Mutual Aidpril

Hey, all - I hope you’ll forgive me; I’m opening this edition with something a little more personal. After will follow a round-up, and there are a lot, so I’m linking straight from Threads. This way you can click the links and repost, boost, share, comment, whatever you gotta do, more easily. And of course: give.

I’ve been spending less time online lately, and that has made one thing more clear to me than it previously was; what I am doing here, I am now predominantly doing for others. I want to be intentional when I say that this is largely an acknowledgement; and I am treating this (the realization and the act itself) as a positive.

But let’s take a couple of steps backward to start.

Just over a year ago, I endured a trauma that fully decimated my ability to write. By this, I literally mean the act of putting pen to paper and articulating my own thoughts to and for myself. I could still write for work and for class, probably because I had to, and even there, I could tell some of my previous skill and passion had been decimated. It was a psychological insult that quite actually changed me, and every day I realize a little more or a little differently that in subtle ways I remain changed, and I remain hurt, and I’m still very much dealing with unrealized fallout from it. But being on social media was a small way to combat it: it was like I was receiving little prompts for my thoughts, little points of nucleation for ideas to coalesce around that would allow me flashes into what was kind of trapped in my own psyche through communion with others, and that would allow me to interrogate my own cognition while dropping notes of understanding and support into the ether. It helped me find other like-minded monads (nomads?) to connect with, not to make them do the lifting for me, but for both of us to acknowledge that there was lifting to be done. And this was - and I still hold, is - good. The connections we make on social media are as real as we permit them to be, especially if and when the parties involved recognize that some unique magic has occurred and each allows and fosters those connections. I’ve had that with more people on Threads that I genuinely thought possible, and more than so many other things in the world right now, that experience - and those people brought into my life - are what is giving me hope. Hope, yes, hope, and something like a purpose.

I want to be plain: this is not a goodbye. This is not that kind of a letter. Even if Threads goes the way of Twitter, goes the way of the dinosaurs, you’ll still have to pry my fingers away from this keyboard. You’ll find me on Bluesky. You’ll find me yapping ceaselessly into the uncaring digital void, wherever it goes. No, I am a poster. I will always post.

Recently (and after some months of therapy) I’ve found myself able to write again. (Here I am. Look at me. Doin’ it. Doin’ the thing.) It’s made me realize I’m no longer actively (desperately) seeking the little bits and pieces of the world that I can pick up and examine and maybe add a little something to and set back down again. In fact, I find it now to be mostly exhausting. That’s not a criticism; far from it. Interacting with so many human beings on such a scale seems to me like it should be exhausting when you understand that on the other side of (almost) every post is a whole-ass human being (or a bot, but let’s discard that for the moment). It should be exhausting to be in such vibrant community with so many people.

And thus I have come to realize that my Threads-ing has evolved into something it wasn’t: it’s no longer for me. It’s for you. It’s something I’m doing for others. Again, as above, this is no criticism, and again, as above, I am not leaving. In fact, it’s the reason I’m choosing to stay. This account and this newsletter - with full admission that I am deeply human and as a human I am deeply flawed and highly susceptible to the delicate ego-stroking that comes with the completion of this sentence - have enough eyes on them that I am going to turn their use fully outward and render them tools of what I started (and re-started) this newsletter to do, which is, in some small way, to build and help a community that will almost certainly need as much dedicated energy as I can give to it. Yes: I will still post my inane little takes. Yes: I will still post pictures of Crumpet. As I have said, I am a habitual poster. But slash and: most of my time online will be spent on sharing information in the areas where I am informed enough to do so, and shutting up and learning more about those areas where I am not. Most of my reposting will be in service of growing and preserving mutual aid networks and getting a broader audience for the people who require that assistance. And I’ll be honest: you may have noticed that that’s kind of what I’m already doing. But for me, that’s a big switch, a big admission. I used to make sure I liked every single response, tried to reply to every single comment to which it was worth replying. I used to apologize when I could not. But - and blessing of blessings - there are simply too many of you for me to keep up. I’m offline for one day and the backlog is just too much.

But many of you have grown to be my close friends - truly, some of the closest. So, though I have to reiterate that I may be (intentionally or not) slow to respond, my DMs are open. If there’s something you think I need to see or share or know, send me a message. Or just send me cats (you know I love them toe beans). But that’s how you can make sure I’ll see your post.

There is, of course, always the fear that this shift may lose me the following that I rely on to effectively get help to those who need it. I worry that overloading my timeline with mutual aid requests will get everyone to mute or unfollow. And you know as well as I do that this kind of work either requires a large amount of unencumbered funding or something like a sizable audience, and I for one certainly do not have both. I’m teetering on the edge of the latter and hoping I don’t fall off. But for now, I’m going to try and make this work, and I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. Or I’ll burn it for warmth. Right now, though, I’m going to use what I’ve got.

Alright. Let’s get to the real point of this thing: requests.

Remember: the perfect is the enemy of the good. Pick one and give what you can. If you’re on Threads, you can click right through, share, comment, and boost. We can do this together.

Thanks so much, friends. See you next week. Until then…

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