Autumn Christian's Blog, page 4

What Fiction Writers Can Learn From Video Games

Teach Robots Love is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Note: This article was originally published on Litreactor in 2019

I’ve been playing video games about as long as I’ve been a writer, and for several years I was in the game industry - as a tester, designer, and writer. 

Many of the fiction writers I know don’t play games, especially those from an older generation, and often look at them with disdain - like they’ll rot your brain and give you rickets merely by engaging with them. But games have evolved a lot since the days of early Mortal Kombat and Pac Man, and are now more complex, engaging, and narrative rich than ever. They can do things that may change your perspective on your fiction, and offer a richer palette of experience to draw from.

And if you like games, and just needed an excuse to play some, here it is.

Error is the Best Learning Mechanism

A game is often defined as a structured form of play with rules. And in my opinion: in order for a game to truly be a game, it must have a fail state. In order for a win to matter, there must be a way to lose. Otherwise there's no challenge. No reason to struggle. No feeling of accomplishment.

Franchises like Dark Souls were designed so that you would die. A lot. The appeal of the game is mostly how challenging it is to complete it. Other games, like Stardew Valley, don't have fail conditions per-se, but there are more and less optimal ways to play. (Some may even argue it isn't a real game, but a 'simulator'.)

When you first start out playing a game, you are probably going to be bad at it. You don't understand how the controls work. The best strategies. The paths to take. There are hundreds, probably thousands, of hours of videos on Youtube on how to improve your skill on League of Legends. And oftentimes when you're playing a particularly difficult sequence in a game, the fun yields to frustration. You feel like quitting. Maybe yelling at the game. 

But if you push through that feeling, you get to the other side. You keep going. The frustration gives way to satisfaction. And you'll often find that there's nothing you can't do if you put enough time into learning the mechanisms and getting through it.

To think of error as something that can be avoided is an error itself. It should not even be thought of as a failure. 

So it is with writing.

Work through the frustration when you get stuck. Don't berate yourself for "failing" when you write something that isn't quite landing. This is just part of the game, and the only way to fail is to stop playing. Yes, it sucks to write 3000 words and then realize you can't use any of them, or realizing that you need to shelve a story because it's not conveying the message you wanted. But you had to get there to realize it wasn't working. You could not have achieved a success state without a fail state.

If you start thinking of it as just part of the process, it will stop hurting so much. Failure is just how these things work. 

And if you couldn't fail, it wouldn't feel so good when you succeeded.

The Medium is the Message

Video games are the medium of interaction. They are different from every other kind of art in that sense. There can be art installations that are interactive, or video-games that are art - but each has its intrinsic medium, a core that if removed, would make it something else. Without being able to interact, a game would cease to be a game.

Like every piece of art, a game tells a story. Story seems to be the thread that runs through every human medium. 

The best game designers understand that the story of a game should be told via interaction iself. An excellent example of this the Japanese designer Fumito Ueda, who created Ico, The Shadow of The Colossus, and The Last Guardian. There is almost no dialog in either of these games, and the stories are told via the happenings in the game.

In Ico, a boy with horns is left to die in an abandoned fortress, where he meets the queen's captive daughter, a young woman named Yorda. During combat Ico must protest Yorda or she'll be captured by shadow enemies and dragged to a portal in the ground, thus ending the game. Ico must also hold her hand as they walk along exploring the fortress, and if he leaves her for too long without supervision shadows will come and drag her way. The idea that Ico must protect Yorda is thus not created by dialog, but by the mechanics of the game itself. 

Every element of the game - the animation, atmosphere, art, music, combat, and controls - come together to create a story that could not have been told via any other medium. 

Contrast this to a game like Last of Us, a critically acclaimed game that basically thinks it's a movie. While it has great dialog and art, most of the story is told via cut-scenes, and the gameplay itself is incredibly basic: Sneak around, kill zombies, place ladders to get to other places where you can place another ladder. Don't get me wrong, The Last of Us is a good video-game. But I think it falls short of being a masterpiece, because instead of using the medium of a game to tell its story, it relies on fallbacks like cinematic cut-scenes at most of its pivotal moments.

It's important to remember when writing books, that you are not creating art, a movie, or a game. You are telling a narrative via text. Too often writers will try to create a story like they are describing a movie, and it shows. The text is sparse. They set up a "shot" by describing everything in the background. The "camera" of the POV is zoomed out, so we never get a glimpse into the character.

I think this comes from a fundamental misunderstanding that the medium is the message (And read more books, damn it!). Text is not just an inconvenient vehicle for your vision. It is a part of the narrative itself.

Writing fiction does things that other mediums cannot. So if you want to create a masterpiece and not just a second-rate movie made out of text, you have to utilize the medium itself. 

When you are writing: Experiment. Play with text. See how certain words leave different flavors on the page. See how shaping the paragraphs changes the meaning. Explore the rhythm of sentences. Use more specific words to see how they subtly change the image left in your mind.

Change the Background to change the scene

Back when I first started playing games in the 90s, it seemed like every game on a console followed the same formula: There would be a forest level, a city level, an underwater level, an ice level (I hated the goddamn ice levels. Couldn't see a damn thing.), and a fire/volcano level. Now games tend to be a more sophisticated in their level design, with more subtle areas of interest, but it was a good way to keep things fresh. Game mechanics can often get repetitive, so it was important to switch up the backgrounds so that you felt like you weren't just doing the same thing over and over again. A great example of this kind of "old" game style is Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

Of course, the best games don't just have different backgrounds, but different kinds of game content: But creating new mechanical systems, with lots of coding hours, is often way more complicated and more expensive than just uploading several new art assets.

Resident Evil 7 is a good example of a more modern, "grown-up" kind of level design, (Heavily taking inspiration from the defunct P.T.,) largely taking place in a single lot in the middle of a swamp, but with different levels that feel seamless, from a flooded basement to a garage with hanging bags of meat, to a house full of bugs, to a weird underground Saw-esque trap maze, that make you feel like you're progressing and retains visual interest while maintaining a cogent theme.

This is related to writing because oftentimes I read stories that seem to take place in the same, gray miasmic environment. Fights take place outside of bars. Existential crises take place inside of bars. People drive longingly past bars. You get the picture. Or I guess, the lack of one.

Even while reading plain text, we're visual creatures. We need stimuli to engage our minds in the story. A simple trick to keep people more engaged in your fiction is simply by creating different kinds of landscapes and environments for your characters to interact in. Instead of having an existential crisis on a bar, imagine if it was while parachuting, or on a canoe, or while hiding underneath a bed while the boyfriend of the girl you just slept with is hunting you down. And simply by moving the environment, the context changes, so that your fiction will feel more fresh and engaging as a result.

Think of it as a trick to allocating less mind resources while getting pretty much the same results: You're creating art assets, not building expensive code.

One great example of this is the game D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die, which features one of the most epic button-mashing brawls to take place on an airplane.

Humans love movement, even supposedly arbitrary movement. When things are moving, our eyes are drawn toward those things, because generally if something is moving - that means it can potentially kill you and you should be paying attention. That's the reason why everyone stares at you if you decide to go running. Not because they're judging you (They probably are), but because our eyes can't help but be drawn to an object of interest. In fiction, this also implies. 

People are more likely to pay attention if your character's declaration of love takes place while they're running from a giant prehistoric crocodile in a swamp, vs. in yet another bar. That's just science.

Humanity is the X Factor: Multiplayer Games

I know, you're sick of hearing that characters are the most important part of fiction, but I swear this is a fresh take.

While I just talked about changing up the environment to maintain interest, some games do not take this approach. League of Legends is a MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena for you neophytes) where every match takes place on the same map. People log thousands upon thousands of hours on the same environment. It's probably one of the most addictive, most played games of all time. The League Championship Series gets more views than the super bowl.  So what keeps the game from becoming boring?

For one, strategy becomes more important when novelty wears off, and everyone else knows what everything is on the map. There are also tons of characters with different skills to master, and that means tons of different ways to play and team compositions.

But most importantly - it's the people. People are fighting against people in the arena, and it's the only thing that changes every game. People rarely behave in the way that you expect, and when you are teams of 5 vs. 5, the combinations of ways in which people can act are almost infinite. Whenever you play multiplayer, the people become the most important part of the game. Games aren't sophisticated enough so that they can change with enough variability to create endless content on their own. But people can do that.

From the game production side: It doesn't matter how many times Quality Assurance tests your game, how brilliant your designers are, or how much focus testing you do - when a game is released people will behave in unexpected ways, and play/interact with the game in ways that the designers never intended. (For example, speed racing in Mario 64 or on the darker side, money laundering via the mobile game Clash of Clans.)

(That's not to say people don't behave in patterns. Sometimes they behave in patterns over and over again that people refuse to understand or acknowledge, because they don't know enough about human nature. There is  a universal rule when it comes to custom content that developers rarely acknowledged in the past: If you allow custom content in your game, people will find some way to create dicks.)

Playing a multiplayer game can be an interesting study in psychology and sociology, especially if you must work on teams to achieve a common goal. If most of your understanding of humanity is via movies or other kinds of fiction, your characters will probably be stale and wooden, and follow predictable paths that were designed to create Hollywood-style arcs.  You need to experience how real people interact, deal with problems and solve them. A fast, easy way to do that without ever leaving your couch is via games, and in such an environment you can see how people deal with crises and confrontation more often, even if its simulated.

People exist outside the realm of fiction, outside the goals of plot, and every single one of us is the protagonist in our journey. Although there are patterns, people do not always follow rails, and there will always be those looking to break out of them. 

Not Just a Hero's Journey

Not every journey is a hero's journey. The reason the hero's journey is so often repeated is because it is the universal story of self-actualization. You start out weak, become strong, and then defeat the monsters that are trying to destroy you. Everyone can relate to that, because it's the story everyone wants to have. Story formulas aren't just things bestselling writers "made up", they are resonant pieces of our psychology. A bestseller often becomes a bestseller because it has more resonant components than other stories.

Then Joseph Campbell identified the hero's journey, saw the recurring patterns, wrote a book about it, and gave every wannabe Tolkien an easy to follow guide to create their own resonant stories. All well and good. We learn how to write better stories because of those who paved the way before us, and who identified the patterns that make up good stories that could then be easily replicated.

But the hero's journey is just one of many stories. And I would argue there are story formulas that we have yet to identify. Some of the greatest stories of all time, like Taiko by Eiji Yoshikawa or War and Peace or Game of Thrones, are not psychological stories, but sociological stories. Stories about large patterns, and how the psychological components intersect to create societies. And they have much more complex, moving parts than a hero's journey. (And as such, are more difficult to pull off.)

In order to create new stories, we often have to look to different mediums. There are plenty of video games that follow the hero's journey, but many of them do not. Games like Rollercoaster Tycoon and Sim City don't feature you controlling a single character, but you are a God-like omniscient present that creates a city or an amusement park.

Kenshi is a game where you start out as just another ordinary person, with no special powers or questlines, and you spend most of the first few hours getting the crap beaten out of you by wandering thugs. You can rise to power, but not because you're ordained to it - but because you worked to get there.

Even with games that seem to have no possible story - like Tetris or Solitaire - the player creates a drama in their head, with highs, lows, stakes, and victories and defeats. We can’t help but see stories. We think in stories, because a story is just the contextualization of data. And it’s possible that games can help you learn to tell new stories, and reframe the way you think of plot formula.

Recommended Games For Writers

Okay, if I’ve convinced you to play some games to improve your fiction game, here are my top game recommendations for writers. Most of these recommendations usually just feature Gone Home and Firewatch (Two excellent games, but they are in every goddamn list like this), but I’ve included a wide range of games that pertain to the sections above, not just games with a fiction-like narrative. Some of these, like Rimworld and Kenshi, are difficult games and best suited for people with at least some gaming experiences. Others, like Portal or The Walking Dead, are excellent for beginners.

Portal (1 & 2)

Soma

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice

The Sims

The Walking Dead (Telltale, Season 1)

INSIDE

Rimworld

Bastion

The Fall

Kentucky Route Zero

Her Story

Saints Row: The Third

Kenshi

Teach Robots Love is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Confessions of A Fake Teenage Goth

The first guest post I’ve ever had is from Valerie, a woman I met a few months back during a picnic meetup in Austin. I was immediately struck by her singular and passionate personality. Valerie is the writer of Val’s Pals. She is a talented writer, and while I know a lot of talented writers, what is rare about Valerie is her unbridled sincerity and enthusiasm. Her honest search for answers. So many people become enamored with the idea of themselves, and their writing takes on the pretension of someone who wants to be seen as a Guru or a Thought Leader. Their writing becomes brittle as a result. Valerie simply is, and her substack is an exploration of someone who is very interested in becoming. Anyone who has attempted such a thing knows how difficult it is to do.

Teach Robots Love is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Confessions of A Fake Teenage Goth

Ask anyone from my high school if I was goth, and they’ll say I was goth, but not a real goth. I think that’s a fair description. I had the red lipstick and the angst and the penchant to listen to Bring Me the Horizon on repeat, but I also had a perfect GPA and a love for Taylor Swift and a complete lack of knowledge about what it meant to be goth, aside from wearing black.

In short, I was an imposter, a fraud, a tried and true bona fide fake goth. I wish I could tell you the story ends there, but of course it doesn’t. By the time I graduated from college, I had reached into the cookie jar of identities multiple times and stolen a number of flavors when no one was watching: witchcraft, math research, software engineering, girlfriend to lawyers, novelist, consultant, economics student.

I remember my witch phase fondly. There was this Facebook group that a witch in my neighborhood had started. She was a cashier for a spice shop, which I found rather fitting. All the witches in her group believed that stones could give you magical powers, that all it took to become rich was burning specific types of candles, that charging water under the full moon would make you fearless.

“HAVE YOU BLED YOUR ATHAME?” one post read. “IN ORDER TO BE LINKED TO YOUR ATHAME, YOU MUST LET IT PIERCE YOU. ONLY THEN WILL YOU BE ONE WITH THE KNIFE.”

That year, I watched The Craft, the quintessential witch movie from the 90’s, and stocked up on Killstar clothing and various crystal pendants. Then, with that preliminary research in place, I wrote a lot of stories about witches who smelled really good, think sage and rainwater and incense, and cast spells on boys who broke their hearts. I wasn’t sure what real witches actually smelled like. Maybe they smelled like cinnamon and pekoe tea and vanilla instead, but even if that were the case, I’d still write about witches smelling like sage and incense instead. What mattered most was not the essence itself but the idea of the essence, you see. If people couldn’t smell you and see that you were different, then why bother with that identity anyways?

-----------

My “witch” phase lasted for about two years. By the end of the phase, despite having accumulated maybe thirty or forty lacy, witchy tops, I still had no idea what witches actually believed. And keep in mind that by this point, I had also visited Salem, Massachusetts twice. If I really wanted to, I could’ve asked any witch on the street what they believed, but the thought never occurred to me to make my passion more legitimate. After all, why be a witch when you could simply look like one?

A few months after that phase ended, I dated some guy who had just broken up with a girl named Stella. Stella was quite bitter about the way things ended (in retrospect, I don’t blame her, but you have to understand that I did not have a brain back then) and got really upset with me. So of course, like any girl who does their research on romantic competitors properly, she found out some of my weaknesses and circulated them.

“Valerie calls herself a witch, but she’s not even a real witch! She doesn’t actually know anything about them.”

Stella was right. I was a fucking fake witch. And a fake novelist (wrote a 20,000 word draft before quitting) and a fake math researcher (felt insecure about my lack of career plans, so entertained ideas of being a PhD student) and a fake software engineer (talked a big game about becoming a Google engineer but was too scared to apply there) and a fake girlfriend to lawyers (law seemed romantic but all the lawyers on Tinder ghosted me) and a fake consultant (still have no idea what McKinsey does) and a fake economics student (what is supply and demand anyways?).

In short, I dreamed and dreamed and dreamed about all of my identities, and talked and talked and talked about them to everyone around me, only to realize later that while the idea of these identities intoxicated me, I couldn’t realize any of them. At some point, turning a dream into real life requires turning the crank of reality. And at that point, the difference between what someone wants to do and what someone is willing to do becomes clear. As much as I liked the idea of eating fancy cheeses at McKinsey dinners or getting to tell people that I worked at Google, I was unwilling to put in the work.

------

The thing about identity is that it’s comforting. Getting to tell someone I’m an Ivy League student, or that I study representation theory at grad school, or that I’m dating a partner at a law firm feels like I have a security blanket for my life. I wanted an identity I could feel warm and fuzzy in, and I thought that I could have whatever label I wanted for free. But of course, I was being naive.

I’m starting to realize that I can’t choose my preferences, no matter how badly I’d like to. This has been an extremely infuriating realization at points. Some nights I still wish I could be a Google software engineer and work twenty hours a week and have to remind myself that I’m not wired for that sort of life. And other nights I wish I were a published author like some of my friends, before I begrudgingly remember that I hated pulling my teeth on long-ass drafts.

This is all to say that I am still working on accepting my limitations and revealed preferences. Is it working? A bit. I can truthfully say that I don’t want to date lawyers anymore and that the idea of being a PhD student makes me vomit. I think this is good progress, actually. And who knows? Maybe I’ll even accept myself fully before the time I’m dead.

Have you been enjoying the newsletter? Consider subscribing below or getting a paid subscription to support the continual survival of this newsletter and all my bad habits. You can also buy my books on Amazon or the CLASH website.

Share The Teach Robots Love Newsletter

Teach Robots Love is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Listen Through A Closed Door

When CLASH sent me Afterword to read, I almost immediately knew it was a special book. It was elegant, but full of warmth. Its ideas were grand and majestic, but delivered in an intimate and personal way. It was a book like a GPU server room draped in soft, red curtains. Its humanness was never lost, which is always the danger of writing science fiction. To risk asking a cliche question, what inspired you to write this story? It’s such an interesting, insular, and singular book. I’ve never read anything quite like it.

The Teach Robots Love Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I’ve been thinking about creativity and origin stories. I don’t think there is a singular, isolated inspiration for a novel—at least for me. It’s a mash-up, a swirling mess—events, images, ideas (I love ideas), people, bits and pieces of things, words that have stuck for whatever reason. These fragments combine and recombine in the inner world. Imagine a room full of bouncing balls ricocheting off the walls. For a long time, it’s chaotic and full of mysteries, and that makes me happy. I know I’ve got to sit in that room, balls everywhere, so much uncertainty because that’s when something interesting and original emerges. 

So, here are some of the bouncing balls that led to Afterword: 

Death; what makes us human?; what if we don’t die?; Jacque Lacan’s theory of the mirror process; Japan’s ease of fusing humans with technology; artificial intelligence and the trampling of human limits (including death?); my friend’s diagnosis of cancer; privacy; female mathematicians; Ada Lovelace; Eugenia Kuyda, founder of Replika; trying, trying again to make sentences sing; Virginia Woolf; the human/machine relationship; Nick Bostrom’s essay, “Are We Living in a Computer Simulation?” 

There are more bouncing balls, but you get the picture.

You are a somewhat mysterious figure online. I admit that after reading your book I went and tried to find out as much as I could about you, and didn’t come up with much. Could you tell us more about yourself? Are there any facts about you that might surprise people? 

I’m a pretty private person. It’s true. I need a sphere of solitude and privacy so I can think and move thoughts into language. A writer friend called it marinating. So I need a sealed inner world for marinating.  

My life is, from the outside, pretty boring. I write, I walk a lot, teach creative writing, ride my bike; I have two boys, read tons, and love to take philosophy classes. I can’t seem to get enough of the philosophers. They light my brain on fire.

If you had to describe your own writing style, how would you do it? What do you want your style to achieve, and how do you want people to feel when they read your books? 

I don’t think I have style, but who knows. Reading Robert Frost’s “The Sound of Sense” and teaching style in fiction profoundly changed the way I write sentences and think about them. Frost said, “The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.” Even if you’re not reading out loud, neuroscientists have found that the auditory part of your brain lights up. 

What that means is that you convey one meaning by the word itself, which represents something in the external world; and you convey another meaning by the sound of words and the syntax. Music and meaning are inseparable, and I think that’s so cool and mysterious. 

What secrets does a sentence hold?

Probably the most profound aspect of all this is when you write with your ears, you’re making readers feel the sound and rhythm and this creates a reality that is undeniable. The intellect can refute, deny, justify, but the body is honest. As Toni Morrison said, “Rhythm and sound are the deep structure of fiction.”  Poets know this, but as a prose writer, I had to take a circuitous route to this understanding.

If you only had to pick one book, what book do you think represents the pinnacle of style?

To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf. But now I have to add As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner, and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. 

You’ve also written a non-fiction book called Stunning Sentences. I’ve also been reading your newsletter of the same name. I’m something of a “blue collar intellectual.” I dropped out of college, and I taught myself to write mostly through repetition, self discovery, and feel. I’m always fascinated by people who can dissect writing on its analytical, chemical composition. Do you have any advice for someone like me on how to write better sentences? Someone who’s more of a “playing by feel,” kind of writer, versus someone who diligently practices their scales.

I like to analyse things. It’s just what my brain loves to do--to take things apart and study the pieces, then put them back together by creating something new. But if you don’t like doing that, you can pay attention to sounds. Not just words, but sounds in the world. When you’re out on a walk, listen to people talk. Or the birds. Or the trucks going by. How would you write that sound? Through a closed door, listen to people talk. How would you write that? You can read your work out loud and listen to it. Is it a smooth sound? Is that what you want to create? Do you need harshness? Jaggedness? Choppiness? 

Afterword had a very timely release, in conjunction with the rise of the machines. What’s your opinion on ChatGPT and how it relates to the themes in Afterword?

I live in the Bay Area where I’m surrounded by people working in tech and AI. Three of my neighbors are in the field of natural language processing, which is the basis of the language models. So long before today, when the world feels like it’s about to spin off its axis in a profound way, I was learning about computers behaving like humans, talking like humans, and successfully passing the Turing Test.

The Greek’s view of the afterlife was a shadow world, and the shades required the blood of a black ram to animate their voices. Back in 2016, I learned that soon, the animation of shades would come from code, and a synthetic Hades was on its way. 

And now we’re here. Many of the themes in Afterword are the themes of our new reality: privacy, the human-machine relationship, and transcending limits, including death. When I wrote Afterword, we didn’t have what we have today: from 60 seconds of a recorded clip of someone’s voice, you can create new sentences spoken out loud from this voice. 

And AI exerts tremendous pressure on what it means to be human. Another way to say this is: what must we retain to stay human? Will we adopt AI’s values of efficiency and productivity, giving up all our other values? 

So far, the Large Language Models released to the public are passive. They wait for a prompt. They appear obedient, benign, helpful. 

But soon—and this exists now, but they haven’t released it (though by the time this is published, it might be out)—we’ll have AI that has agency. This is one definition of being human. You give it a task—rent a car, buy a new coat—and it will figure out a plan and make a payment for you. With a sample of your voice, it can imitate you and make calls and book appointments. When I wrote Afterword, the language models couldn’t do this, but I gave Haru, the voice of Virginia’s dead husband, agency.

It’s advancing even as I write this. I find it fascinating and frightening and full of the unknown; there’s so much uncertainty right now because no one really understands what’s going on inside the black box that is AI, and that, too, is a theme running through my novel. 

You can Pre-order Afterword either on the CLASH website or on Amazon.

Have you been enjoying the newsletter? Consider subscribing below or getting a paid subscription to support the continual survival of this newsletter and all my bad habits. You can also buy my books on Amazon or the CLASH website.

Share The Teach Robots Love Newsletter

The Teach Robots Love Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The Teach Robots Love Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Quiet, Silent, Beautiful

The Teach Robots Love Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Sometimes a baby just stops breathing

It’s a genetic thing. It can’t be helped. There’s nobody to blame except a mutant fist of broken DNA, and a newborn’s lungs being so delicate. Lungs like mucus and pearl, shivering under the shallows of the chest. So fragile they might as well not be real

I have a new fiction piece up. Read more of Quiet, Silent, Beautiful over at Hobart Pulp

Have you been enjoying the newsletter? Consider subscribing below or getting a paid subscription to support the continual survival of this newsletter and all my bad habits. You can also buy my books on Amazon or the CLASH website.

Share The Teach Robots Love Newsletter

The Teach Robots Love Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

How To Become a Ghoul

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

The Teach Robots Love Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I ran away from home. I got so used to running that was all I knew how to do.

I knew that I needed to leave, but once I left I didn’t know where to stay. 

I found myself living in a commune outside of Austin, above a divorced man’s garage, on the couch in a house full of punks and anarchists, in an abandoned warehouse, in a run down house full of burners called “The Dead End,” in the boss’s old apartment, in a co-worker’s living room, at work, in my car. I’ve lived in multiple apartments and over eight different rental houses. I’ve lived in Austin, Seattle, San Diego, rural Oklahoma, and then back to Austin again.

I actually liked being homeless. There was nobody to scream at me. I was working as a videogame tester at the time, and I had the money to rent out a small room, but I couldn’t be bothered anymore. Sitting in my car alone in the parking lot of the H-E-B, huddled in the backseat so nobody could see me, I felt like I could breathe for the first time in my life. I ate a peach with the windows unrolled and when I fell asleep using my jacket as a pillow, I dreamed of floating away. The skin of the earth peeled back.

What would it be like to have a home? That wasn’t even a question I asked myself. The 2008 economic crisis had just happened right when I was graduating highschool, I’d dropped out of college, and nobody my age was able to afford one. I’d convinced myself that I didn’t even want it. Why would I want something I couldn’t have? People like me didn’t get to have homes.

Sometimes I’d dream of a home in Iceland. I heard that psilocybin mushrooms grew all over Iceland. I’d tend sheep and live in a quaint little cottage full of plaid blankets, copper kettles, doilies, green wool jackets, warm boots, warm earmuffs. I’d harvest those magic mushrooms in a cute little wooden basket and then trip underneath the Aurora Borealis. I’d make a snow angel

Writers are good at coming up with lives they’ll never live, in places they’ve never seen. Sometimes they believe that if the lie is good enough they can crawl into it and hide.

In my teens and early twenties I’d spent a long time reading Henry Miller, Kathy Acker, Kerouac, and Bukowski. I read Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.  I didn’t know that at the time I was preparing myself to become a wanderer. I romanticized the idea of always being a stranger. I would hop trains for the rest of my life so that the sky would never become familiar. I didn’t want to look into the same pair of eyes twice. That was what made a true artist.

I was the kind of person who’d stop going to a coffee shop once the workers started to recognize me. I didn’t want to become a regular. That might mean people might become friends with me, start to miss me, ask questions about my life.

And what would I say? I dropped out of college and ran away because I think if I stayed I would have died. One of my biggest aspirations in life is to be a ghost, something beautiful that you can never touch.

I wanted the words that I wrote to be warm and full of blood, but if you tried to stick me you woudn’t find the vein.

It took years just to assemble some kind of coherent sanity. To build a life and project some semblance of normality. I had a soul that could be filled. Not just with transparent dreams of doing hallucinogenic mushrooms in countries I’d probably never visit, but family, and personality, and responsibility, and health.

You get so used to telling yourself what you don’t want, that sometimes you don’t even stop to think about what you do.

A home. Wouldn’t that be nice? A few months ago I went back to my grandparent’s house and my aunt and I marked baby Samantha’s height on the wall. Three generations of children. My dad and aunt, my brother and me, and now her. I wish I could have something like this, I thought. Something that lasts. Something that endures.

But I did. I did have it. I was looking right at it. The evidence was written on the wall. Why did I feel like it didn’t belong to me? Where was I, if I wasn’t here?

I know now that ghouls are real, and this is how they are made. With good intentions and grand designs, with romantic dreams, with cope, with illusions, with beautiful lies. They become ghouls because they were just trying to survive. Because a voice in their head screamed at them to get out, and they didn’t know how or when to stop running. And they don’t realize how far they’ve gone from anything real until they look back and try to find it again. Only then do they see they have nothing. They try to reach out and touch something and they can’t even feel it because the feeling died long ago. It pulsed at the end of a nerve and fizzled out.

But maybe all that you need to become alive again is an electric shock. A sharp jolt of reality that pierces through a broken illusion.

Here is a dream that could be more than a lie:

One day I will look back on the worst moments of my life, and I will smile, because they brought me here. My children will never have to know how much it used to hurt. They will know that they will always be welcome home, no matter how far they go. And in that way, no matter where they go, or how far, or for how long, they will always carry a home inside their heart. They will not have to become ghouls adrift, only at peace when they are hiding in parking lots or abandoned rooms , their bodies shifting away from the light.

And there will be a home to come back to. A little house with a big yard, and trees that shiver at night like they are quivering to tell you a secret. And dogs that roam at night, and stars that are bright enough to spill across the water that shivers at the top of a pitcher. A home that is more than a place. A home where the soul can go, and feel like it belongs.

Have you been enjoying the newsletter? Consider subscribing below or getting a paid subscription to support the continual survival of this newsletter and all my bad habits. You can also buy my books on Amazon or the CLASH website.

Share The Teach Robots Love Newsletter

The Teach Robots Love Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Eyes Renewed In Infinity

What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness, and say to you, "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence" ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

The Teach Robots Love Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Notes from the first 6 months with a baby

Six months in I feel that I’ve adjusted to the sudden lifestyle change that’s having a baby. This is my life now. I am a mother now. It’s been the most violent, and forceful, and yet natural job transition I’ve ever had. I can’t really remember who I was before I had Samantha because it’s like it was another person.

I didn’t know that a smile could come so easily, and be so beautiful. Samantha stirs in bed, and I awaken with her, and no matter how early it is, she meets my eyes and her entire body quivers with a smile.

I never understood before how special it was to watch a human grow consciousness. I rolled my eyes whenever parents talked about their kids sitting up, or eating food for the first time, or their first word. But now I get it. You only get so many chances to watch life unfold. Every day more light seems to pour into her eyes. She becomes more prescient, more aware. It’s the history of the universe rewritten over and over again and there’s nothing more fascinating.

I had grown so tired of life I wasn’t sure that anything could truly excite me again. It turns out all you have to do to see it anew is to see it in a child’s eyes.

I often think of Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence when I see my child struggling with something. Pain and frustration has been a constant presence since the beginning of life, and it’s never truly diminished. If you’ve never been hungry before, or been submerged in water, or bumped your head on the ground, these are all consuming and existential threats. Pain becomes fresh with each renewal of life. Sometimes when I see the pain in her eyes I ask myself, “Is this worth it?” And then I always think, “Yes.” In that sense eternal recurrence is real. Each moment plays itself out, over and over again, in an infinite loop. Life repeating itself is not a demonic punishment, but a chance to see glimpses of heaven from every angle until the end of time.

Samantha has her father’s fine, brown hair. It stands straight up like his does when he doesn’t take a shower for a day or two. And she has her father’s big eyes, but they have my shape. This must be what love really means. Two strands of genetic code intertwined forever, and your family and his family, together.

I always hear a clock ticking in my head now. A child is a child for such a short amount of time, and a baby for even less time. Each moment counts. There is no reset or redo. Everything that’s been done is done forever. It makes me more conscientious of my movements and actions. Each minute takes on a new significance.

To be a mother means to stop reaching for mother. It means to stop looking up with my eyes toward heaven, toward an imaginary parent, asking for help. Because that person is me. I am the one who has to step into that role, that eternal archetype. The old weak self must be consumed by something greater. Samantha has me to look up toward. I have myself.

A lot of women say they hate breastfeeding, but I’ve never felt so at peace then when my child is in my arms, eating, eyes heavy, drifting off toward sleep. I cling to it because I know it won’t last long. All the inconveniences - takes too long, breasts big and leaking, not able to go out by myself - seem like nothing compared to the closeness that we get in return.

I have a lot of nightmares about Samantha dying or being injured and I suspect they'll never stop, because our dreams reveal what is important to us and what we fear losing.

I once took a hit of acid to try to “cure” myself and instead got locked in a bad trip for twelve hours where I saw animals dying and screaming in the pit of my stomach, all covered in blood. It took years to stop hearing them scream inside of me, but the noise has been replaced with the soft, rustling sound of arms reaching down into a cavern and rescuing the soft mammal trapped underneath.

The first time Samantha played with another baby her eyes lit up with wonder and I imagine what it’d be like to be so curious and unafraid. This is what it must have felt like before joy was leached out of me. Before I learned to shrink from everything’s touch. When even the picture of the angel above my childhood bed seemed to be scowling in disapproval instead of smiling in a peaceful, wane way. I think of all the things I could have done if I didn’t waste so much of my life fighting mental illness and self-hatred. 

Maybe “Inner child work” is just a poor substitute for actually having a child.

At six months of age you can really see your child becoming. They are opening up to the world and stepping into their personality. It's difficult to believe in tabula rasa/blank slateism after having a child. You don’t mold their personality so much as discover it.

Samantha seems most at peace when we are traveling, on the go outside, observing, experiencing life. I spend as much time outside of the house as I can so that her new eyes can see all that there is to see. And in that way it also strengthens my own courage and self-determination.

You won’t know what it’s like to be a parent until you get there. Don’t plan for anything that could go wrong because it’ll drive you crazy, and there’s plenty of resources online for anyone addicted to paranoia if you want to waste hours researching rare childhood diseases and conflicting studies on child development.Just try to make yourself into the person who can deal with anything.

Samantha’s favorite music seems to be Sarah Mchlachlan, but really any soft female vocalist seems to put her at ease. She also enjoys dubstep.

The first few months of having a child didn’t really feel extremely difficult, but I realized that I was in survival mode. I’d prepared for years to have a child and was expecting the worst, so I was not expecting the warm and soft and happy moments that came. I did not think of myself as a maternal person because it came so easily. It’s only now seeing that Samantha is a bit more independent that I realize how much of a lifestyle change and how difficult it was. It’s like how sometimes I can only see that something in my life was horrendous or difficult based on other people’s reactions. Maybe it’s a little bit of disassociation from my own emotions, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I never developed postpartum depression or felt some of the extreme suffocation that some other women report to feel.

I know as a parent I'm going to make mistakes. I know that one day Samantha will look back and see that I'm outdated and a little silly. That I have odd beliefs and bad behaviors that need to be corrected. That is the nature of life. To be replaced by a better version of you.

There are so many things I don't care about anymore. Having a child has refocused my priorities. Robert and I are moving out of Austin and back to the country in Oklahoma this month. I want to never forget what an open sky feels like. A cool breeze. A dark world tipped on the edge of light, humming with all of nature's mysteries. A child's shadow outstretched near sunrise, dancing in the palm of my hand.

Have you been enjoying the newsletter? Consider subscribing below or getting a paid subscription to support the continual survival of this newsletter and all my bad habits. You can also buy my books on Amazon or the CLASH website.

Share The Teach Robots Love Newsletter

The Teach Robots Love Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The Death of Beauty

The Teach Robots Love Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

“I hate slick and pretty things. I prefer mistakes and accidents. Which is why I like things like cuts and bruises - they're like little flowers. I've always said that if you have a name for something, like 'cut' or 'bruise,' people will automatically be disturbed by it. But when you see the same thing in nature, and you don't know what it is, it can be very beautiful.”
― David Lynch

I used to dislike children. It was the smell.

I always associated children with this particular smell. It was like plastic and dirty diapers, drool and rotten milk. I smelled it everytime I walked into a house with kids. I tried to avoid children as much as I could. I didn’t want the stench to permeate into my home, my hands, my life

Not to mention the toys made of bright primary colors, scattered toys, diaper pails, wet wipes, pink ruffled jumpers covered in snot. It all seemed so ugly and ungainly. It spilled outward in all directions. It wasn’t just a smell to me. It was an infection.Like if I had a child I would become something less than human. A parasite’s host, my body and mind a place where nothing could live but children’s babble and applesauce.

I wanted to live a sterile life. A beautiful life. There were no children in my palace of bones and champagne. I did not want to be holding an infant while I wrote late into the night, went to strange parties, walked downtown at 4 in the morning, crawled out of bed to get my espresso and starved myself in the afternoon. Children would break my porcelain pretensions that I had of myself. They didn't make good characters in stories because they never did what they were told. They existed only to demand and to stay up late and keep you from the darkest and most romantic corners of the world.

I should've known it was a lie. All those things I thought were beautiful were hollow, like a face made out of a silver mold that's empty on the inside when you turn it around.

When my daughter was born I rediscovered beauty. It was not flat and austere. It was warm, and messy, and chaotic. Beauty was the life that flushed to cheeks, those quiet feedings at three in the morning.

I had run from it because that kind of Beauty cannot be controlled. Life always rushes and spills out. It bursts seams and stains good clothing. It gorges itself on the unexpected. It cannot be starved or frozen out.

And the smell. It wasn't plastic. It was flowers and blood.

Now I stop by breweries, or coffee shops, or libraries, and I'm struck by how empty they are. Beautiful decorations have been replaced by a hard ugliness. Everything is industrial metal, ugly carpeting, gray and hard backed and plastic, designed to keep you moving on. Concrete receptacles and concrete bar tops and people who make sure never to look over or glance or smile at a stranger lest they invite something unexpected into their careful and curated world.

Had it always been like that? Or had I only just noticed, so enamored was I with the idea that they represented and not the thing itself?

Freeways block the sun, and buildings are designed to be interchangeable, and rows of apartments line the cities that look like molds for gray candy when you see them from an airplane. Tents of homeless people line the streets. There are faces that are only designed to be beautiful under ring lights, when the camera is on, and then there are the faces of people who have already accepted they are dead.

And I wonder what it does to a person, day in and day out, to go outside and see trash everywhere, and people with faces like ghouls, haunted by their own failure and their own memories, or perhaps even worse, so empty inside that they’re not haunted at all. It's no coincidence that in many strategy games beauty increases morale. An ugly world breeds ugly thoughts.

We convinced ourselves that we could become anything, and in that sense damned ourselves by committing to nothing. Beauty bleeds from all our industries. Sometimes walking alongside rows of shops in Austin I feel as if I'm walking inside the sterile rows of a hospital. There's nothing warm. Nothing inviting. It's all supposed to be efficient. So efficient that it's almost removed the human element entirely.

I dream of a world where beauty is allowed to come back. But if we want beauty again, we'd have to welcome back experience. And if we want experience, we'd have to understand that sometimes when we walk outside we don't always get exactly what we ask for. We have to allow ourselves to be surprised, and challenged, and hurt.

The unexpected arises. And with that, life itself, generating perfect beauty over and over again.

Have you been enjoying the newsletter? Consider subscribing below or getting a paid subscription to support the continual survival of this newsletter and all my bad habits. You can also buy my books on Amazon or the CLASH website.

Share The Teach Robots Love Newsletter

The Teach Robots Love Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

A Little Blue Book of Pain

“There's a sorrow and pain in everyone's life, but every now and then there's a ray of light that melts the loneliness in your heart and brings comfort like hot soup and a soft bed.”
― Hubert Selby Jr., Requiem for a Dream

The Teach Robots Love Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I get so tired of the familiar ways in which I hurt.

Camus once wrote, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Instead, it’s more like one must imagine Camus deranged. Most people with nice jobs, comfortable houses, and a beautiful family aren’t even happy. They drink their morning coffee with a perverse delight in their own suffering. 

Sometimes it even seems like suffering is the goal. They go on vacations to blue beaches and complain about their Mai Tai order taking too long, or get in an argument with the hotel concierge desk for putting them up in the wrong room. They fabricate reasons why they are no longer in love with their wives so they can give themselves permission to cheat.

As a general rule, people don’t embrace the absurdity of life. They rail against it. They don’t deal well with surprises or a big loss. They don’t even like to win. They just find new ways to hate each beautiful thing.

If you’re not careful you can enmesh yourself a black, broiling ball of suffering no matter how well off you are or how much you’ve accomplished.

A dream can become a monstrous entity that sticks its snout into all your little joys and taints them with its poisonous breath. Every paradise turns into a hell if it’s just always out of reach.  

For ten years I’ve been chasing my vision of heaven. Sometimes I even walk into it for a moment, like I just discovered a secret hallway in a house that I’ve been living in for years. A place where colors are brighter. The air is cooler. When I breathe it’s like my lungs have become new again. Each particle, each movement, feels significant. I think to myself, this is what it means to feel alive. 

This is what it’s like to be happy. It’s real. Happiness is real. Such a thought feels forbidden. Tenuous. Like it can only exist in moonlight, in windswept grasses and nestled in abandoned burrows. Like if I turn on the bright overhead lights it’ll scatter away like a rat. 

Happiness is real.

The soft skin of the world rises up to greet me. Even my coffee tastes better. I can taste the ridges of the mountains and the valleys of the earth. I think that if I can live like this for the rest of my life, then I won’t have to put so much effort into being afraid. I can stop hiding myself from my own eyes.

Camus also wrote once, “Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?” But that’s not really a choice at all when you feel like you’re standing on the rim of infinite, sunlit possibilities. 

It isn’t brave to stay alive. It’s the easiest thing in the world. There isn’t a beast in this world that goes down to an oasis to drink and then instead, decides to slit its own throat. 

But then I look away for just a moment, and heaven is gone again. I lose sight of the secret corridor. I lose my faith. Getting out of bed hurts. Music loses its ability to make me shiver. I become unalive.

Sometimes I ask myself why such an old and ordinary pain feels so new each time. It’s like I keep hiding the same revelation, over and over again, from my eyes.

I don’t have an intelligence problem. I don’t have a productivity problem. I’ve solved almost every issue I’ve had. I’ve gotten almost everything I ever desired. I don’t feel like I lack talent or ability.

I have to accept that a big part of me just wants to suffer. I want to find something wrong with my life. I want to believe I can’t trust anyone. I want to hate, and lash out, and separate myself from the rest of the world. Suffering is my precious jewel that I keep reaching for. It’s the enthralling darkness that I stare into like I’ll find anything but tmy own corrupted reflection. It’s my protective armor. It’s my aesthetic. It’s my sense of romance.

I am Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill, year after year, and I am not happy because it’s my suffering that promises to sustain me.

In one hand I hold my glowing seed. My hope and my dreams and my vision of heaven. My little taste of happiness that’s like thinned out honey.

But clutched to my chest is my little blue book of pain.

Maybe once I understand that, really understand it, I can finally let it go.

Have you been enjoying the newsletter? Consider subscribing below or getting a paid subscription to support the continual survival of this newsletter and all my bad habits. You can also buy my books on Amazon or the CLASH website.

Share The Teach Robots Love Newsletter

The Teach Robots Love Newsletter is a reader-

The Teach Robots Love Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The Lost Passion of Age

“A being who, as I grew older, lost imagination, emotion, a type of intelligence, a way of feeling things - all that which, while it made me sorry, did not horrify me. But what am I experiencing when I read myself as if I were someone else? On which bank am I standing if I see myself in the depths?”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

The Teach Robots Love Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Every creative endeavor is an unspoken question of being.

Every person who creates is curious about life and the mysteries it holds. Maybe they’re cynical and arrogant about it. Maybe they’re stupid. Maybe they’re unrealistic, or their perception is distorted by the abuses they’ve endured, or they’re just plain wrong. But still, every motion to create asks the question, why? And in the question ‘why’ is always a spark of hope.

A carpenter creates a chair because people want a place to sit down. But why does he desire to make the chair beautiful? Why does his hands move lovingly over the wood, imagining its rich color bringing warmth into a new space? What does that chair say about its creator, and what does the creator’s gift say to the world?

Even the simple act of creating a piece of furniture is like crawling to the lip of the unknown and trying to peer over.

It used to feel exciting. The thought of being swallowed by the glittering darkness of the thing beyond myself.

I used to be able to write sentences that bent my spine backwards, gave me goosebumps, made my eyelashes feel like werewolf fur. They made me feel like a witch.

It’s been difficult for me to be motivated to write the last few weeks. Maybe because I’m getting older, maybe because I have a 5 month old and I haven’t slept for longer than four hours in half a year, maybe because even after years of struggle and work I still have flashbacks of my childhood that leave me feeling shivery and broken. 

How can I understand the world like the greats do if I can’t even fix myself? Writers like Cormac McCarthy and Dostoevsky and Brian Allen Carr are great because they see. They can’t help but see. The world pours itself into their eyelids. Whenever I read them I can almost feel the light spasming off their fingertips.

I spend a lot of my days in a stupor of disassociation. I’ve hidden myself from myself. I sit in the eclipse of my knowledge. I hide in the dark bubble of paranoia and mistrust because it’s more comfortable than the light. I’ve made myself too weak for the light. It hurts my eyes when I turn to regard it.

When I was nineteen years old and writing The Crooked God Machine, my worst fear was losing my passion to write and thus, losing myself. I didn’t want to become one of those thousands of “writers” that gave up to work in some office with fluorescent lighting and gray carpets, to go home to needy children and a distant husband and one of those beige couches that seemed out of place no matter how you decorated. I knew that in this nightmare version of myself my coffee would always be bitter and lukewarm, and the closest I’d get to love would be a look from my husband like the look of a deer before it’s run over in the dead of night. A look of dumb shock mistaken for an excited nerve.

 I didn’t want all of my sharp edges flattened. I wanted to live life as one big spiritual experience. I never wanted to stop feeling the blood welling up underneath my nails.

But the worst part about losing yourself is that it doesn’t hurt, because death doesn’t hurt. It goes quietly into the night, and the pain is a distant memory, if there’s a memory at all.

I’ll never be nineteen years old again and looking out at the horizon of my life, in this center of a median where everything in the expanse beyond me was huge, and glittering, and brilliant. I can still remember how I felt the first time I went into a cafe in a strange city and ordered a cafe au lait. How the possibility of everything that could be made the world seem bigger than it really was.

But in the decade since I’ve scoured the earth and its corners, I've come to recognize life’s patterns, its endless chiral spirals, its mathematical certainties. The coffee in most cafes is mostly the same. Most restaurants have the same meals. People, when you get down to it, aren’t really that different from one another. Each day brings a similar routine, and even if you try to break the routine you can soon grow to be bored of your newbound freedom. Everything is carbon.

This doesn’t mean there aren’t beautiful and nice and surprising things in my life anymore. It just means they don’t matter as much as they used to. They don’t contain such awesome mysteries.

And after dealing with my trauma and the pain it’s caused for most of my adult life, I think that even if I unlock “the mystery” to curing myself, my reward will just be a normal life, with different problems, with a ravaged wasteland of broken relationships and missed opportunities. I’ll never get to be twenty years old again so I can order a cafe au lait at a coffee shop, everything foreign and wondrous, my shining eyes erased with an old pain.

When I gave birth to my daughter I gave birth to my replacement. It was the moment I became old. A true adult. I’ll never feel like a young person again. I’ll never write like a young person again. I’m not supposed to. In order to have childlike wonder I must erase my knowledge, hide wisdom from myself, be blind and ignorant, repeat the mistakes of youth over and over again. I must learn nothing. 

A person full of childlike wonder cannot become a mother, elder, wisdom-holder, sage. They become the sad village clown. The forty-five year old that still shows up to teenager’s parties with a six pack and sallow skin and eyes that refuse to be filled with new insight. Or like Madonna, who has become like an idiot fairy. She tried to cling to an image that was meant to change, and so became a mutant and distorted version of her old self.

In order to become the best version of myself, to continue on that unabiding chain of life, I have to put away childish things, or I will become the childish thing that must be put away.

I do not have to bend my face down into an eternal cold. I do not have to become a husk. But I do have to become different. I do have to recognize that all things, from the beginning of time, move through a current of blood that carries us all to our final destination into the dark.

I recently published a new story in XRAY Lit mag. You can read Disappear Here over on their website.

Have you been enjoying the newsletter? Consider subscribing below or getting a paid subscription to support the continual survival of this newsletter and all my bad habits. You can also buy my books on Amazon or the CLASH website.

Share The Teach Robots Love Newsletter

The Teach Robots Love Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Notes for Myself When I'm Too Afraid to Move

It's okay to be afraid, it means you have something to live for.

Alicia D'Aversa

The Teach Robots Love Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Fear has defined so much of my life. One of my first memories is of being at the Oklahoma Zoo and looking down into the hippo pen. My mother told me to be careful, because a boy had fallen in and was swallowed up. I was too young to understand what it meant to die but I understood what it meant to be eaten. I spent most of my childhood afraid of rattlesnakes, and strangers, my own reflection, the pinch of fat on my stomach, getting lost, being abandoned, the tremble in my own voice, angles where I could be seen but not seen.

I’ve worked a lot on managing my fear but if I slip a little, If I glance away for just a moment, it can all come flooding back in a crushing wave of paralysis, bringing with it the haunted bones of my childhood, transforming my face into the rictus of a terrified doll. Maybe I'll always have to contend with feeling as if my nightmares are more real than waking life, because the twisted dream logic of a world that always presents to me my worst fears seems more realistic than daring to hope for the best.

Still, dare to hope we must. Here are some notes I wrote for myself to contend with the fear when it becomes overwhelming.

Death is everywhere you look. You're not imagining it. Everything is coming to an end and there's little of you that can be preserved. Only fools are unafraid of looking over the stretched rim of life, down into the deep and sparkling well where nothing resides.

Recognize that you have a good reason to be afraid, because you have been designed to be a fearful creature. You are spit, and adrenaline, and nerve endings, and eyes that catch the slightest movement in the periphery. Your most base instinct is to chase life at the expense of everything else.

Nothing in this reality is without consequences. You pay for everything, there is no way around it. What costs the most to a human being is living a life they never wanted because they were too afraid to dream of anything else.

Sometimes when I'm afraid I have to remind myself that I'm often afraid of the wrong thing. Oftentimes the price of inaction has a much more potential horrible outcome than doing whatever it is I'm afraid of.

Fear tastes like metal and blood and salt, like a ball of sweat that's been rolled through a frozen shadow. Recognize the taste, because sometimes you try to convince yourself your choices have been made not from fear, but desire.

Being a neurotic means that I see danger everywhere. Sometimes I become so obsessed with the fear that I lose sight of the sky and the trees, the color that imbues everything, the joy that seeps into each moment if only I would allow it.

I used to dream of demons tearing me apart, until I started to laugh and dance in their presence. Then they shed their black shadow skin and their carnivorous teeth and became giggling little children.

All new knowledge is precipitated by fear. Fear is the needle that injects each new perspective into your brain. The mind above all resists change. It howls, terrified of it, and often becomes furious when confronted with it.

I often wonder what it'd be like to be eaten by a bear. I feel it's paw on my head, pinning me to the earth, spine crushed, paralyzed but feeling as my organs are pulled out of me. The ground is frozen and my pink insides are frothy with steam. It seems an unimaginably cruel way to die, and yet, so common and ordinary. It doesn't matter what plans I have for my life or what I try to avoid, all cruelties I'm confronted with must be endured.

All pain becomes dull in memory. All pain is bearable because it soon fades.

If I become devastated and terrified at the thought of losing something, it means that something is worth keeping. It doesn't mean I need to figure out how to live without it.

Every fear avoided just makes your world a little smaller.

I didn't develop a fear of heights until my late twenties. It was as if suddenly my brain has fully matured and I became aware of a danger that was always prescient. I used to climb trees and telephone poles, traipsing in strange backyards in the dark, behind gas stations and down alleyways. I feel like I was a little babbling lamb at the mouth of a dragons cave, and now I'm a lot more cautious, although I'm not sure if that's improved my life significantly.

Nothing in life is guaranteed, and every promise can be broken.

Having a child is a special new kind of fear. Before I was just afraid of dying. But if your family died, it would be like dying forever, every piece of you extinguished.

Lot's wife turned into a pillar of salt not because God is cruel, but that if we turn back, fearful and hesitant, scared to move forward, stuck in the past, blind to destruction, the world will kill us.

Fear really is the mind killer. It is the little death. To give in to fear is to die over and over and over again until your soul is so small that it couldn't be scraped off the pavement.

Fear and excitement are twins. You can even teach yourself to enjoy that metallic taste in your mouth, the twinge in your stomach, because it means you're about to experience something new and important.

Hell is real and demons are real and it's the result of giving in to your worst impulses, to entertain a perverse kind of misery, to give in to entropy and fall and fall into suffering because the fear of hope is just too great for you to endure.

One of fears greatest tricks is getting you to hurt yourself to try to avoid the thing you're afraid of. It's a corrupting brain virus.

I have to remember that I’ve gotten through worse than this. I have continued to endure in the obliterating scream of fear, day after day, even through the mornings when I woke up and thought I couldn’t possibly go on. Until I’m dead there will still be moments where I can laugh.

I have to believe that there’s more than this. I have to believe I can have a life that isn’t ruled by fear. I have to believe that one day I’ll get everything I want, fear winking on my shoulder like a little fairy, instead of the enduring and eternal maw of a monster that meets me at every choice.

Have you been enjoying the newsletter? Consider subscribing below or getting a paid subscription to support the continual survival of this newsletter and all my bad habits. You can also buy my books on Amazon or the CLASH website.

Share The Teach Robots Love Newsletter

The Teach Robots Love Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.