Draft Four: Start where you are

Second half of the year, here we go.

Some nights ago, I bumped into a group of creatives I admire. They were having drinks and expressed enthusiasm to see me. I froze. Less because I was starstruck, more because I’ve seen them mock me (and my work) online in the past few years.

And here they were, on a sidewalk, greeting me loudly. I shook their hands, said hellos, and moved on. The whole thing lasted less than a minute, but it left me sad and self-conscious. It couldn’t have been genuine enthusiasm on their part, I thought. Why pretend?

This is not a letter about what not minding what others say. Neither is it a letter about getting used to haters questioning you publicly. (More power to those who can).

It is a letter about co-existence – about joy and fear sharing space through the day, about admiring and avoiding at the same time, about sadness and enthusiasm jostling for one’s attention.

Ultimately, it’s a letter about reaching the mid-point of this year (and of our planned correspondence) and taking personal stock.

Before we move on, thank you to the more than 1.350 of you who subscribed; this adventure has surpassed all my expectations.

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Recently I’ve inventoried professional thoughts – a list of jobs I could do, my pitch for what I want to learn in the future etc. I’ll report news when I have it – for example, I’ve asked a bunch of 20-somethings to join me for a weekend session to design media prototypes for the future.

But yesterday I was listening to a psychologist talk about something I believe in as a storyteller and editor: the sharing of struggle to create connection, but also to reduce the pressure of social-media induced perfection. (“Sharing your pain is a gift to other people”, Mariana Alessandri said).

So, mid-way through the year, here’s a complimentary list: a more personal inventory of more difficult things. I’m sharing it with the belief that when you tell your story, others connect better to their own, and we all feel less alone.

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I was walking through downtown Timișoara last weekend, and a young woman stopped to say “hi”. “We don’t know each other”, she told me. “I was a DoR subscriber. Just wanted to say thank you, and that I miss your work”. A couple of days later, during a workshop, an AI-researcher told me he missed Concentrat, the daily newsletter we used to publish. He also brought a printed DoR for me to sign – one with a cover designed by the amazing Sorina Vazelina, who I also met for coffee with in Timișoara (Sorina told me she missed how we connected different communities.)

I bring these up because many have asked me – bluntly or more sheepishly – if I was OK after DoR, if I was suffering in a way I’ve not expressed. I’m still surprised this question makes me smile, and it does so partly because I’m relieved that it’s easy to answer.

I’m very OK with DoR not being around anymore.

Yes, I miss the creative work (carefully written and edited narrative nonfiction seems even rarer in Romanian media now), I miss the camaraderie of a team, and, occasionally, I miss having the ability to make large scale stuff happen: such as a live journalism event for hundreds of people.

But those can always be done again; they don’t need the brand, and I don’t miss the role and the daily responsibilities. Of course there are spells of loneliness, and there was grieving, but I grieved thought a joyous appreciation and celebration of everything we did for 13 years that culminated with our December send-offs.

The other part of the answer I give those who ask how I am is to say how I’m not: I’m not bitter, nor filled with regret, resentful, panicked about losing an identity, or angry. Those are all valid emotions, and many create and build with them as fuel.

For me, powering my life with such fuel would be cataclysmic.

That’s not to say these emotions don’t show up.

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This year has been confusing in many ways. I am a person of routines, and many went out of the window. I am also a person that thrives in long-term commitments. Plus, I enjoy things done with care and transparency, two needs that I struggled to have met.

And things do make me angry. The renovation I’ve been doing on the apartment has reached a stage where I don’t like who I become when I think about it. Easiest example: last week, new windows were finally installed, but the workers who were supposed to prepare the openings, and then fix the walls didn’t do it when they said they would. Last week they sometimes showed up and worked, sometimes didn’t, and I couldn’t find a way to communicate with them about what was on their list for the day, or whether they’d come back tomorrow.

I got so irritated that I told the contractor that’s not how he expects me to act when it comes to payment. I don’t say “tomorrow”, then deliver just 30% of the fee, four days later. Would he like it if I did that, I asked. He wouldn’t, he told me.

I didn’t enjoy talking to him like this, and I don’t enjoy having to do so. I also dislike it when others casually tell me: “this is how people work here. Just adapt”.

I know the wisdom – accept what you can change, what you can’t, be wise and know the difference etc. I try to live by it. But it’s one thing to find ways to go on when systems fail, and another to acknowledge that they are broken, and then go on without forgetting they can be improved, and when the time is right, giving that improvement a shot.

In other words: I know “I shouldn’t get angry”. But sometimes, I can’t help it. And sometimes I can’t help it, and I act on it. And then I end up regretting the action because I feel a strong tension between what I just did or said, and my values.

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I have also come to accept I have a hard time adapting to people and places that don’t cherish transparency, care or clarity – think queries that sit unanswered when a “no” would be amazing; projects changed without consultation; offers (of jobs, services etc.) that don’t spell out the ground rules but promise “we’ll see”; systems that use all this murkiness to avoid responsibility.

As an editor, there’s a trick I used to help things move faster: when I pitched anyone to do a story for us (or work on one as a photographer or illustrator), I’d send a brief and add this: “If you don’t have the time, if this is not up your alley, if this pays too little, send back say a quick ‘no’; we’d be grateful”. It often worked.

We associate assertiveness and transparency with unkindness, when it’s the opposite. I’m now advising my students to send in pitches to publications with a reply deadline: tell them that if they don’t get back to you within a week – and a “no” or “we’re swamped, give us 10 days to read this” are both awesome replies! – you’ll go elsewhere.

This is less a negotiation tactic, and more a way of not allowing circumstances to hold you hostage.

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A few more pain points.

I’m single, after eight years in a wonderful and important relationship, which reached a natural conclusion. This is an important identity shift, but one I don’t have mental bandwidth for – or maybe I avoid because the prospect of “being out there” seems more daunting than finding a working model for journalism. Someone made a good joke about this: “You are a 42-year-old Eastern European man, no kids (or desire for them), and no divorce in your CV. Serious red flags”. (I see the male privilege behind all this, but I also get the joke.)

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Money has been on my mind, too. This is an expensive year. I exhausted my savings with travel and apartment work, and though I was able to work on projects that ended up paying more than my salary at DoR (5.000 lei per month when we closed), the payments were scattered. I’m lucky to not pay rent or to have to support others, so my level of discomfort is subjective, and it has further heightened my awareness of the inequality of our systems and the shitty pay in arts, culture, nonprofits etc. (I am editing a story for which the reporter emailed around 50 Romanian newsrooms to ask their salary ranges. None replied. We made ours at DoR public a few years back, but it remains a taboo move to make – both because they are low, and also because the discrepancies they’d show might be large).

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So, this is water, always a mix of joy and pain.

This is Water is also the title of a famous David Foster Wallace commencement speech delivered in 2005 – one I’ve been reading at least once a year for a decade (just did it again this week). I do it because it reminds me of a few essential ideas:

• Adulthood is repetitive (thus boring in a way).

• It’s easy to fall into the trap of believing you are the center of the universe: your desires trumping others’, your pain more acute, your task-list worthier.

• “Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.”

• “It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat out won’t want to.”

What Wallace says is that our minds can be terrible masters. (His own was tortured by terrible depression; he committed suicide in 2008, at 46.) Ideally, we can remind ourselves that our lives and the lives of others are never just one thing: either bad or good. We get angry and entitled, but we can also be generous. We lose something and find something, often the same day. We hurt and love simultaneously. We’re in the light now, and in the dark later, then back out into the light, and it’s OK.

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Please understand I’m not trying to give you “put it on a T-shirt” advice.

This is how I’ve come to understand life, and I have no idea if it helps you to know this. I don’t find anger fueling, but you might. I crave the adrenaline of learning new things, despite the fear. You might not. I appreciate the stoic wisdom of not paying attention to what distresses you, but if I make that a goal, I’ll fail constantly.

I’m more in the “throw in a bit of everything everywhere all the time” camp.

When my mother was dying many years ago, I was falling in love in the next room. My mother was literally having her lungs eaten up by cancer in her sleep, breathing loudly though a tube, while me and my then new girlfriend were talking late into the night about who each of us were. When the grandmother who raised me was dying a decade ago, we had our last conversations over video-calls, because I was at a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, the most incredible professional achievement in my life.

And it’s not just big moments. Last year I got COVID and injured my foot terribly, all within a week, while also attending an amazing community experience (OK, without moving much), which led to fulfilling projects, including three shows at the end of 2022.

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So, yes, when I ran into those creatives and froze, that was just one input into the day. Minutes before I had seen Carbon, a beautiful film from Moldova, built with a tenderness for a corrupt and tragic past that is rare. Yes, I got frustrated with a slew of things this week – the scorching Bucharest heat included – but it’s also the week the students I coached on their BA projects graduated (many got a 10!), and the week I had a chance to talk storytelling with chemists and architects and astrophysicists.

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I have a piece of paper tacked to a corkboard above my desk listing “impact principles” I borrowed from Bülent & Raluca Duagi (get their org design newsletter!). There’s six of them, and to me they make up a great blueprint for living (with everything) through change:

1. Start where you are.

2. Look around you.

3. Build on the energy.

4. Learn as you go.

5. Seek conversations.

6. Leave things better.

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I’ll close with a poem I heard in Timișoara last Sunday, at Tongue Fu, a brilliant spoken word & poetry jam session. It was written the night before by a tipsy Stephen James Smith, an Irish poet. The subject was the city of Timișoara (and maybe Romania, by extension). It featured a list of observations, facts, sayings, and perceptions from his few hours on the ground. (I’ve transcribed some of it below, from a phone recording I made).

I loved it because it honors the principles above, because it’s about living with everything simultaneously, and not letting the painful parts crush you. Just the opposite: letting everything guide the search for who you are, or who you could be.

Tu ești [You are]

Hungarian, Ottoman, Austrian

You are agriculture, and fields of sunflowers

(…)

Tu ești

Your weather is too hot for an Irishman

You have weathered a storm, a regime change

Tu ești

A Revolution in 1989

You are George Hagi making football into an art form.

(…)

You are rubble

You are baroque buildings and art nouveau architecture

You are gold teeth, accordions, and piles of bird shit

Tu ești

Remittances from the ones your country lost

You are blue, yellow, red

Counting the dead after the Holocaust

(…)

You are classical music and euro pop

You don’t know where you’re going and when it’s gonna stop

(…)

This isn’t my place to write this

This is just a prompt, just my foreign eyes

But I’m part of your story now, too

And I can only be me

Tell me, who are you?

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SIDE DISHES

1. The psychologist Esther Perel on the new season of her podcast and the dangers of overusing therapy-speak (just scroll through your Insta stories).

2. Darkness is OK. It’s the conversation from the Grey Area I mentioned at the start and it’s worth every minute.

3. We often make the mistake of believing people think ill of us (when they don’t), or that they think of us at all (when they don’t). Listen to this episode of Hidden Brain to understand these social illusions and how to counter them.

4. This is Water (Asta este apa) was just translated and published in Romanian, in a nice slender volume from a nice independent publishing house. Buy it, read it, gift it.

5. Another beautiful thing to read in Romanian is Cristina Alexandrescu’s book of poetry Cât mai departe de tot ce cunosc (Farthest from All that I Know).

6. And because I closed with one of my favorite questions, here’s one of my all-time favorite speeches on storytelling as identity-making.