The last time you heard from me, I was writing about categories. The way they help other people read you, place you, and placate themselves with the idea that you have been organized onto the correct shelf, instead of left cluttering the corner of nowhere-to-put-this.

Since then, I have done little else but try to make myself legible.

First, there was another film screening. This one in Kingston, New York. Beforehand, I was interviewed for the Kingston Wire by a splendid journalist who had clearly done her homework and arrived with the exact right blend of respect, curiosity, and awe, which is my favorite blend and should be bottled.

The venue was big with small quarters. The screening room was where they kept the pinball machines. The films had to be uploaded to YouTube and cast from there, with no cords or wires involved. Just faith, bluetooth, and the hope that the internet would not decide to skip, crash, glitch, or sludge your precious work into unintelligible soup.

At one point, we had to stop and restart the film before mine because the image and audio had fallen out of sync. It was like stopping the music to remove a splinter from the guitarist’s finger. Necessary. Spiritually destabilizing.

Afterward, the other filmmaker left “to get some food,” likely starved from the splinter removal, and the portion of the evening where audiences were meant to do one-on-one Q&As with the filmmakers fell entirely upon me.

One man was delighted by my merch table. He told me he loved spotting the posters from each chapter of the film, that the work had really made him think, and thanked me for putting it all together. Bottle it!

Another man told me that after my moving opening speech, he was dismayed that the film began with a gag.

It was disarming. He was in until then, he said.

And then what? I wondered.

He fell off at the first chapter of the movie. What did he do for the rest of the runtime? Float away? Stare at the pinball machines? Remain bodily present while etherically filing a complaint? He did not include this in his comment.

This is one of the risks of making yourself legible. People get attached to the first label that works. Moving. Disabled. Serious. Funny. Spiritual. Bitter. Experimental. Grieving. Chronic. Once they find a handle, they begin carrying you around by it. Then, when the work changes shape in their hands, they look betrayed.

My opening speech, always the most harried part of the event for me, felt rushed and formulaic this time. As usual, I’ll include the video below for my precious paid subscribers, who may compare it with past appearances as a minor archive of self-exegesis. A flipbook of mortification and/or becoming depending on the mood.

As soon as I returned from Kingston, I took no time to celebrate a self-produced, bi-coastal screening tour. I took no rest. No earned hiatus. Instead, I jumped directly into figuring out what it would take to pitch the trilogy as something bigger. As it turns out, it was more learning to explain myself and my work and what shelf to place it on.

I started a pitching class to practice this until it becomes entertaining.

Then I jumped into devising a new film project based on the essay many of you seemed to like very much, about using your attention to manipulate time. I made a sample video on my iPhone, taught myself DaVinci Resolve, and submitted it to the Sofia Coppola short film fund.

As of this writing, my overall score is 95%, with visual quality being the category keeping me from a perfect 100 (word is, the judging panel only pays attention to those films with an average rating of 98 or above). This feels mildly unfair, since I am being rated on iPhone footage of myself acting out the movie idea, when I could have achieved pitch-perfect visual quality by simply filming myself talking about the idea from my couch, which is apparently what one was meant to do.

A helpful lesson: sometimes the thing you think makes the application special is the thing the form has no box for.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, while I was trying to make my film legible to audiences, programmers, funders, distributors, and potential industry champions, another classification system began waving at me from across the internet.

Autism.

Which is to say, the categorizing impulse had finally come for the categorizer. Last week the internet informed me that my strongest autistic trait is “social.”

This was surprising, mostly because I have spent the last thirteen years assuming all of my strange social experiences belonged solely to a traumatic brain injury.

The internet didn’t care.

It handed me a report card. Social: 95%. Sensory: 65%. Executive functioning: somewhere in the middle.

Not a diagnosis per se. More like a sorting.

I’ve already been diagnosed with ADHD, although if you asked me to point to the ADHD and then point to the brain injury, I honestly wouldn’t know where one ends and the other begins. What is the precise location where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Pacific?

And so it seems, categories continue to haunt my world. I keep bumping into them. They stand in doorways. They gather around clipboards. They appear in dropdown menus. They ask, Which of the following best describes you?

First it was brain injury.

Then ADHD.

Now autism keeps waving at me from across the algorithm.

Every few videos, someone describes sensory overwhelm.

Brain injury. Autism.

Executive dysfunction.

Brain injury. ADHD

Needing three days to recover from a party.

Brain injury. Autism.

Understanding what people are saying to me a few moments too late.

Brain injury? Autism? ADHD? Just a Tuesday?

The obvious answer is that all of these conditions overlap.

But categories themselves are more taxonomically leaky than we pretend.

The same thing that makes my submission video ‘lacking in visual quality’ and my movie ‘disarming’ and my social tendencies ‘unintentionally cold,’ is what makes me, me. And somehow there’s no box for that.

There is no box for the way a brain, damaged or born this way or both, learns to make meaning out of lag, overwhelm, misfire, and beauty…which is soooo inconvenient (!).

By the time you read this, I will be off to a 7-day silent retreat, the same one that last year produced the tick in my navel story, based loosely on true events. This year, I arrive with a few more identities under my arm, that i’ll likely set down beside my shoes the moment I arrive.

Until next time, may you you remain gloriously difficult to classify,

Abigail

Become a beloved paid subscriber to watch the video of my speech at the Kingston Screening and support a writer who is completely devoted to you.

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(a curated grid of your most important images of the year, determined by engagement)

I remember looking at them and thinking, Top-9 according to who-m?

The vast difference between what was most meaningful and what was most engaged-with had never been so obnoxiously clear. One, an inner weather system. The other is a scoreboard built by a machine that likes FACES, bright COLORS, announce-ments, and, possibly, humiliation.

It’s a subtle shift, but a consequential one. The moment something passes through a system it becomes legible in a new way. It acquires a label, a ranking, a place in a hierarchy.

And the way it’s notarized (blegh) always feels like a mild distortion. Not quite wrong, but not quite the whole, living-breathing picture either.

Lately, I’ve been feeling that old Top-9 outrage. My ideas, my work, my experiences, even my calm, getting ranked, summarized, categorized, and handed back to me by structures that were definitely not in the room when the thing happened.

So I’m pausing over two things that have lately been handed back to me in distorted form: my work, and my contentment.

You may recognize this as one of my preferred hobbies: taking something the world has confidently labeled for me (my capacity, my pacing on substack, the way I experience time) and politely refusing the label long enough to look for other options.

I hope that somewhere in my refusals, you find permission to offer yourself more options.

My Film and Where to Place It

According to film festival programmers, my movie is as experimental as they come. In the narrative slot, it’s fractured, cognitively askew structure dregs against the more linear continuity of it’s running mates, and it struggles. As an experimental submission, doors open. The tone shifts ever so slightly from polite dismissal to curious interest. It begins to move.

And then there was the man from Film Forum, who went out of his way to tell me, with a certain condescension, that there was nothing experimental about my film. It was, in his view, a straight narrative. And for that matter, he’s seen my not-so-original idea before in two other films he’ll name here, both esoteric and important and, of which he is a scholar of.

He wasn’t describing the film so much as placing it. Slotting it into a satisfying taxonomy. I could feel his satisfaction in his slotting expertise.

And both pronouncements were delivered with such…assuredness.

Assuredness always shows up dressed like Truth, when really it is just a person enjoying the sound of their own gavel.

you’re wondering, though, how would I categorize my film?

The annoying answer is I don’t experience the film as one thing.

The even more annoying answer is I experience it as the maker of it, which means I see only a series of decisions that, at the time, felt necessary.

So when someone tells me how they would label the outcome of those decisions, I find myself less interested in whether they are right and more interested in what they need it to be; what function the label is serving.

This idea has suited me in not mistaking category placements for descriptions and applies to a myriad of other identity labels in life- more on that later..

The Shape of Nothing Being Wrong

I couldn’t access the fire needed to write through a current emotional hijack for a newsletter because my emotions hadn’t really been hijacked.

Similarly, I felt empty showing up to therapy without anything urgent to bring. No flaming bag of psychic garbage. No relational mysteries.

I was feeling even. I was actively aware of the many things going right.

At first, this felt like a lack of material. For therapy, for writing, for the private investigation bureau I’m operating inside my own chest.

A good week, though, can produce it’s own material. Maybe contentment is not the absence of depth, but the n-e-g-a-t-i-v-e s-p-a-c-e that allows the rest of the picture to take shape.

In a painting, negative space tells you where to look. It gives the object its outline.

And the shape coming into view is what’s working. It’s like being able to see the figure without having to set the background on fire.

It can be helpful not to convert every quiet stretch into a wound just so I have something to say…more on that later..

Circling in on the difference between a label and a living thing…The category comes from the outside and can serve it’s own purpose———- a diagnosis, a genre, a metric, a submission slot, a therapy topic, a Top-9. They help the world sort and file and process and admit or reject.

The aim, then, is to not confuse the sorting mechanism with the thing itself..

Until next time, may your categories be useful, your labels loose, and your inner weather remain gloriously un-notarized,

Abigail

The more time I spend reading other newsletters, the less I want to produce a sentence of my own.

It’s something atmospheric.

Like walking into a cocktail party where everyone is already mid-conversation. The air has been spoken into. Glasses clink. Someone is finishing a story. Someone else is adding a clever aside. You’re holding a thought in your hand but the room already has momentum, and your thought dissolves politely before it can become a sentence.

Substack can feel like that sometimes.

Notes scrolling past. Writers talking to each other in public forums. Essays responding to essays. The sense that the conversation is always happening, and that the correct posture is to remain conversationally available.

It’s lively. It’s communal. It’s the antithesis to getting any interesting work done.

Writing, I think, prefers a temporary disappearance.

Maybe not dramatic–though dramatic moves are *chef’s kiss for writing–but at least a short absence from the room is required so a thought can finish forming without immediately feeling like it needs to be shared.

My current solution is to pretend the cocktail party of Substack is actually a library.

I arrive quietly. I place something on or pull something off the shelf. Then I leave again.

I try not to wander the aisles too long while I’m still writing. I try not to peek at what everyone else is shelving in real time. This preserves a small bubble of oxygen for whatever sentence is still trying to form.

The Notes function. I can dip into Notes once the writing is done. Otherwise, the writing evaporates into social commentary.

And the last trick is to read dead people when I’m drafting. Dead writers are considerate companions. They are not keeping up with anything. They are not using their writing talent to join discourse. Instead, they are simply sitting in their books being interesting.

These tactics leave plenty of room for a person to think.

Meanwhile, IRL, I’m doing the opposite of withdrawing.

A mindfulness workshop I’m guiding through the philosophy department at the library is already underway-a small project that grew out of the feeling that, in moments like this, gathering people to pay attention together might be one small useful thing to do.

The second of three sessions is tomorrow. We’re learning to meet our minds from different angles. It’s virtual and free, so you can join from anywhere. If that sounds appealing, you can still jump in for tomorrow, March 16, or for the final session on March 30.

At the same time I’m preparing for the Los Angeles screening of my film, which involves the opposite skill set: leaving the quiet room entirely and inviting strangers to join you in another one. If your LA local or know an LA local who likes new-wave experimental film and stand up comedy, feel free to pass the word and come say hello!

Writing asks for withdrawal.
Events ask for appearance.

So lately I’ve been toggling between two versions of self: the one who disappears long enough to write a paragraph, and the one preparing to appear before other humans and explainin why they should care about a movie.

Both strangely intimate acts drawing from the same small reservoir of energy.

Which is why, when it’s time to write, I try to stay out of the cocktail party and sit quietly in the library instead.

Eventually the sentence arrives.

And once it’s safely on the shelf, I’m happy to wander the room again.

So if I’ve been a little quiet here lately, it’s not because I’ve wandered off. I’ve been toggling between selves: the one who disappears long enough to write a paragraph, and the one who shows up in rooms with other people.

As always, thanks for being the kind of readers I want to keep showing up for. I promise to return with something probably strange, possibly useful, and hopefully worth placing on the shelf between us.

To your disappearances! May they give you something worth bringing back,

Abigail

The free share for this month’s care package is the epilogue to the unpublishable chaos that came before it.

If you’d like to read a personal missive on a slingshot return to the industry, an existential bootcamp, and the loud-mouthed critics that move in when life gets risky… If you’d like to watch a filmed post-crash monologue at my Brooklyn screening… If you’ve ever had to surf the paradoxes of a disabled (or just overloaded) existence, I’ll see you behind Butterbean’s wall…

For my beloved window shoppers, consider the free recommendation below the last stop of the journey. It makes way more sense if you know the story that came before it, but, it also stands as a pleasure that can be enjoyed without context.

Best retained when feeling a draft across your shoulders and yearning to stand in an electromagnetic current of energy.

Enjoy!

the post-bootcamp recovery arsenal

Naturally, after the existential endurance challenge lovingly spilled behind the paywall, I decided it was time to invest in my recovery periods like I was building a luxury medical facility for one.

Given my affinity for laying on the floor, my sights landed on a fully loaded PEMF mat- an inland slab that hums with electromagnetic fields, radiates bone-deep heat though a strata of precious gemstones, and bathes you in a piping clot of red light therapy, all in the name of repairing cells aflame, boosting circulation, and soothing a withered system.

In my research spiral, I quickly encountered two paths: the slick, podcast-sponsoring mats (cost: one minor organ) or their less glamorous, but perfectly functional cousins (cost: still too much, but less). I went utilitarian, two mats, one full-body sized and one portable, together, still less than a single Bon Charge or Higher Dose. Oh, to be joyfully Exxtra AND responsible!

The full-body mat rules my routine. I plug it in and design my entire day from its heat radius. Scrawling in notebooks, tip-tapping emails and substacks, saliently meditating—it all happens sprawled on my glowing mat. Sometimes I lie on my back, sometimes on my stomach, sometimes I kneel like Mary Magdalene on the heated stones. (Is this cellular repair, winter survival, or a new form of prayer? Yes.)

The portable mat shadows me—slung behind me at my desk or draped over me like hot fudge on the couch. The best part: you can choose your magnetic frequency on this mat, depending on whether you want to be productive, relaxed, grounded, or simply hover somewhere between consciousness and slumber.

In these short, cold days, the mats have become my headquarters, my creative engine….my whole winter personality?

For you if: you want your winter to feel less like an endurance challenge and more like a holy apres-ski.

For the origin story of why I am now part-human, part-heated floor—and a video of me gamely faking energy in Brooklyn—read on…

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I compiled the pursuit here for you in:

⚡️A series of quests accepted and weapons used in the year 2025 ⚡️

It started with an unfortunate haircut

the kind that makes you feel like you’re living as a Rod Stewart Halloween costume, fresh out of the plastic. I tried to pin and hat my way out of regret until, finally, I did what one does in matters of hair and despair: I brought in Nietzsche, who assured me that experimenting with my appearance was evidence of liberation.

March was the first goodbye

Both my job and the view from my window left all in the name of someone else’s progress. I didn’t have much to hold onto except this newsletter, and, surprisingly, another existentialist, Camus! His nihilism was the only thing that made sense. To find purpose in the continuing despite it all—imagining Sisyphus, if not happy, then at least, ya know, still pushing.

April brought the first bouquets and second weepings

after my first private movie screening. I became someone else, quietly, by walking through a door I hadn’t realized I’d opened. Making movies, writing newsletters, trying on new voices: all ways to narrate real events until they started to feel like mine.

An astonishing devotion to delivery happened in May

I gifted The Long Now, a compendium of new ways to think about time, based on the post-screening lull and my private experiments. I offered up spells for slowing time, pausing it, speeding it up, and, maybe most importantly, reclaiming so-called “lost” time.

The small but mighty outpouring over the time-bending spellbook had me reeling

and I began plotting a modern digital utopia—a place where I could send you even more life-affirming, creatively free missives. I took inspiration from the Butterbean video, using “personal resurrection met with collective tenderness and spontaneous outbursts of thrill” as a manifesto for the space I longed to build.

I surprise myself again by delivering on my lofty plans with the first digital utopian offering in the form of a care package

The precious paid subscribers got a new kind of writing from me: a fable about my time with the Quakers on silent retreat and the wisdom that seeped in via a tick bite. There was also a recommendation in the form of a productivity cube (I really did spend a lot of this year massaging time) AND a new dinner ingredient to add to your repertoire.

And then, and then, Arnold left us

The bouquets and weeping returned. I wrote about his final days, the panting goodbye tour, his mechanical eating of chicken before his great slumber, and the aftermath of flowers and lemon cookies and burning ceremonies. I found that grief wasn’t depression so much as food poisoning, and that the odd lightness that followed was both terrifying and oddly liberating.

September was a summons to shift

moving from loss to unrelenting drive. I wrote the second care package: field notes from the streets, staple gun in hand, prepping for my first public movie screening. I shared another pre-show video (this time with a sketch-comedy-meets-seance vibe) and a few beverage experiments that made all the shape-shifting way more fun.

And finally, October/November

blending together as one month because there was no end to October and no beginning of November, it just happened, continually, without stopping, in what was the most emotionally packed period to end an emotionally packed year.

There was more bouquets, and more weeping, a bootcamp in growth and diminishment. But that quest calls for a newsletter all its own.

I’ll gift it to my Butterbean members, including the third behind-the-scenes video of my part stand-up/part-poetry bit before yet another movie screening (!). Look out for that soonish, lambs. And hop in if you aren’t in there already!

Subscribe now

Thank you for being the kind of reader who reign through every quest with me this year.

Whether avid supporter, irregular skimmer, or tip-toeing lurker, may you keep showing up, filling the empty seats, and warming the drafty corners.,

Whole-hearted thanks for helping to keep the torch lit,

Abigail

Last time you heard from me, my body was swollen with the weight of Arnold’s leaving. Heavy, misshapen, with a giant hole in the center. Then, somehow, it turned.

The vacancy filled with a different kind of possession: the unreasonable drive to walk the streets with posters and a staple gun, convinced that strangers should see my work at a movie screening. It wasn’t healing, not exactly, but it was movement. A body shifting from loss to insistence.

In this care-package transmission, please accept the following:

• (free sample!) a field report on what it takes to convince strangers to enter the dark with you — hustle, possession, collapse — and revelations about the bravest artform

• a private viewing of the comedy-radio-show-meets-séance that hugged the screening

• humble tweaks to familiar drinks that turned out stranger, livelier, and more sustaining than expected

Consider it a play-by-play on transformation: a body remade, an audience conjured, ordinary drinks turned peculiar. It winks if you look long enough.

Best consumed with curiosity.

Enjoy!

I held another screening of my trilogy, this one, unlike the last, was open to the public.

No cousins, no coworkers, no one who had an obligation to fill the seats could be relied on. I was counting on strangers–who didn’t love me already, strangers–who required marketing.

To woo them, I trudged around neighborhoods with packing tape and a staple gun, pinning my hope to telephone poles, leaving postcards at registers, and tucking my plea onto bulletin boards without covering anyone else’s dream. Online, it was endless link-in-bio! dispatches into the void, captions trying their darndest to amuse rather than beg.

What I was asking for was outrageous: that someone might glance at a poster, scan a QR code, pay actual money, and then travel across town to sit in a dark room and watch something they had zero proof was worth their night.

The jitters of showing my work were overshadowed by the enormous task AND, like a lunatic, by my insistence on adding live performance to the whole ordeal. A friend and I staged a comedy-radio-show-meets-séance to wrap the evening in context (my sneaky way of giving the audience permission to enjoy the film instead of cataloguing its fractures).

The performance involved rewrites, rehearsals, and tech headaches that only Reddit threads could solve. Every night I told myself this was unreasonable. Every night, some other force commandeered my body, convinced this was the most important work on Earth. Possession by purpose.

It worked, kinda. That QR Code miracle occurred approximately 31 times, plus stragglers. In a small gallery, 40 bodies = a coliseum.

After the screening, I collapsed for a week. A proper post-posession crash. As I lay like a plank of wood in bed I thought of the movie and the live performance and felt proud. But the most radical art form of the evening was the strangers themselves–40 people who showed up and believed in me for 90 minutes.

⬇️Following for paid subscribers (who keep the radical art of showing up alive!):

The radio-show-séance portions were filmed and I’m sharing with you. But! If you come to a future screening, you’ll need to pretend to be surprised. (The whole world depends on our ability to keep being astonished.

🧉 And! The delightful beverage experiments that have been fueling all the shifting of shapes.

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I had a system for announcing bathroom activities. "PEEING WITH DOOR OPEN," I would call out when Arnold was sleeping against the bathroom door, his small body creating a furry barricade between me and privacy. This felt like the most natural thing in the world—to negotiate my bodily functions around a 35-pound creature who had found sweet respite in household thresholds.

There were other accommodations. Dirty t-shirts lived longer lives because Arnold had claimed the space in front of the washer. We became experts at carrying his compact body—how to support the legs just so, how to be human elevators for stairs and cars and parking lots. These were not sacrifices but small acts of devoted choreography, a dance we had perfected over years.

Before he died, I designed an Arnold Goodbye Tour. We drove him to places where I remembered him being happy, where he had once pressed his belly into sun-warmed grass. I imagined us having transcendent moments, communing through memory and love. Instead, the steroids made him frantic. He panted and searched and could not settle into any of the sacred spaces I had curated for our farewell.

Even dying, he could not rest. Or maybe it was me who could not rest, watching him pant through his final hour. I kept feeding him chicken, his jaws working mechanically until the sedatives finally allowed his head to drop. He fell asleep like he was falling down a very long, soft staircase.

That night I thought about his paws—how they crossed over each other when he slept.The image arrived in my chest like an explosion. I discovered that grief is not a story you tell yourself but something that happens to your body, like an appendectomy or food poisoning or falling down stairs.

People began appearing with offerings: roses, lemon cookies, books, trees to plant in his memory. The "I love you" texts were like IVs of tenderness. One friend organized a burning ceremony for lost pets. We lit our chosen objects and announced what we would miss. "Arnold the pushover," I said, watching smoke twist into dog-like shapes. “Clyde the pervert,” said another friend, “Powers the stubborn,” said another. Somehow the qualities we find insufferable in humans become the very things we cherish in our animals.

We found salvation in dark humor. “I said, I’m going to kill my dog this weekend," a friend announced cheerfully, recounting her own brush with loss, and we understood this was love language. We used to tell Arnold, when he was being particularly difficult, "You have a terminal disease! You’re dying! Shouldn’t you be quiet?" Death makes comedians of us all.

To set the mood for crossovers, I filled the room with magnetic candles—the rechargeable kind that never drip wax—and let them burn until their batteries died. Sometimes, when memory hit particularly hard, one would flicker, and we would say "Hi Arnold" to the room, convinced he was manipulating electricity from wherever dogs go.

Then came the quotidian dismantling. The stack of encyclopedias wrapped in a t-shirt to elevate his food bowl. The behavior log taped to the refrigerator, documenting every pant and pill and nose drop—a medical history more detailed than my own. His ashes arrived in a chic black boutique bag, the condolence card spelling our name wrong and featuring a seashell that seemed like an odd design choice.

But the language on the card—calling Arnold's life "significant, precious, important"—was so exactly right it startled me. When people offered reassurance that I shouldn't feel ashamed about mourning 'just a dog,' I was confused by the very suggestion. Shame seemed like the wrong mathematics for this equation. Dogs are not just dogs. They are parents and children and grandparents and best friends and every spiritual teacher you've ever needed, compressed into one small, faithful body.

I cried in episodes: at the sight of old dogs on walks, eating dinner without paws under the table, lying on his bed and on the blanket that was the site of his last breath. When the ashes came with a gold nameplate reading "ARNOLD," I realized how completely he had inhabited his name. Arnold—serious, dependable, faintly ridiculous in the way only a rolly-polly security guard can be. But etched in gold, it looked too official, like his Arnoldness had been translated into something permanent and strange, like his name was a monument instead of the warm, breathing thing it once was.

Grief split me open like a peanut shell. It revealed the absurdity of all my previous concerns, the tiny emergencies I had mistaken for real problems. On this side of losing Arnold, I feel a peculiar lightness. If we could lose him anyway—this creature who was everything—then what else could possibly matter? It is the most liberating and terrifying discovery: that love makes everything both infinitely precious and completely meaningless.

To your losses, may they hit you hard and leave you lighter,

Abigail

🫁 Amid this emotional demolition, my first paid-subscriber newsletter went live—a carefully curated care package featuring a writing experiment inspired by silence, a recipe with an ingredient so peculiar it required explanation, and my endorsement of a cube that promises to hold your attention with a small, geometric embrace. 🫀 I had delivered care into the world in the exact moment before I would desperately need it reflected back to me. The timing felt like either cosmic grace or the strange sense of humor of existence. 🦷 As one more offering to my beloved paid subscribers, I share Arnold's eulogy below:

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So, for this inaugural care package, please accept the following:

• A small, elegant object that fixed my tumultuous relationship with motivation
• A short piece of writing born from a 5-day silent Quaker retreat I took in the woods and the sad grief that followed me home.
• A recipe involving an exciting new ingredient that made me feel like I was inventing dinner for the first time

It’s a mix of the tactile, the emotional, and the edible. It smells faintly of woodsmoke. It’s best consumed slowly.

Enjoy!

A Silly Little Cube That Respects My Time

You don’t know where your attention is until you’ve used a timer that isn’t on your computer.
You think you do. You think you’re “focusing” when that YouTube Pomodoro video ticks next to your browser, or you try to ignore the “notifications” that come along with using your phone stopwatch.
But no. That’s not focus. That’s cohabitation with chaos.

This is different.
This is a cube.
A physical, rechargeable, absurdly obedient cube. You flip it. It lights up. It starts counting.
You do the thing.

I didn’t know I needed time off-screen to actually enter it.
The act of flipping it—a gentle rotation, like turning over a beetle—is oddly blest. It’s a ritual. It marks the beginning. And then: I begin.

Suddenly I want to do the thing I’ve been avoiding.
There’s a tickle in my brain, like a small animal has been given a map.
You have 25 minutes.
Not forever. Not “just finish it.” Not “whenever you can.”
Twenty-five.
It’s finite. Friendly. Forgiving.
And then when the timer goes off—it stops me. Not harshly. Not like a boss.
More like a friend saying: hey. you can breathe now.
you did a little.

I use it in bed. I use it on the floor. I use it when the screen feels like a threat.
It’s tactile accountability. Soft. Odd. Mine.
There is a satisfaction to seeing your time pass rather than scroll.

This timer, this silly little cube, has done more for my productivity and peace than any app or method or desperate self-bargain ever has.
It doesn’t make promises. It just counts.
And somehow—
That’s enough.

There’s a Tick in My Navel

It’s the nineteenth hour of silence when I notice it—a black filament, hair-thin, protruding insolently from my belly button like a mic boom. I give it a few flicks, try to pinch it. No dice. This is a tweezer job. I haven’t packed tweezers. I shrug. Let it be. Descend back into the silo of quietude.

And then—static. A pinprick of presence. Like a radio dialing in from the far end of the AM band.

“Shit. Oh shit.”

I don’t flinch. That would break the silence.

“This isn’t Quaker blood!”

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I hope this trespass on your inbox finds you alert to all the nutritive, promising, desirable elements of your present life.1

I aim to do nothing but add to these elements and make them sing. I am but here for you. To drape one extra shawl across your already layered shoulders. (Take it or don’t, you will still be warm here in the parenthesis)

Which is why, when my last essay on time-bending hit a chord–many of you wrote in, shared it, said it helped you feel seen, or less rushed, or slightly more like a magical wizard—I was floored. Deeply touched. Surging with gratitude.

Immediately, my desire to serve you even more was ignited. I blame my mother. She's the type who will already be offering/pushing seconds should you dare to utter delight at your first bite. It's high-contact love language: equal parts nurture and coercion.

Though it may soften my push to say that, unlike at my family's dinner table, you can decline these offerings freely and without remorse. I won't hold it against you if you’re satisfied with one serving. Or even a few bites. You can even spit it into a napkin.

I have some ideas on these offerings.

Some are already kicking, like the Subscriber Chat,. A handful of early-arrivers and I have already dedicated a corner of the chat to Creative Conundrums (placeholder name!) about the hard parts of living a creative life–the hared psychology of being an artist, the weird ache of making things–and how we could hold each other's hands though it.

Other ideas are still in formation. Like taking essays you've loved, experiments I've been running in secret, discoveries made in the chat–and morphing them into Zines, workshops, rituals, and super niche art objects. Things you didn’t know you needed until you saw them and went: Ohhhh

Or how about a monthly care package? One that could include: more creatively loose writing excerpts by myself or others I’ve swooned over, a recipe or culinary experiment I've tried (usually plant-heavy and ambitious, with wavering results), and a recommendation to check out something that I've checked out and want you to check out too so we can chat about it?

I’ve shared the more intimate sections of a newsletter with the paid subscribers in the past–the stuff too tender for the general internet. And I intend to keep that up. And maybe even include early glimpses of my film projects? I don’t know. I’m getting ahead of myself. We’re talkin’ Real, Private, Under-theTrenchcoat stuff here!

When I think of the optimal experience of offering my inner-most work on the internet, I think of the meme that brings tears every time : Butterbean, the baby lamb, standing to heartfelt praise after being frozen in a lake.

@thegoodplacefarmWhen you find a baby goat half frozen in a field and he's the only surviving baby of triplets you set your expectations accordingly but boy did he defy all hope!!! This was the moment we knew he was gonna make it and make it he did! He has gone on to be the father and grandfather of over 20 goats and is now the elder statesman of our goat field. You can't save em all but the ones you can save? Well, they keep you trying everytime! Butterbean Merch now live on our Etsy store! Link in bio! #butterbean #babygoats #fyp #goats #petoftheday #cuteanimals #animals #cute

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Something about gaining the will to rise again after a traumatic life event, wobbling into your own aliveness, and having an entire room of humans lose it in solidarity–it's all I've ever wanted.

This kind of utopia I believe can be built within the sanctuary of a paywall.

Within this protected haven, I want the things I share to feel like Butterbean’s great stand for all of us: Personal resurrection met with collective tenderness and spontaneous outbursts of thrill.

This is the only kind of reception I’m willing to tolerate regarding my ambitions. I do not need critique on how I’ve decided to go on living despite it all. And I want the same for you.

We can do this for each other. People handing each other warm towels.

This is what I want in my currency exchanges, too, and I aim to make it a most-valued part of the nutritive, advancing, promising, and desirable elements you spend $5 on each month.

I do hope to see you there, behind the wall. We can get into it back there.

What’s that? Subscription fatigue you say? I get it. You can Venmo me (@Abigail-Bruley) any amount between $5 and 1 Million and I will comp you for a year. Be sure to include your email address in the Venmo notes. No questions asked.

And of course, my usual, totally-free missives will still be hitting your inbox at their regular-irregular tempo.

All to say, I'm eager to serve you even more than I am because I'm obsessed with you, and the exchange between creator-and-audience is everything to me.

Hyperbole? Perhaps. Though what is hyperbole but an exalted truth!2

May you hyperbolize freely and with great flair,

Abigail

P.S. If you have ideas about what you’d want more of from me, please toss them into the comments like nickels into a wishing well. I will fish out each one.

Since the film wrapped, I’ve been in a strange lull. Not quite lost, just unoccupied. A hallway between selves, no clear exits. Time isn’t passing so much as idling. I haven’t moved in any direction. I’m not hearing from anyone. It’s like being the only object in a still life.

It reminds me of the last time I was preoccupied with the passage of time, after my injury, I was convinced I had flat-out missed my life. Everyone else was halfway into their mortgages, baby count, and meaningful careers as I was learning to exist inside a scrambled brain in slo-mo. Time felt like a party I hadn’t been invited to.

Back then, I learned a useful life hack: Ignore the way most people talk about time.

"There's never enough hours in the day," "Unfortunately, that ship has sailed," "How is it 3 o'clock already?" "I feel like I lost a whole year."

Not so much reflections as inherited excuses, passed down from one overwhelmed generation to the next. Shrugs in sentence form.

But time isn't fixed! It slips! It stalls! It shapeshifts in response to attention, sensation, movement, and meaning!

Neurodivergent people know this. So do mystics. And scientists. So does your dog.

I’ve been experimenting. Collecting spells. Strange little practices. Thought experiments. Ways of speaking and being that seem to tug time in different directions. Trying to treat time like a friend, not a stopwatch.

My field notes below:

Sometimes, time thickens.

I’ve had moments where time felt like it went syrupy—thick and slow and glistening. The moment widens. You see the veins in a leaf. You feel your socks. You blink, and you notice the blink. Someone laughs and you catch the exact shape their mouth makes mid-laugh. It’s surreal, but also... real.

Neuroscientists call this the Time Expansion Effect: your brain starts gathering more sensory data, and time stretches to accommodate it. It’s why childhood summers felt endless—because everything was new. You weren’t multitasking. You were just staring at things. (Respect.)

This happens during awe. During mindfulness. During grief. During music. When we’re really here, time slows down to greet us.

Today, you can stretch time like taffy when pouring your coffee or brushing your teeth. You can press yourself so gently into a moment that it pulls like warm candy in your hands.

Try it. Choose something ordinary—tying your shoes, washing your face—and pretend it’s the last time you’ll ever do it (Because, well...tomorrow isn’t guaranteed, folks). Notice the micro-details: texture, temperature, sound, scent, shadow.

You don’t need more time. You need more noticing.

Other times, time hushes.

I’ve also known the soft click of a pause. Not a frozen, holding-your-breath kind of pause, but a pause that feels like stepping backstage. The show’s still going on out front—but you’re behind the curtain, quiet, still, untouched.

The Greeks had a word for this: Kairos. Not clock-time (Chronos), but sacred time. Opportune time. Time glows at the edges.

I’ve felt it lying on the floor of my apartment, staring at the ceiling. I’ve felt it in my car, parked outside the house, long after I’ve arrived. I’ve felt it watching someone I love while they aren’t looking at me. Those moments feel like velvet. Like everything else has gone on mute.

This is not wasting time. This is holding it tenderly.

There are times I’ve wanted time to speed up.

You know the ones. You’re in the waiting room. On hold. Wide awake at 3am, watching the digital clock mock you with its lack of mercy. These are not moments to savor. These are moments to warp.

Turns out, you can. Time speeds up when you’re fully absorbed in something slightly hard and slightly fun. Psychologists call it Temporal Distortion; Buddhists call it mushin; the neurodivergent folks call it hyperfocus, a kind of tunnel that shoots you into the future at warp speed (while accidentally skipping lunch, texting back, or noticing the passage of hours 🤷🏼‍♀️).

The trick is flow. Doing something that consumes your attention just enough to unhook you from the clock. A weird little task. A timer. A game. I once spent 45 minutes rearranging my bookshelf by color just to escape a bad mood. It worked. I arrived in the future.

And then, there are the ghosts.

The times I want to go back. Not to warn anyone about the future. Not to fix anything. Just to be kinder to myself in the past.

There should be a form you can fill out for this. A way to revisit a version of yourself, not to change the plot, but to change the posture. Because sometimes the past keeps showing up dressed like middle school: chaotic, overdramatic, wallet chain dangling.

You don’t have to banish her. You can befriend her. Re-curate her. Let her sit on the couch and tell you what she was scared of.

Therapists call this “reprocessing.” Shamans might call it soul retrieval.

You can write to your past self. Just a few sentences. "You're not weird, you're early” or “You’re not late, you're on a scenic route.” or "You did the best you could with very little to work with."

Regret, I’ve learned, is just love with nowhere to go. Give it somewhere to go.

AND! There is the tender act of reclaiming time.

Not from clocks or calendars or capitalist grind culture—but from the story that you’re behind.

Behind what? A schedule no one agreed on? A milestone invented by a marketing team? A fantasy version of your life that didn’t account for illness, love, loss, rerouting, rebirth?

Wisdom traditions—and some delightfully rebellious neuroscientists—would tell you that time isn’t a conveyor belt you’ve fallen off. It’s not even linear. It loops. It spirals. In many Indigenous and Eastern cosmologies, time isn’t something you race; it’s something you join. And you can join it whenever you’re ready. Even now.

You’re not behind. You’re alive. That’s all time really requires of us.

Maybe we weren’t supposed to be on time. Maybe we were supposed to be in time. Present. Embarrassed. Curious. Bruised. Alive.

And if I’m late? So be it.

There’s always someone at the party who shows up late and changes everything.

To Your Time Travel, May It Change Everything,

Abigail

I trim stems. Refill water. Shuffle the strong ones to the back so the floppier roses can get more light. It’s a strange new ritual, part shrine-keeping, part time-killing.

Every time I sit down to write, I try out a sentence like “I feel like I walked through a portal,” then delete it because: gross. Portals imply direction. This felt more like being turned inside out and left that way. A Möbius strip of a moment.

In the days after my movie screening, I keep revisiting evidence of the night and weeping. Each time I cried in a new way — once with my chin tucked into my shirt collar, once while standing and swaying, and once sitting straight up like I was in a melancholy perfume commercial.

I cried over the video of Pat Finnerty singing In Dreams at the afterparty-not just singing, but launching his voice like a little rocket straight into the sky, pulling away from the mic like he didn’t want to damage it with sincerity.

I cried at the photo of me in a two-piece suit standing between two dads–one dad real, one dad cast. Real dad had driven a long way to be there. Film dad having rehearsed fatherly concern with just the right amount of unresolved backstory.

It’s the only photo I posted. I set it to Tom Petty’s “It’s Good to Be King”—because Tom Petty is a character in my movie. Not literally, but spiritually. He haunts the whole trilogy like a patron saint of stubborn feelings and complicated departures. And also, because there’s something about the word King that made sense. Maybe it was coronation-adjacent. And something about it felt regal like “Long live whoever you are now.”

I cried over the video of the intro speech I did before the movie playing like a time-lapse of someone becoming someone else. I had meant to give context and thank the people who helped make the film, but what I ended up doing was giving younger-me a pep talk from inside the present–delivered to a room full of witnesses. I keep trying to spot the exact moment of crossover–from trying to explain to just being heard. Like watching a Polaroid develop in reverse.

I’ll share a snippet here, but I’ll save the full video for the curious and tender-hearted paying subscribers. It’s raw and stitched inside my ribs. Nine minutes of gentle armor, NSFPC: Not Suitable for Public Consumption.

People kept asking me if I felt closure and it’s the answer I never had. Closure has a nice social shine to it, like it was made up by people who needed other people to wrap things up. How does one feel “closed”? Like a book you’re done reading? Like you’ve folded yourself up into a neat little box and taped it shut? That’s not what happened.

What happened was more like... a giant balloon, filled with all kinds of random things — memories, regrets, achievements — and you let it go, but instead of flying off, it just hovers awkwardly above your head, floating around, like, “Now what?” That’s where I was.

The first press came out about two weeks later.

It led with my brain injury, not the film. It was kind. It was celebratory. It made me feel like a commemorative stamp. A pamphlet called How She Got Hurt and Then Did Something Anyway.

There’s a way these stories tend to be built around overcoming, a word I don’t trust. It implies you’ve risen above something and are now clean and dry, safe on a mountaintop.*CLOSURE*

Now, my disability is not something I want to tuck away like a shirt tag. It’s part of who I am and how I work, but I am not above the injury. I’m inside it. I make things from inside it.

I didn’t set out to be an emblem, a cautionary tale, or a statue of Overcoming.

It’s like throwing a dinner party and everyone complimenting you on surviving food poisoning five years ago. (Thanks! But... did you taste the pie?)

It’s the steep cost to be known, when people want to feel good about what I overcame and not what I created.

A few days later, I filmed the last sliver of sky outside my apartment before a luxury condo fully blocked the view.

For months, I’d been watching the building rise like a slow erasure. And then one day, the skyline disappeared.

I cried again. Quietly, cheeks-only. The kind of grief you feel in your skin before it becomes sound.

Making the video was a quiet way of acknowledging that something had ended. Not with a bang or a ribbon-cutting, but with a small, internal shift. Like turning around and realizing you’ve walked through a door without noticing.

I was crying because it all mattered. At bouquets that refused to wilt. At the skyline vanishing. At videos and photographs and tiny, pixelated versions of myself saying things I only halfway understood but fully felt. At not overcoming anything but becoming something/someone else.

But filming things—that’s my loophole. That was the magic trick. It didn’t give me closure, it gave me a second chance to narrate. Slowly. Weirdly. In a language I forgot to speak the first time around. It’s like looking at an old photo of yourself and thinking, “Wow, I had no clue what I was doing, but, man, did I do it anyway.”

Long live whoever you are now,

Abigail

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It arrived like a noisy, 200-feet tall neighbor, craning (obvs) its long metal neck through my window.

I used to have a view–a respectable view.

A diorama of cultures and time periods layered together like a collage: colonial brick row homes elbowing up to mid-century boxes, murals blooming across crumbling walls, church steeples and radio towers prickling the skyline. There was the gentle green curve from the park, the golden dome of the Ukrainian club catching sunlight like a half-unwrapped candy, Asian shop signs flickering in neon poetry, and—on clear mornings—a silver ribbon of river that made me feel like I lived inside of a novel.

Now, I sip my coffee at the window, watching a lumber skeleton grow taller each day, blotting out my horizon like a censor’s black bar. Soon I’ll be facing someone else’s condo kitchen and we’ll both pretend we don’t see each other using the microwave and staring off into a quiet abyss.

Losing the view feels like the final curtain falling on a show I didn’t know was ending—abrupt, unwelcome, and leaving me blinking into a new reality. I might mourn in silence if the loss didn’t ring a familiar bell. Not long ago, I lost a job perfectly fit for me, advocating for people whose needs tend to be an afterthought. The federal DEIA cuts came sweeping through and poof –gone, with the same speed and finality as my once beloved view.

I imagine the ballcaps in Washington high-fiving over beers and buzzwords. “Progress,” they call it.

I know that word. It’s the same one plastered on the construction fencing outside, beneath the smug rendering of a building that doesn’t exist yet, but will soon stand where my view used to be. Coming Soon: Luxury Living! I read while stepping into traffic to avoid the flashing lights and bone-rattling drills. Luxury for whom?

It’s a special kind of whiplash, watching things you relied on—a skyline, a paycheck—disappear under the banner of “progress." And isn’t that just the trick of it? Growth for someone else. Someone with new countertops. Someone whose view remains unblocked.

Progress rarely includes everyone. It’s a word that sounds benevolent until you notice who’s being asked to sacrifice for it. My skyline disappears; someone else gets panoramic windows. My paycheck evaporates; a corporate tax cut funds another high-rise. Growth, advancement, revitalization—just synonyms for making certain people comfortable while others contort themselves to keep up.

It would be one thing if this were just misfortune—random, indifferent. But the certainty makes it something else. The doom isn’t hypothetical; it’s scheduled, funded (or defunded), and breaking ground.

And yet, here I am, doing what I always do in this newsletter: trying to reframe it, learn from it, find meaning in it. Not because I think there’s some grand lesson waiting, but because What Else Is There?

The only real choice is whether I let it roll over me or find some way to hold it.

"The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

Albert Camus (from The Myth of Sisyphus)

There is a strange comfort in noticing, in bearing witness. Camus wrote about the absurdity of life and the futility of searching for order in chaos, yet insisted we must imagine Sisyphus happy, finding purpose in the act of continuing, in the choice to keep going despite it all.

"Suffering is not relative; it is absolute. Suffering has an absolute relation to the suffering individual—it cannot be easily mediated by a third term like 'privilege' or 'luck'... What is universal and unvarying is the stubborn, unspoken belief held by many of the afflicted: 'Not me. Not my body. Not my life.'"

Zadie Smith (from Intimations)

Zadie Smith talks about the value of paying attention, how seeing clearly, acknowledging suffering fully, without looking away, can be an act of grace.

I can’t stop the building from blotting out the skyline, can’t reverse the job cuts, can’t single-handedly redirect the roaring machinery of pr*gress.

But I can notice.

I can let the absurdity of it all—the luxury condos, the “Live. Work. Thrive.” banners, the jackhammers pounding away at my livelihood—settle next to my loss without rushing to resolve it.

Maybe meaning isn’t something to chase down but something that sneaks up on you when you’re paying attention, when you let the absurd and the awful sit side by side without trying to smooth the edges.

To your struggle, May it leave a mark,

Abigail

If you receive any value from my reframesor meaning-makings, consider supporting my endeavor by becoming a paid subscriber!

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I scheduled the appointment three weeks out and spent the interim not obsessing, but casually evangelizing the decision to anyone who would listen. I announced it like a manifesto: When the urge to change your hair arrives, you must obey. Otherwise, you risk eternal stasis. A good rule, I thought. Probably one of my better ones.

I was laser-focused on achieving a “grown-out shag.” I believed it would be the kind of haircut that had a considered infrastructure I could blissfully ignore. I’d heard the horror stories: friends weeping over accidental Carol-Brady mushroom mullets, mourning the early stages of their shags like they’d lost their front teeth.

I wasn’t about to let that happen to me. No, I would outsmart the system.

Armed with pdf print-outs of effortless, airy, cool layered cuts and sunshine blondes with moody dark roots, I entertained the idea of making a second, equally detailed anti-inspiration board—images of hairstyles I absolutely did not want. Ultimately, I abandoned the idea. Clarity, I decided, was the key.

Moments before the cutting began, I voiced my nervous plea: I just don’t want the top layers to be too short or...mushroom-y. My stylist reassured me with the confidence of someone who does this all day. I felt understood. I relaxed.

Five hours later, I faced the mirror. “Well,” I said, summoning every ounce of diplomatic grace, “I wanted something dramatic, and you gave it to me.”

Inside, I was spiraling. It was not the carefree, grown-out shag I had so carefully envisioned, but the spiky wig for a Rod Stewart1 halloween costume–something detachable that, tragically, I could not detach.

For the first few days, I oscillated between denial and grim acceptance, like someone acclimating to a new reality. I wore hats. I mastered the art of the high ponytail, twisting and pinning to tame the 80s glam to a more suitable size, sometimes muttering What have I done?

It wasn’t my stylist’s fault. It wasn’t even entirely mine. It was the eternal hazard of transformation: the leap from what was to what might be, landing somewhere unintended.

But just like other bigger choices I’ve agonized over–the career I didn’t pursue, the cross-country move I didn’t make–these are mutable. Even the decisions made on the fated day of my brain injury, though undeniably permanent, aren’t fixed in meaning.

The thing about regret: it has a way of distorting time, magnifying the moment of decision until it feels like a fixed monument to your own fallibility.

AND YET! Regret also only seems to exist where choice does, therefore, is it not a byproduct of freedom?

Nietzsche’s Amor Fati: The love of one’s fate, including the mistakes and missteps, as essential to the journey.

Rumi: “Try not to resist the changes that come your way. Instead, let life live through you.”

If regret is evidence of choice, could it not also be evidence of liberation? Yes, I chose this haircut. And yes, I hated it. But that choice, even if it felt disastrous in the moment, wasn’t a death sentence. It was a messy step forward in the grand creative experiment.

Is it just me or is part of the thrill of impulsive decisions the fact that they force you to embrace the creative chaos of making-it-work afterward? Just me?

The haircut I bemoaned turned out to be one more experiment—messy, sure, but necessary.

Every choice we make, no matter which way it falls, or mushrooms(!), is a layer, a chapter, a step, a draft.

So here’s my revised rule: When you feel the impulse, obey it. Because the only truly bad choice is refusing to choose at all.

To your choices! May you make many!

Abigail

Despite the title of this dispatch, the past year, with its spirals and crescendos, wasn’t so much about learning lessons as it was about tinkering with survival tactics. Let’s call it The Year of Trying Things Out—a grand experiment in keeping it together while observing what stuck and what didn’t.

Last December, as the holidays marched in with their good tidings and cheer (sure, sure), they also brought their ceremonial dread: a chokehold on my calendar, sensory chaos, and the creeping specter of burning up into ash. In Bring the VOID with You, I mulled over what to pack in my emotional fanny pack to navigate outward, rather than inward—tools for finding flashes of meaning (and mayyybe even joy) amid the seasonal onslaught.

By spring, production deadlines had bulldozed me, and I found myself flat on the ground. In Take it To The Floor, I wondered aloud: “If every story has a few places to enter, can I enter this one from the bottom? More specifically, the floor.” Grounding. Humbling. Occasionally humiliating. There are many, many good reasons to play dead on the floor.

Fast forward to May, when I undertook a trip upstate to visit a friend—a journey that felt far more perilous than it was. On the other side of that gauntlet, I wrote Please Disturb, an ode to the strange thrill we find in tension. Like the dissonance in jazz or the suspense in a murder podcast, life’s strains can both electrify and enlighten us - if we let them.

In June, as I anxiously awaited the fate of my movie, language itself became a battleground. In Pitiful Pathetic Losers, I explored what happens when we reclaim words heretofore designed to diminish us. Turns out, they shrink in power when we stretch their meanings.

Liberation, I discovered, often lies in semantic rebellion!

By midsummer, I sought refuge in my work, retreating into a season of chasing the Internal Everlasting Now. Burying my head in the page, the antics of summer blurred into the background. What emerged was the realization that art—even selfishly made—is inherently generous.

Somewhere in the depths of my deep-desking, I bought a wobble stool—an impulse purchase spurred by its promise to turn "active bodies into active minds.” It’s since become the Swiss Army knife of my seating repertoire, and it feels fitting that this wobbly wonder mirrored the year’s larger lesson: the importance of staying l-o-o-s-e.

As summer stretched into fall and the apocalyptic tedium of politics clawed for my attention, I wrote Loosen Up or Bust. A final offering of mind-stretching ideas for adapting to the ever-shifting, makes-no-sense of a world. Like the body, the mind needs exercise, and like science, it thrives on experimentation. A rigid worldview won’t cut it in these ever-shifting, ever-stranger times.

This year, wobbling this way and that on my stool, I was figuring out how to keep going, to stay weirdly alive to the possibilities in any moment.

I vow to keep sharing new ways to stay supple, curious, and maybe a little unhinged in the year to come. We will need all three where we’re going.

Can’t wait to hold hands with you through the 2025 mysteries,

Abigail

Interested in a dedicated solution to your current quandaries through the lens of mindfulness, psychology, philosophy, literature, poetry and art ?

Send them in and become a paid subscriber to get first dibs in the new year!

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Pretty sure we can expect to be in unprecedented times from here on out.

The future is only getting weirder, wider, more chaotic, and impervious to your five-year plan.

Things are happening at lightning speed, and rigid ways of thinking are just not gonna cut it anymore. If we don’t learn to adapt, stay open, and loosen the grip on our worldviews, we’re toast.

Adaptation will be our friend. The times of settling into a perfectly curated set of hot takes are over. But, training our minds to flex will be the one-up on flowing with the transitions.

Luckily, helping the tightly wound find some ways to loosen their thinking is one of my favorite ways to spend time! I offer up three simple–and maybe a little weird–tools to keep our brains from fossilising.

No handy acronym here, just some thought experiments that once you try, you won’t forget. Trust, it will stick.

Offer Generosity of Interpretation

Recently, I witnessed friends write off an acquaintance in what can only be described as a public trial–complete with judge, jury, and executioner–working themselves into a lather because said-person didn’t have the ‘right’ reaction to the latest global catastrophe.

And, I don’t know, I think it’s fair to say, in a boiling-point moment of space and time like the current, people are not going to nail it.

More often, we’ll feel they’ve missed the point.

Most often, they don’t match up with how we think they should be reacting.

People are messy, and like all of us, their opinions don’t emerge fully formed from their mouths like pearls of wisdom.

As someone with a scrambled brain, I rely heavily on generosity of interpretation because my own internal processing doesn’t always match what I’m able to put out there.

Instead of rushing to slap quick labels on someone based on a single moment, we can practice mental elasticity, allowing for the possibility that people have their own thing going on.

Offering a little grace is always nice. You can say something like:

“Well, they’re not here to defend themselves, and I have no idea what they’ve got going on, so I’m gonna hold off on any verdicts for now.”

It’s only weird the first time you do it.

Practice Animism

I stumbled across Animism–the idea that the living world (trees, stones, rivers, animals) shapes our thoughts just as much as we shape the world–and was immediately smitten.

Rather than seeing nature as a passive backdrop, you can interact with your environment as if it’s alive—as if the world around you is an active participant in your thoughts. Something opens up. It’s like expanding your thinking apparatus to include everything around you, dissolving the artificial barrier between yourself and the world.🔥HOT🔥

You could interact with the rain as a living presence—when it starts to fall, instead of rushing to shelter, you might stand still for a moment and feel the drops as a form of connection.

You could say “See ya, Fern!”1 to your plant as you leave the house, recognizing its presence and role in bringing LIFE to your surroundings.

Check in with your favorite tree on your neighborhood walk like checking in on an old friend.

Suddenly, the world feels less like a collection of dead objects and more like a dynamic partner in your mental processes. You stop being the sole protagonist in the story and start thinking with your surroundings..

Let Chance Lead

Lastly, the most daring (but thrilling!) of mind-loosening experiments: letting go of the reins completely.

We live in a world that glorifies control—control over your schedule, your career, your social media presence (ack). But what happens when you hand over the wheel to something as random as chance?

Composer John Cage, the king of “I’ll wing it,” used the I Ching , a form of divination, to bring chance into his music. Instead of relying on conventional decision-making or predetermined outcomes, he would throw coins or cast yarrow sticks according to the I Ching’s methods to determine the structure, rhythm, or notes of a composition

And William S. Burroughs would go “walking on color” through a city:

“Pick out all the reds on a street, focusing only on red objects–brick, lights, sweaters, signs. Shift to green, blue, orange, yellow. Notice how the colors begin to stand out more sharply of their own accord. I was walking on yellow when I saw a yellow amphibious jeep near the corner of 94th Street and Central Park West. It was called the Thing. This reminded me of the Thing I knew in Mexico. He was nearly seven feet tall and had played the Thing in a horror movie of the same name, and everybody called him the Thing, though his name was James Arness.  I hadn’t thought about the Thing in twenty years, and would not have thought about him except walking on yellow at that particular moment.”

You could go for your own color walk, or even a shape walk. Flip a coin. Open a book to a random page and take the the first idea you see as your guide. The beauty of this practice is that it gives you a reprieve from needing to direct every outcome.

Let randomness shape your next move and see what unexpected connections and ideas emerge! Often, something delightful comes forward that you would have never found while clutching the wheel.

At the core of all these tools is loosening up. Whether it’s being more generous in how we interpret others, recognizing the world around us is alive and conscious, or allowing the unexpected to unfold, it’s about loosening up our rigid thinking and letting some weirdness in. Trust, it’s the only way to keep pace with the rapid-fire strangeness coming our way.

Generously yours,

Abigail

I don’t say this often enough, but, thanks for reading! Please send ideas, thoughts, and feedback my way any time.

And, AND, AND, If you’re interested in doing a deeper dive on your mind softening, I’m teaching a wonderful virtual Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course starting Oct 21st! Use MINDFUL for 30% off.

xoxox

The One, Maybe The Only requirement of being an excellent writer, an interesting writer, is living. You’ve got to get out there, inhaling experiences, chasing the wild stories.

Everyone says it: You need to live a life worth writing about.

And listen, I did that—gathering my little basket of moments, observing the world with eyes wide-open, mouth agape, filing away the details for future stories.

But since you last heard from me, I’ve been in a different kind of space. I’ve had my head down, blinders on, immersed in an extensive writing project (a feature screenplay of all things).

I wasn’t making copy-worthy experiences. Instead, I did all my living on the page. It felt like I was just inflating and deflating my mind over and over, like a pump, rather than engaging in the outside world.

And you know what happened? I matured as an artist. *blows out smoke

Sure, there are countless ways to mature in your craft, but what I was learning was HUGE, something I’d rebelled against for years. I was learning how to be hospitable to those who experience my art.

‘Way to catch up, Bruley,’ you’re thinking. And fair enough. It’s no secret I’m a slow processor.

But, for me, and maybe for certain other readers out there, too, I’d always resisted this idea. I didn’t want to spoon-feed the audience, spelling everything out, sucking all the mystery and magic out of the work. I wanted to just trust the viewer to do the heavy lifting, to dig through layers, to be spellbound by the maze I set up for them.

A quote from Conan O’Brien about respecting the intelligence of his audience fueled me:

The best advice I can give to aspiring writers is to be clear and simple, but not simplistic. Trust your audience to understand. If you’ve done your job right, the audience will be able to follow you.

For a long time, that’s how I operated. I was all about creating work that made you think, that required a bit of effort to unpack. I wanted my audience to feel smart, to feel like they were in on something. And there’s value in that approach—no question.

But something shifted in my thinking.

I realized that while mystery and complexity can be rewarding, they can also alienate if not handled with care. I wondered: was I being hospitable to my audience, or was I just being obscure because, well, why not? Was I trusting my audience, or was I keeping them at arm’s length, letting them fend for themselves in the labyrinth I’d constructed?

It finally clicked that trusting your audience doesn’t mean leaving them in the dark—it means inviting them into a space where they feel welcome.

Could it be that being a good host in my art didn’t mean making it more simple-minded, but rather making it more hospitable?

I began to see the value in creating a space that invites the audience in, that makes them feel cared for, where they can be fully in the moment.

Creating the Internal Everlasting Now : that feeling when time stops, and you’re fully immersed in whatever you’re experiencing. A moment of total presence.

Oh yes, once again, I had forgotten I teach mindfulness.

To make sense of all this, I dipped my toes into some intriguing ideas:

Reception Theory, is the idea that a work of art or literature is not complete until it has been received and interpreted by an audience.

Hans Robert Jauss was big on this back in the 60s. He said we needed to shift away from traditional authoritative art that focused mainly on the author’s intentions. Instead, Reception Theory emphasizes consciously shaping your work to create an inviting space for interpretation, rather than leaving the audience entirely on their own.

So, in essence, I was being gross and authoritative about my art before. Yeesh.

Then there’s Relational Aesthetics, which is about seeing art as a social thing. The artist sets the stage, but the real action happens when people show up and interact.

It’s like hosting a party–some people participate in banter, some get drunk,some hide in the bathroom, some go outside to smoke–no matter the way they engage, the party isn’t really happening until people are there, engaging.

And then there’s Umberto Eco’s idea of the Open Work, where the artist creates a kind of sandbox for the audience to play in. His novel “The Name of the Rose,” is rich with layers of meaning; blending elements of detective fiction, historical fiction, theology, and semiotics. There’s no one right way to experience it, it’s more like an invitation to make it your own.

That’s another form of hospitality—telling the audience, “Hey, this space is yours, too. Come on in and mess it up.”

So, this is where I’ve been when I haven’t been out there living: Realizing maturing as an artist isn’t just about honing your craft, it’s about understanding how your work lives in the minds and hearts of others. Awww.

It’s about creating that Internal Everlasting Now: a moment where your audience is right there with you, feeling like they’re part of something special, without you having to spoon-feed them the answers. That balance between mystery and connection, that’s where the real magic happens ✨

But here’s where it gets interesting: Not only was I once defiantly averse to being explicit in my art, I also hated, HATED having to explain myself in everyday situations–it became a kind of personal policy.

But to get the chance to explain yourself? What a privilege! When do we ever get to be better understood? So rare. To share your thoughts completely without them getting lost in translation. It’s a kind of hospitality we don’t always think about, but it’s just as important as holding a door open or offering the good chair…and definitely worth embracing.

A pleasure serving you,

Abigail

This is not a seasonal post because it's about being Pitiful, Pathetic and what the unimaginative might call a Loser - which doesn't fit in with the other fun beach reads you had planned for your summer. Sorry bout that.

But, in order to bind this newsletter to truth, I must acquiesce to what's actually here, and what's actually here has nothing to do with sun-soaked sexcapades and everything to do with a smouldering desire to deliver previously truculent words from their damnation. Sorry bout that.

It was borne of the common faux-pas of using the names of disabilities as derogatory terms: dumb, lame, spazz, crazy, etc. As a woman of words and meanings, I pivoted quickly, adapting my language as best I could to reflect new understandings. And it got me thinking about other words we use that have perhaps been vilified unjustly.

You may be wondering the relationship the author has to the words Pitiful, Pathetic, and Loser.

Surely she's never been called these names by someone else. Surely, she doesn't call herself these names. It wouldn't make any sense! She's nakedly ambitious, endlessly producing output, and releasing it to the public with an unyielding confidence and belief in her work!

And, it's true. Of all the mental distortions that accompany life as an artist, Imposter Syndrome has never touched me. I think I do great work. However, I often think that no one else really agrees with me about that.

I've illustrated this feeling as being the little girl in a big, empty auditorium. She's at a screening for her latest movie and no one has shown up. Yet, she is staring at the big screen wide-eyed and smiling. "Yay me!" she thinks "This is great!"

But, if someone were to be walking past the auditorium, look in and see this scene, they might think "Poor thing doesn't even realize no one cares (pitiful), fails to attract a crowd (pathetic), and is certainly not winning any pots of money or acclaim (loser)."

As someone who releases primarily non-beach-read material, this feeling comes up a lot.

Some might say it is a symptom of being the Black Sheep of the family, the one who doesn't enmesh with the values and points-of-view of the parents and carries this feeling of other-dom out into the world. If that Black Sheep also happens to get a brain injury and feel ever-more divorced from popular reality, the feeling calcifies.

BUT, dear reader, as I’ve found, this is all really a misunderstanding of semantics. Therefore, if you have any sour relationship to these words, allow me to transmute them to their rightful place:

If you are Pitiful, you are a soft opening of vulnerability. You've inspired the feeling of sympathy in others, meaning your mere presence has softened their cold, cold heart, this fleeting feeling of tenderness perhaps the only respite they've had from a mind otherwise filled with to-do's and to-dont's. You are walking poetry.

If you are Pathetic, you have seen it all, you have let life happen to you, and are brave enough to stick around and see what comes next. There’s no need to be guarded in your expressions because the unknown is your playground. The courage of your sincerity is stunning.

If you are a Loser, you are a revolutionary. If the dictionary defines a Loser as “one who fails to win or thrive,” the Loser asks, “What exactly are we supposed to be winning, and what is thriving supposed to look like?” The loser is the only one asking if what everyone else is running after is truly all there is. You are a radical in your persistence to the truth.

In Wim Wenders Perfect Days, we have our mascot, Hirayama. He's living a solitary life, cleaning public toilets with reverence, delighting in nature, photography, music, literature, food, gardening - fulfilled and captivated by life. Yet, others barely notice him, or, if they do, regard him as an inconvenience.

His well-to-do sister speaks with him only to ask if it's true he is cleaning toilets. After shaking her head in disappointment, she leaves without a word. Hirayama cries inconsolably.

He weeps for his estrangement from his family, no doubt, but I think what he really weeps for is the fallow lives of the non-Pitiful, non-Pathetic, non-Losers. So sad.

Here’s to a softer summer,

Abigail

I was heading to visit a friend in upstate New York. The transfer train from Manhattan was stalled, just sitting there. The announcer crackled over the intercom: “We’re experiencing a delay,” which we knew.

He didn’t say why. My train car collectively shrugged and returned to screens, magazines, and snacks. Lap nourishment.

A chapter later, I resurfaced. The train hadn't moved. How long had it been? Had time frozen? The calm was eerie. The announcer broke the silence: Bridge maintenance ahead. No idea how long it will take. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Passengers began to stir, some getting out of their seats. A hum of dissatisfaction spreading. "This is ridiculous!" cried out the woman next to me. Her frustration palpable, but directionless. The vague announcement didn’t help.

I glanced at the scrolling menu on the train ceiling THE END flashed ominously. I took this symbolism seriously. I often do.

A group of tourists pacing the aisle suddenly seemed suspicious. Were they surveying us? Plotting something? Was the voice doing the vague announcements one of them?

Each moment of hesitation felt like a gamble. The train doors were still open, offering a promising escape. Do I stay or go?

I checked my supplies: half a spicy salami sandwich, soggy; water bottle, almost empty; cell service, weak; WiFi, predictably useless. Decision time. The air was THICK with anticipation and underarm musk (likely coming from me).

I grabbed my things and stepped off the train dramatically. The cool air hit my face. The city buzzed with its usual chaos, but my personal action movie heightened my senses. Every decision was critical. And with the instincts of a jaguar I texted both my husband and friend, begging them to get me the next bus ticket from Penn Station. Soon, I was lost in my book1 once again on the Trailways bus. Jaguar growl.

Days later, preparing to leave my friend's house, the dog she was sitting ran off. Worst-case scenario flashed before us—he’d bolted into the woods and is attacked by a bear. My friend, panic-stricken, ran into the forest, calling the dog’s name. Once again, I snapped into special agent mode.

"Grab a squeaky toy!" I yelled after my friend, while I followed with some leftover meat chunks , pulling up dog whistles on YouTube and holding my phone up to the thick woods. We called 911, animal control, and the shelter. We got the dog's photo up on the local Facebook page. Knocked on neighbors' doors. Through it all, my friend was losing hope, berating herself. I had to stay steady, focused. I could not add to the stories she was already telling herself.

After hours of searching, we found the dog in the neighbor’s front yard ––opposite direction from where we'd been looking. My friend collapsed in relief. Later, she told me my cool head saved her from a panic attack. It dawned on me then:

I had a talent for navigating high-pressure situations with near perfect composure.

So why, when it comes to challenges that make up my day-to-day do I freeze? Why can I feel bullied by circumstances, thinking there’s nothing I can do?

It’s because what I RULE at is dealing with tension, not fear. Tension is something I can do. Tension is what we face when we're about to cross a threshold.  It’s the space between this-might-work and this-might-not-work.

Even if fear is present, tension is the POSSIBILITY there’s another side to the story to pursue.

It is enduring the space of not knowing where we are in the process, not being sure of our plan, not having a guaranteed solution…but, there’s something.

And in these moments, when life pushes against us, we can get a load of info about ourselves, as Jung, as always, aptly explains:

Every suffering has both a cause from the personal past and a purpose, a pull, toward a future situation which would resolve it and reveal it’s meaning.

-Carl Jung

✓ We see where or who we’ve been—the energies that we’ve been cultivating are coming to pass before our eyes.

✓ We get to see what we are made of; our disposition, reflexes, instincts.

✓ We see what we might want to change to avoid it next time.

A suffering checklist!

With every other (real or imagined) issue in my life that isn’t high-stress or action-packed, I’ve added stories and meanings, attaching them to my identity. Usually it’s “This is happening because of this…”

In other words, I have turned them into fear by not recognizing I am in the very temporary feeling of tension.

We (I) willingly expose ourselves to the tension of *Jazz*, or *Sports*, or any media having to do with *Murder*. But, when it comes to our own lives, we’re (I’m) mostly so convinced by fear, we (I) miss the real opportunities to act.

The fear we create paralyzes us until we realize that forward motion is possible. It is finding the thrill in the tension that moves us over the chasm…and makes for a good story later.

Finding the thrill with you,

Abigail

P.S. If you’re still here, hit the like button: Consider it the Newsletter Guestbook where I can see who’s sharing this space. xoxo

In all fairness, I didn’t disappear so much as lie down.

If every story has a few places to enter, I can enter this one from the bottom. More specifically, the floor.

It started with my debut bout of Covid, an anvil drop to my limbs and blood and life force. There is not much to say about this period of time beyond the forced beginnings of a supine position that I couldn’t have known would be my 2024 stance.

Then, as the virus dissipated, my new gig as a Production Accessibility Coordinator 1 took over the month of January with an arduous stream of 5am wake-ups and 8:15pm bedtimes and obscenely long workdays in between.

There was something about the simplicity of the production life I enjoyed, however. You can't make any plans outside of work because (1) the hours are long and grueling and you don't have the strength to do anything else (2) you could go out and catch Covid and bring it back to set with you, and then what are we supposed to do?

I found myself slipping easily into the cycle of crawling in the door from work straight to the rug where I would assume the 2024 position: on the floor, legs splayed, arms up over my head. Letting my body go diffuse.

In February, set-life still coursing through my veins, I dove straight into pre-production on my own movie.

I’m hot-glueing fabric to boxes, printing signs and posters, choreographing dances, watching Youtube videos on the benefits of shooting Raw vs ProRes, seeking permission to film in locations that resemble what I need for the story, but also come with lounge areas and bathrooms, meeting with my actors to rehearse, meeting with my production crew to plan shots, convincing artist friends to make props, asking friends and family for favors like borrowing their car, PAing on set, and lending me their big cooler.

And I’m doing it in the same way every girl instinctively knows how to: flat on my stomach, propped up on my elbows on the floor.

Come March, I was not quite ready to film but the clock was ticking and I had to anyway.

I adopted the resolve of a warrior, pushing my limits daily on set, tackling each scene like a seasoned fighter unfazed by outside speculations about my directing abilities or the rain threatening my exterior shots.

But each day after wrap, I’d surrender to the ground, sinking into a plush rug or held by an unyielding hardwood floor. From this vantage point, my spatial orientation skews; I’m no longer stomping around making things happen, but prostrate before whatever it is that wants to take the reigns from here.

Why be so dramatic? Why not simply sit down in a chair? Lie down on a couch or bed?

The answer is simple: On a bed or couch or chair, our mind still races along with the day’s ruminations. When lying on the floor, you must leave your head and tune into the body and how it is placed.

Another thing about sitting in a chair is just how many muscles you need to use to make it happen. The hip flexors are lifting the thighs toward the abdomen, the abdominals are stabilizing the torso and maintaining an upright position, the lower back muscles are holding up the spine, the neck and upper back are supporting the head- it’s hard work.

It’s one of the reasons we get people who are able out of their seats and onto their back in mindfulness class. Your breath and heartbeat seems to amplify, you can even feel your blood reversing and dropping with the new center of gravity. Being present takes center stage without even trying.

Yes, I know how it might look to the untrained eye, forgoing my responsibilities to my readers and drifting horizontally into an abyss. But consider from my place of seeming repose, I was doing the hard work of accepting what is, finding contentment in my current state, and rejecting societal norms and pressures. I was actively engaging in a simple gesture of intimacy with the world around me that said ‘Enough about me, tell me about you.’

Expect regular floor transmissions from here on out. At maybe at the end of your day today, instead of plopping down on the couch, perhaps you too will accept the summons of the floor. Report back your findings in the comments!

From the ground up,

Abigail

I can only attribute this to a feeling in which I’m currently entrenched: one of being completely overwhelmed by the holidays!

Even in my mostly-curated-out-of-medical-necessity existence, where every Joule(J) of energy is accounted for, I still find my self taken out by the number and frequency of good tidings this string-of-months brings.

The travel, the parties, the gift buying, the card making, the decorating, the socializing with friends who are only in town once a year, the traditions, the rituals, the hosting, the MANIA!

It's no wonder my first entry upon returning in February was about desperately trying to discover a process to return to my creative work.

But, this year, this year I am determined to know this time of year for what it is: a time for reaching outwards. A time for nurturing community. A time for stepping out of my narrow mind and my narrow world and surrender to the wave of witnessing and being witnessed.

I'm no Scrooge. I love the lights and the carols and the gift exchange and the peppermint and the ball drops and the Auld Lang Syne’s..but I am in need of a new way to look at the hustle and bustle and crowds and obligations and noise that come with the near-constant duty of merriment.

I chose three motivations to concentrate on and conjure whenever the overwhelms begin to seep in: The Very Ordinary. Impermanence. And Death.

It is an amusing coincidence the acronym of these motivations is VOID. So, this holiday, I will concentrate on the VOID.

The Very Ordinary

In defiance of the artificial urgency of a holiday 'schedule', I will bask in the task at hand and lose myself in the details for as long as I desire.

The smell of scotch tape, the wild reflection of lights, the sitcom of family dynamics, even the cold drafts whipping against my cheeks can be wondrous and full of awe.

Ordinary moments will be my church.

Impermanence

People move. They split up. They break their leg. They convert religions. They denounce religions. They move into a condo uptown.

I can remember that everything changes all the time and regard people and places as if for the last time.

This excerpt by Andrew Anabi will carry me:

"When life changes, you will probably miss the way it was. You may miss those long morning drives or walks to the office, or those hectic family gatherings. You may miss them because those moments are finite — you will only travel those streets and see those people a certain amount of times.

Every time you do something that is one less time you do it. One day you will do something the final time and you will rarely know when that day comes.

For all you know, today might be the last time you walk in a particular neighborhood. Or it might be the last time you smile at a particular someone. To think otherwise, would be foolish. Nothing is guaranteed, except this moment. Your only real choice is to cherish every exchange like it is your last — because it very well might be.

Therefore, the best way to cherish life is to remind yourself of life's impermanence. It is to remember that every time you see someone that is one less time you see them. It is to remember that every time you go somewhere that is one less time you visit. By doing this, you naturally slow down. Almost like a reflex, you start to truly live."

Source: How to Cherish Life 

Death

There is a mindfulness idea that I've always loved about 'keeping death on your shoulder' as it reminds us of the preciousness of life. I thought it came from Confucius, but upon researching, I found that what he had to say about life and death was even better:

“We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.”

Esteemed psychologist Beth Pickens, author Make Your Art No Matter What and Your Art Will Save Your Life (AND my personal artistic counselor and reason this newsletter even exists!) advocates for developing a death acceptance practice in order to reflect on who one wants to be and how one would like to spend their time.

She says, “Remembering my mortality gives me the needed motivation to make change, hold everything more lightly, and have compassion for myself and other people. I am less confounded by and anxious about time on the days that I consciously remember that I will die one day.”

credit: Holding Space art shop in Kingston, NY

The mundane is sacred. People and places will change. You and everyone you know will die. Remembering the VOID can be generally just a good way to move through life, but especially for those times when you need extra motivation to keep up the engaging in an engaging life.

Enjoy the mayhem while you can!

VOIDing with you always,

Abigail

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