favorite nonprofit Miry’s List