A Question for you all: for the Rebirth of the Althing
Hello loves.
Happy Sunday. That hole picture is not mine. I took it from the internet.
I’ll read all these comments.
I would like to ask for some feedback about the Althing itself, since the opportunity presented itself so magically. If you’re new, don’t worry if this is confusing…just follow along. The Althing is a monthly newsletter and roundup I’ve been posting (and charging for) since near the dawn of the patreon. It was my hack to make sure I had at least once piece of content every month. I have to post it by 12pm PST on the last day of every month or I lose out on that dough.
Last night my draft got mangled by a patron bug and I didn’t make the deadline….and I posted a frustrated message. We will work on fixing and posting it Tuesday when everyone is back at work. I crawled into bed with my partner, who’d been entertaining Ash and waiting patiently in bed for me for an hour while I’d tried to fix it – and I grumbled about how on-brand it was for the season. And how hard it was to write something so satisfying and not be able to release it to the world. I thought about my parasocial heart. And about how much I work on the fucking weekends.
(You’ll be happy to know we are all taking the day off today and going to the beach with the boys.)
So. I woke up today to all your wonderful and understanding comments and I figured….
I’ll ask YOU – my family of patrons for many years: is there anything I can or should change about the Althing?
Do you like enjoy or even watch the little video message I include? Is it too long? Too hard to read? Too repetitive? Is there anything you would rather see, or hear about, or read? Given that we are possible switching to a monthly model, should we do it quarterly instead of monthly? Listen: I make it for YOU. It often helps me (and the team) to sort of take stock and survey my work. It goves me a nice place to put all the stuff that doesn’t fit anywhere else.
But.
Evelina said:
And then Superball and Laura said:
This is something to consider at the moment.
What really caught me was Evelina saying about the “liberating power” of giving up digging and starting anew.
So I’m going to look at this tech disaster as a little bit of a gift, an opening, for the moment.
Someone was recently talking about a loved one with me and used this same metaphor: the hole, the digging. They said: “once you’ve dug a hole that deep, the only way to dig is down.”
It was such an apt metaphor and stuck in my head for days. It’s so true, and reminds me a lot of my addict friends’ stories about Rock Bottom (notice the similarity? You’re….”down” there.)
You can climb out of a shallow hole, with your hands, with your feet, with your grit, on your own….when you’ve made a mild mistake or two. But once you’ve doubled and tripled and quadrupled down on the darkness – whether it’s lies, denial, addiction, or whatever – and you’re in a 179-foot deep hole….you cannot dig up.
If we wanna take this metaphor further, there’s two ways to get out of a hole that deep: leave this reality completely (I’ll let you interpret that one – one path leads to clicking glittery shoes and reaervaing time and one leads to….well), or start shouting for help so someone lowers a rope. That’s the way out.
And here we are, back on The Art of Asking.
It’s never too late to ask your world to throw you a rope. You may think you’re too far down there for someone to hear you…but I promise you, someone knows you’re down there, and help exists. Sometimes it’s time to stop digging and start yelling.
I have been considering a lot of my own bad habits lately, and often not liking what I have to face. The last-minuteness, the entitlement, the self-centeredness, the distractability, the ever-justified carelessness, and most of all: the blind trust I have in people, in which I used to take such pride (I will sleep on any couch) and by which I used to define myself by….but that I now see as a kind of painful and dangerous naivety (sometimes that couch has a trap cushion door into a 179-foot deep hole).
Maybe it happens for a reason.
Tell me.
Maybe it’s time to change the Althing.
Why not now?
Note: the draft of the August one is done, and it’s good. These changes would be for the coming season.
May you all find a way to get out of whatever hole you’re in.
I’m gonna make some coffee and some pancakes and go to the beach with my son and my friends.
I love the shit out of all of you.
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A