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It's August. What else are you doing?
FRIENDS! I’M BAAAAACK!
A whole bunch of new subscribers joined us while I was on my break. Welcome! Before we get into it, here’s a little bit about me and what you’ve signed up for:
Hi! I’m Liz, a writer (duh), a social media strategist (ew), a Canadian (eh), and I live in Los Angeles (insert your own opinion here). In the winter of 2023, going outside felt like visiting an open air asylum, and I needed something to call our post-pandemic-world-on-fire-content-goblin zeitgeist. So, I coined this era “the Age of Unhingement™,” and started this Substack where I live out my girlhood dream of growing an engaged email list.
I mostly write about the insanity of culture, the spiritual crisis wrought upon us by technology, and my own tireless search for a hinge in this unhinged world, but at its core, Burn It All Down is an experiment in showing up as ME on this sloptimized hellhole we’re still calling the internet, seeing what happens, and who finds their way here.
I’m so happy to have you, and I hope you’ll stick around.
“Writing,” Kafka once confided in his diary, “is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.”
At the beginning of last month, I listened to an interview with David Sedaris in which he shared that writing is not cathartic for him at all. Not even what goes in his diary. “Like, that’s really embarrassing if you look through an old diary and it’s all about your feelings,” he told NPR.
I was on a plane headed to a yoga retreat when I heard him say that.
A few days earlier, I filled the last page of the journal I kept through a very difficult year. That lime green notebook is full of emotional gigantism, harrowing dispatches from my internal monologue, and the rantings of a bruised optimist psyching up the will to live. Fresh notebook in my backpack, I was done cold plunging into the abyss. From now on, I told myself, I would take a page from David Sedaris and use my diary not to process my unruly feelings or existential outbursts, but as a place to keep detached observations about the silly happenings in my midst.
I got four pages in before I wrote: Still dealing with my “healing journey” that won’t fucking end.
I know that sentence would make David Sedaris sick.
I heard about Kripalu — the yoga retreat I was flying to when David Sedaris inspired me to become less Kafkaesque — from Paul, my best friend for five days, four summers ago. We met at Esalen, a cliffside retreat center and “intentional community” that’s been going strong here in California since the 1960s. Both of us had a smidge of writer’s block, and both of us were burnt out from leading ridiculous lives. The retreat was meant to unblock creativity, and the last two days were for making and presenting a final offering that reflected our authentic voice. Neither of us dared to face a blank page alone, so we put our heads together, invented a spiral-shaped board game full of inside jokes, and called it “Chaos.” It was a massive hit with the group. We seriously discussed taking it to market over our final retreat lunch and then never saw each other again. But at some point during our time together, Paul called Kripalu, the largest yoga retreat center in North America, a former Jesuit monastery that occupies 100 wooded acres in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, “the Esalen of the East” and told me that I had to go.
I was at Kripalu for maybe 45 minutes, catching the end of dinner, wandering around the dining hall on a quest for hot sauce, when an older, kind-eyed man asked me what I was looking for, and said, “you must be a Libra.”
“Yes. I’m a Libra rising,” I replied, pleased with myself for exuding enough Venusian energy to obscure that I am a card-carrying Scorpio witch.
He introduced himself as Coach Chris.
A few hours later, I ran into him again, as I paced the halls, wide awake on West Coast time, drinking some useless chamomile tea. Kripalu is sprawling and there were a lot of different retreats happening that week. Coach Chris, not a self-styled coach who sells courses, but an actual coach who runs a high school football program in Brownsville, Brooklyn, was leading one for Black men. I asked him how the first night went and he told me there were painful family stories and a lot of tears.
“You’ve got to reveal it to heal it,” he said.
Every time I saw him after that, he looked progressively more exhausted. I assume from holding space for generations of trauma to be dug up and processed.
I, unlike Coach Chris, did not arrive at Kripalu intending to reveal and heal. I just wanted a gentle break from impolite society. I signed up for a retreat called “Yoga Summer Camp” because I wanted to hike and down dog outside and leave my phone for dead. I didn’t know that a too serious woman would make us mindfully process every activity as a group or that the Wednesday hike would be silent. Walking silently in the woods, my mind became a haunted house, but I am grateful to now know that I can never do a Vipassana retreat because I’d need to be airlifted out.
After my haunted hike, I craved transcendent release. I ditched that afternoon’s “Summer Camp” activities, went hard in a yoga dance class that began with the tuning of chakras and ended with the sublime energy of a drugless rave, enjoyed two coffees and a peanut butter cookie purchased from the gift shop, wrote in my diary without injecting too many feelings, did an hour of Vinyasa before dinner, and attended a sound bath with over a hundred people to end my busy day.
I was very sleepy the next morning, but I wanted to go paddleboarding, so I rallied to join my “Summer Camp” comrades. I had a great time until I zoned out, lost my balance, and jammed my finger on the side of my board as I fell into the picturesque lake.
24 hour later, my finger was so swollen and painful that I spent most of my last day at Kripalu solemnly refilling a bag of ice, but I got my shit together when it was time to leave, and had fun with my new retreat friends on the train ride to New York.
I made it to the city around 9 and had dinner in the East Village. I sat at the bar, ordered a dirty martini, and was eventually handed a tequila shot from the man sitting to my left. “Let’s toast to the beauty of friendship,” he said. I obviously knocked it back. After that, I felt no pain. But my finger still looked crazy, so I went to CVS to buy a splint that I never wore and got a bag of ice from the rooftop bar at my hotel.
When I woke up ten hours later, my finger was less swollen and seemed to be on the mend. I spent a long weekend having a great time in New York and could pretend I didn’t need medical attention until I had to pack my suitcase the night before I left.
I flew home knowing that Urgent Care at KAISER PERMANENTE would be the final stop on my summer tour. That was four weeks ago. If you’re thinking you haven’t heard from me because my finger was too mangled to type much without making it worse, that is true. But if you’re thinking that my finger is healed because I’m back writing to you … well, no … the journey … it continues.
I had to get back to it because, as Kafka once confided in a letter to a friend, “a non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity,” and being a monster courting insanity isn’t cute. A month of sitting on “You’ve got to reveal it to heal it,” an instant canon one-liner from Brooklyn’s own Coach Chris, the only living coach without a social media presence, was torture. But it gave me time to extrapolate.
Back in June, I declared this “A Summer of Love,” a season to abandon isolation and fear and embrace a higher vibe against all odds. Reading the cultural tea leaves made me feel like, collectively, we were on the precipice of a healing breakthrough. But what this summer actually revealed to me, personally, is the theme of loving myself while there’s still more healing to do.
I didn’t plan on nursing this finger for a month. Or on feeling so vulnerable again. Having surgery for melanoma at the end of January taught me that healing has its own timeline, but I had to relearn that lesson with my finger every single time it swelled up after I decided it was fine because I was done dealing with it.
I will concede, “A Summer of Love” bringing about healing makes a lot of sense. After all the normalcy we’ve lost and the uncertainty that persists, life now has a scab, and it keeps getting picked. We’re all healing from various communal reveals, not to mention our own special ailments, and we can’t keep destroying our vital organs by mainlining outrage or keep numbing our pain with increasingly vacuous forms of content. I know you want me to tell you how to stop doing that — everyone loves a How-To Guide or Handy Listicle of Tips — but there is no practical cure for spiritual disease. You have to get right with yourself and rebuild a life outside of your phone if you want to stop feeling like shit.
The good news is: You’re not alone! If we want to heal collectively, it can begin with all of us changing our ways, just a little bit.
I’ve been beating this drum for years, but it bears repeating: “Normal” is dead, not just lost on its way back home from defeating the Trojans. This unhinged age is liminal and so is healing. Our culture loves a “Before & After,” but living in the in-between is our journey for the time being.
And I know we didn’t choose this. I know that the future feels like a terrifying group project with the wrong people taking the lead. I know it’s hard because we don’t have control, and can’t fix the weather, and can’t make the world stop burning fossil fuels. We can’t get these men to act right, or get chatbots to stop glazing fools, or stop the bombs from dropping, or convince bloodthirsty enemies to hold hands and mindfully process at Kripalu.
But I can keep my side of the street clean.
I can keep my heart open. I can stay connected to my community. I can be kind. I can care. I can write and share my words and not prompt a machine to think and create for me instead of using my own beautiful head.
I don’t know what the future holds, but I do know that the old ways are gone and we can’t go back to sit in the ashes. I know that if we can love the tender and terrified parts of ourselves, we can face the unknown and that it’s time to evolve and move forward in courage.
We all have a story. Mine just happens to have a “healing journey” at the center. Unfortunately, I’m way too many chapters in to give up on it now, so I guess I’ll just keep healing from the yoga retreat that I never intended to heal at.
So, everything … still insane as per always! But I’m having a good summer because at least I’m not bored. I’m optimistic about the second half of this year, which will be completely bonkers — an official forecast. And I’m so happy to be back writing with my 9 healthy fingers and their one special friend.
More soon, but not too soon, because I just saw my acupuncturist, my most trusted healer, and she told me to stop typing so much. Oops. In the meantime, I’m ✨manifesting✨ a healthy August for all of us.
Less Lessons, More Blessin’s™
Liz