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BOOKBEAR EXPRESS

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IT'S OKAY TO CARE TOO MUCH

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IT'S OKAY TO CARE TOO MUCH

Ava
Aug 12, 2024
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What I like most in people is a sense of heaviness. Some of my close friends are
gregarious while others are shy and restrained, but all of them have big
feelings and an incredibly complex inner world. If you opened them up and
reached in you would never get to the bottom.

A while back my friend said that her therapist mentioned that she might be
addicted to love. She found it to be a distressing thought. In turn, I reflected
that I am not close to a single person who doesn’t have an obsessive, heavy
relationship with love. I know that there are other people out in the world who
think there are more important things, and I find that to be a funny thought.

These days, I try not to pathologize my own obsessions. I think you can guide
where your attention falls, but you can’t fundamentally change what you care
about. Renunciation and abstinence are ways of managing obsession, not a way of
ridding yourself of it. Often, acceptance is what finally allows us to move on.





I’ve always cared too much about other people. When I was in elementary school,
I wanted to hug my teachers every morning. I was so attached to them. Obviously,
all the other kids were like, You are so weird. What is wrong with you? I
finally stopped in third grade, way too late. I watched children’s television
until I was a teenager—I was too attached to all the shows I like, characters
like Babar and Clifford the Big Red Dog. Even now, I’m completely unable to be
normal about a Waymo. I think that Waymos are sentient beings, not a person but
kind of like a dog.

As a teenager, I was troubled by the heaviness of my attachments. I wanted to be
able to shrug them off, to move lightly. I wanted to be cool about things. It’s
funny to see now that what I find endearing about others is exactly their
inability to be cool about things. I like people who care too much, who can’t
stop caring at a reasonable interval. The best compliment I can give, and the
one I give most to people I love, is: “You have a big heart.”

I have a big heart too. It’s been a long journey to learn how to manage it. When
I think back to my childhood and teenage years, I feel frightened by my own
vulnerability, my puppyish-ness. I remember being 13 riding the Skytrain
downtown, starting conversations with strangers. They would say when I finally
revealed my age, Oh, I thought you were 18. I was a kid who was so eager to
cosplay as an adult, to volunteer for adult responsibility. Which I couldn’t
handle.





While writing this I reread Rayne Fisher-Quann’s wonderful post The Pain Gap,
and thought about how the problem with caring too much is that in most
relationships no one else is truly accountable for your pain. You can love
someone intensely, and they can, and might, just brush it off. Even if they feel
the same way, they may not respond the way you want them to. That doesn’t make
them a bad person. But it also doesn’t make you a bad person.

At 20, if I found myself caring too much, I would’ve shamed myself into the
ground for it. Like, it’s my fault, I acted weird, I misjudged the situation,
why am I still fixated on it… all this circular thinking that ultimately was
focused on controlling the situation and rationalizing the pain. These days, I
feel pretty okay with whatever I feel, and what other people feel as well.

T said this weekend that I give other people permission to be the way they are,
and that made me want to tear up. Both because that’s how I want to show up in
the world and because that’s a sign I give myself permission to be the way I am.
To feel the love that arises naturally, and say I don’t feel it when I don’t.

bookbear express is completely enabled by paying subscribers. Please consider
supporting my work if you like these posts <3


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I think it takes a lot of time to figure out love really feels like, especially
a love that feels right. We carry so much that our parents unconsciously passed
to us, and it can lead to us looking for love or validation in the wrong places.
Just because someone is kind, or sweet, or smart, or compatible with you doesn’t
mean they are capable of loving you in a way that feels good, or even capable of
returning your love for them. Honestly, they might not even like you. That’s
just a fact of life. But I don’t think people should be ashamed of getting it
wrong. Getting it wrong is evidence that you’re still trying to get it right.
Yes, it’s embarrassing, but it’s also normal and okay. For some reason (perhaps
because I write this blog) I live a life where people confess a lot of things to
me, and they always think they’re telling me the most horrifying thing in the
world, and I always think it’s… well, not normal in the sense of average, but
normal as in completely human. Your humiliation is everyone else’s, too.

I don’t have all the answers, and I get things wrong all the time. But I no
longer fight against my nature. My life is filled with love, with deeply loving
people, because I care too much. How could I resent that? My capacity to attach
to others also my capacity to attach to the world.

Accepting who you are doesn’t mean you should stay in situations that hurt you.
I advise people, both strangers and close friends, to leave relationships when I
think their care is unreciprocated or they clearly are unfulfilled. I think that
if you find yourself consistently directing your love towards places or people
that don’t love you back, you should try to find healthier places to put it. But
who you are and how much you care is probably not the issue. In our culture
heaviness is often pathologized, but I think caring too much is the key to
everything good in life.

I don’t know if there’s anything I believe in more strongly than this: People
can find love that feels good to them, and they deserve to, and they shouldn’t
feel ashamed for wanting it. Please don’t numb yourself out because caring is
painful. Your capacity for sensitivity and commitment is the best thing about
you.





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ONE WEIRD RELATIONSHIP TIP

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Aug 6
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ENTRY POINTS

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ENTRY POINTS


ON MEANING

Ava
Jul 29, 2024
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CARL MOLL, BIRCHWOOD IN EVENING LIGHT, 1902,

I would like 16 more people to fill out the Bookbear Readership Survey so please
be one of them if you have a moment!



We live in a society that shows us many paths to status but very few to meaning.
As a child, I internalized that I should strive to be beautiful, thin,
intelligent, accomplished and materially comfortable. Ways to accomplish this
included eating less, exercising, undergoing various cosmetic interventions,
going to a “good” college and working hard at a “good” profession that would
allow me to make money. I was taught that doing these things would make me
desirable to friends and to a romantic partner who possessed the same status
markers; it would make my parents proud of me; I would therefore be “lovable”
and “accepted.”

As a child, I wanted to be happy, but the world around me assured me that only
path to happiness was the one I laid out above; that if I worked diligently and
was “good enough,” I would then qualify for joy. Happiness was the result of
achieving, of consuming, of possessing.

All of this now strikes me as tragically bereft. I understand now that while I
received an excellent material education, what I was looking for was a spiritual
education. I would say that what was lacking was religion, but the truth is that
I’m sure I would’ve chafed under the strictures of any Abrahamic religion; I
know enough Chinese-Christian kids (my cousins, for one!) to predict all the
ways I would’ve rebelled.

Instead, I’d say that what I was looking for throughout my childhood and
adolescence and young adulthood was what Romain Rolland called “oceanic feeling”
in a letter to Freud in 1927: “the sensation of eternity, of ‘being at one with
the external world as a whole.’” In other words, I was looking for the presence
of God. The feeling, not the narrative.

Most people are looking for God in one way or another. Certainly all the people
I know—certainly everyone in this town where everyone has their personal theory
of apocalypse and immortality. We’re all seekers. The problem is there’s a lot
of people out there who want to tell you the right way to seek. I never liked
that. All my life I’ve hated being told what to do. Any religion that’s going to
tell me to obey a guy is losing me right at the door.

As an adult I moved to San Francisco and realized slowly over several years that
love is the best entry point to meaning. In high school, when you’re writing
your college admission essay you’re supposed to volunteer your own theory of how
you’re going to save the world. Truth be told, I never had such grand theories.
In the years since, instead of going bigger, I’ve gone even smaller.

I believe that love of others, love of vocation, love of nature are the best
ways to connect to oceanic feeling. It’s a big thing to love a single person
well for a long time. It’s really hard to find something you really love to work
on. Taking care of my friends and writing about it is my best theory of how to
save the world.

When I talk about the friendship theory of everything, it’s another way of
saying that love is a portal into meaning. A house is just a house until a
family lives there. A job is just a job unless you like the people you’re
working with.

We are inducted into what we love by the people we trust and care for. I feel
incredibly lucky that at 18 I stumbled into a peer group that I liked and
admired. I think that’s why SF’s group housing scene works: you can just move
into an eight-bedroom Victorian house and know that your roommates will likely
be pretty cool because they’re either your friends or your friends of friends.
It’s not about the house itself, it’s about the people there and their
aspirations and interests and relationships. It’s also how lots of people here
find jobs: you work at your friend’s company, you work at a company your friend
also works at, someone tells you about something that seems like a good fit.

Directly and indirectly, my friends have helped me find housing, work, romantic
love, spirituality. As in, B literally pressed a bag of shrooms into my hand,
and said, You have to do this. As in, when I was two years into my Substack and
very much wanted to find an additional job, multiple friends said Just focus on
writing. If I write a book and five of my friends like it I think that would be
enough.

if you like my work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber <3 your support
makes everything possible for me


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In some corners of the Internet there’s a fascination with traditionalism, and
criticism of the ways the openness and optionality of modernity have left people
feeling lost. I’ve always felt like, look, I could never be a traditionalist,
because I don’t want to give birth to five kids without anesthesia and spend
half of my day cleaning up around the farm. I don’t think most of the women who
lived in the past and couldn’t vote and couldn’t get married to the person they
loved and couldn’t use birth control had such a great time. I think they had a
really bad time. But I do believe there’s a way in which culture in the past
offered people easier entry points into meaning, and that’s what people today
are nostalgic for.

I don’t think our culture does a great job at making good marriages seem
possible and aspirational, or parenthood seem desirable and fulfilling, or
finding a true vocation seem achievable. Back to the paths to status, not
meaning thing—I look back at what I was told to strive for during childhood, and
now think, what was any of that supposed to give me? If I was a concert pianist
and went to Harvard and became a partner at a law firm, was that supposed to
make me happier? Maybe if I genuinely loved piano and Harvard and law. But if
not, who is all of that for? We are taught to aspire to prestige, taught to
fetishize the idea of the thing instead of enjoying the thing itself. If you
raise kids that way, you end up with a generation that prefers porn to sex. It’s
Narcissus mesmerized by his own reflection: you’d rather watch yourself looking
good than actually live.

Life is not something you perform for the benefit of other people. When you
perform for other people, you rob yourself of the chance to relate to them in a
real way. Everything collapses inwards, becomes solipsistic: you and the camera,
you and the mirror, you and the void. But we need the Other in order to feel
real. People are doorways out of solipsism.

I’ve been looking for entry points to meaning for a long time. And I feel like
I’m writing for people like me, who are seekers, who are interested in history
but don’t want to regress, who don’t resonate with all the things sold to us in
modernity, who are looking for structure without masochism. Who want to answer
the question of: what if I want to find meaning and belonging without doing
anything too weird? Like, what if I don’t want to be obsessed with effective
altruism and I don’t want to convert to Islam and I don’t want to go on
missionary trips to Chile and I don’t want to prove that the DMT aliens are real
and I don’t want to complain about wokeness on Twitter and I don’t want to live
in a polyamorous commune and I don’t want to become a monk? I don’t really have
any apocalypse theories or immortality theories or afterlife theories and right
now I don’t feel like I need them. I believe in the aliveness present in all
things. I want to write every day and read books and to be in love and live near
all my friends and work on what I know to be true and good. For me, that’s
salvation—that’s ambition.

In high school I volunteered for a couple years at a care home for people with
dementia. All anyone there ever talked about was their children (I think their
spouses were mostly already dead). The ones who had children who visited were
happy and the ones who didn’t weren’t. Everything I needed to know about life
was revealed to me right there, though it would take me a long time to see it.

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HOW TO STAY IN YOUR BODY

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HOW TO STAY IN YOUR BODY


WRITING AS FEELING PART 2

Ava
Jul 26, 2024
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ALEX KATZ, LAST LOOK, 1986

Please please fill out the Bookbear Readership Demographic Survey if you haven’t
yet!! It is much appreciated.

I’ve noticed recently that the last thing I do at night is unfurrow my brow.
When I’m comfortably settled under my duvet, earplugs in, consciousness slowly
deserting me, I feel my forehead gently but distinctly unclench. Every time I
think: weird, I didn’t know I was holding so much tension in my face.

The Emerson line of “First be a good animal” has guided me for many years. As I
start to tabulate the results of the Bookbear Readership Survey (please complete
it here if you haven’t!) I’ve noticed one of the most unanimous results is that
everyone says they’re more in their head than their body. I mean, we’re here on
Substack so that’s not surprising, but it also makes me realize how much need we
have for physicality.

I tend to feel most creative when I’m in a physical, receptive state, paying
attention to sights and sensations when I’m in a new country, running my fingers
over tree bark while hiking, draping my leg over someone I love. Analyzing is
all well and good, but the type of writing I do generally comes from a more
emotional place, and I find that it’s very hard for me to decide what to write
when I’m just sitting there fretting with no inspiration.

When I’m in my body, I understand my preoccupations in a different way: like oh,
this week I’ve been feeling oversocialized or, it’s really hard for me to let go
of this particular anxiety. I’m able to reconnect with my intuition. Instead of
feeling like a forest crowded with noises and movement, I feel like an empty
plain. From The Argonauts: Many years ago, Carson gave a lecture at Teachers &
Writers in New York City, at which she introduced (to me) the concept of leaving
a space empty so that God could rush in. I knew a bit about this concept from my
boyfriend at the time, who was big into bonsai. In bonsai you often plant the
tree off-center in the pot to make space for the divine. But that night Carson
made the concept literary.

That line has stuck with me for years: leaving a space empty so that God can
rush in. If I’m too in my head, there’s no space left for inspiration. If you’ve
ever been in an obsessive anxiety spiral, you know exactly what I mean: you get
trapped into this loop that just gets tighter and tighter, less and less
fulfilling. You’re not going anywhere; you’ve caving in. Being in my body feels
like the opposite of that. I feel expansive and relaxed and able to notice the
environment around me.

I asked in my subscriber chat what you guys said helped you stay in your body:

 * yoga (multiple people)

 * psychedelics (multiple people)

 * vivation breathwork - Halvard

 * exercising especially mobility exercise like pistol squats - A$MR Rocky

 * cold showers, walking an energetic dog, shrooms, 30 min breathing exercise,
   dancing - Laurel

 * The only two ways I’ve managed to get out of my head is through reading and
   rigorous exercise. With either, I can slip out of my mind and drift in this
   bodiless dark - Sagar Mehra

 * also a certain kind of walking/writing/photography/even conversation where
   I’m really really present and trying to notice everything I’m feeling without
   self censorship. picked up some of it up from Michael Ashcroft’s Alexander
   technique stuff - Henry Liu

 * self-pleasure along with these awesome suggestions - Shalise

 * finding the right. therapist is crucial. writing, yoga and breath work has
   also done wonders for me - hà anh

 * Meditation that specifically pays attention to the body. My therapist is very
   body-focused as well. I think, another one for me has been being in water
   because there you can sense the body’s movements with no weight or effort -
   Finn Lobsien

 * hiding my phone - Remy Smidt

 * reading good poetry - Ben

There are many more great suggestions and I can’t fit all of them here so I
suggest you check out the subscriber chat.

I like that we seem to agree with each other: yoga, psychedelics, running,
journaling, therapy, going to the park with my dog all help a ton. If you’re
currently feeling tortured by anxiety, I recommend this as a potential day:

 * wake up in the morning and go for a short run

 * complete your workday if you have a workday to complete

 * do yoga at 6:30 PM 

 * have dinner with a friend

 * go home and write about your feelings 

 * read as you fall asleep

if you enjoy bookbear express, please consider becoming a paid subscriber!! your
support makes my work possible <333


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It was very gratifying to me that several of you guys said writing helps you get
out of your head; Aishlin in particular mentioned “Writing exactly how I’m
feeling right now to get into my body” and I too find that enormously useful and
not evangelized enough. In my opinion, Sheila Heti’s Alphabet Diaries is a great
example of this kind of writing (screenshot taken from this tweet):



She’s writing about what she feels, what she notices, what is. That’s the kind
of writing that helps me get into my body and stay there.

This is how I might journal about anxiety, for instance: Lately it feels like
everything I do is wrong. He snapped at me and then apologized. I was 27 minutes
late for dinner with N. No excuse, just preoccupied. I got mad at the Waymo for
being bad at merging into traffic. They left the shrimp in the pasta even though
they said they wouldn’t. I didn’t want to spend the evening alone but I didn’t
feel like having someone come over because the apartment is messy. I tried to
watch a TV show, couldn’t stay focused. I tried to read, couldn’t stay focused.

Sometimes I write to diagnose, analyze, understand; other times I just want need
to put whatever I’m feeling on paper. Some of my favorite writing to consume is
diaristic for this very reason: I like the rawness of it, the spillage. You
might not be able to be honest about your emotions with anyone else, but at
least you can confess to yourself. Try it! It clears a lot of space.

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