1: Intentions

ifyoucan.substack.com is the url.

If you can make it here is the name of this newsletter.

“If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere” is the aphorism popularly attributed to New York City. One of them, anyway. It collects them.

If you read my on-again, off-again newsletter >The Eureka Project<, perhaps you wondered why it slipped into a pretty solid off-again-ness in mid-2022? Perhaps not. Things end for all sorts of reasons, and sometimes you don’t even notice them ending until someone pops up and says, where did it go? And maybe even, let’s start again.

I can tell you one big reason I stopped. I was embarking on a big life project: moving to New York. I’ve been here for eight months, and I’m still moving to New York.

Having arrived, I did not start writing again, because “another white man moves to New York! From London!! And he thinks he’s having a unique experience!!!” did not feel like any kind of reason to bother you. (Did you catch what just happened? We can even silence themselves).

But I’m starting again now, for two reasons.

One: Basically, Gratitude Journalling

I’m a pretty solipsistic person. I think? I just looked it up and it didn’t mean what I thought it meant - it meant something worse, and it was still true: being self-centred, and even having the view that only the self can be said to exist. I mean nothing greedy or intentional when I say this, but yes. Often, my model of the world is much more real to me than anything that’s actually happening. More often during bad times than good. It’s an unmaintained pool-slide with gunge at the bottom. It’s a black hole. You can sit in the hole, god of nothing, and hate it, and love hating it, and eventually, hate loving it.

Why did I move here? It’s a separate question from “why am I here now?” but I can tell you that I moved to escape parts of my life that I’d made myself so frustrated over, I could no longer sit in my own skin unless I was comforted by the thought of some big glamorous self-directed change on the horizon. I moved to escape that feeling. And, despite the intransigence of Virgin Atlantic baggage limits requiring me to say fuck it and straight up leave my decks at Heathrow so I could get on the plane-

–my capacity to hate myself found its way on board. Funny: it’s the heaviest thing I own.

I still have it, and the romance of being here doesn’t make it go away. Indeed I’ve started to feel it choke the joy of being here: as patient friends have reminded me the feelings you have are real but the life you’re living is, uhh, AMAZING?

If you’re reading this, you’re the sort of person who already knows what gratitude journaling is. I’m here to tell you that with the right (wrong) mindset, you too can indulge in resentment journaling, wherever you go, and you don’t even need a notebook.

It’s hard to stop habits entirely, but it’s possible to change their shape. And so, this is going to be more like an act of “curiosity journalling”: remembering to notice, remembering to remember, especially with the good stuff. And with the bad stuff, remembering to not treat my view of it as reality. Why do I think it is how I think it is? How else it might it be?

Two: Newsletters without news are letters, and letters can be nice

When talking to friends I have this habit of apologising for going on too long, forgetting that in most cases, if you are then they’ll tell you. (He says, at the 700-word mark). But that presumes that when people listen to you they are only EVER doing you a favour, and that’s 100% of what they’re doing. In the spirit of point 1: is that true? It’s not true for me when I listen to friends. I get something from it. Or we wouldn’t be friends.

So I write to you in the spirit of friendship, on the idea that maybe you’ll like these letters as they are, and that you have the freedom to let them go if not. Equally, I’d love to hear from you.

THAT SAID!

The secret third reason emerges: this will hold me gently accountable to my own life. New York doesn’t actually have any expectations of you - New York doesn’t care, which will come up a lot here - but it CAN make you have high expectations of yourself. All my adult life I’ve struggled with how you balance wanting things for yourself and from yourself, vs being happy with who you are. So this letter is my promise to you and to me: I’ll find a compassionate way to go get stories for you. I’m trying to build a life — no, to grow a life. You can’t force any specific part of that, or make the whole thing come quicker than its time, but at least this way I can hold the intention of living a life worth sharing with you.

Not a big one, or a glamorous one. But at least a life of enquiry, attempted balance, bravery and humanity.

A life, thin-sliced and made available in your inbox, every two weeks. That’ll be 24 letters in the year, which seems alright. They won’t all be this long. We just had some emotional housekeeping to do.

That is it, from me, for now. Next one: Monday the 15th of January. Take care of yourself until then.

And… Happy New Year from this place.

James

from Variety Coffee, Ridgewood, Queens, NYC