Hello, friends! So glad you could join me today, seeing as it’s a year out from when I first went paid with this newsletter, putting the majority of content behind a paywall. The decision to put any content behind a paywall was difficult for me, honestly. I write for a variety of reasons, but one of them is because I want to communicate to other people what I’m thinking, to engage in conversation. To cut anyone out of the conversation over money goes against the grain for me, as someone distinctly skeptical about capitalism.
At the same time, it’s true that publishing this newsletter takes work— time and psychic energy and creative focus. Not to mention discipline and organizational skill, since this newsletter is so far only a small portion of my annual income and must be juggled along with all the other ways I make a living.
I believe that people should be paid for their work. Tropes about creativity being its own reward are a convenient way for the gatekeepers to keep the number of professional artists from expanding to the point where they might actually change the culture. I picked Substack as the platform to launch my newsletter way back in January of 2021 because it allows any writer with the passion and wherewithal to create consistently to find their people and receive payment from them directly. This has the potential to truly democratize art as a career path, allowing for a host of different kinds of people who might not ever be deemed worthy of audience and attention by the powers-that-be to get paid to put their writing out into the world.
I realize not everyone has the bandwidth to read a newsletter twice a week. I’m confident that the majority of you, who only hear from me twice a month, are receiving plenty of food for thought concerning how to practice integrity as an imperfect human in a complex world. But given the complexity of the world, and us as people, there’s always more to say, always another angle from which to approach the topic. My paid folks are getting the full benefit of that diversity of approach.
Here are some of the essays I’ve sent out only to paying subscribers over the last year. I’ve unlocked them so everyone can get a taste of what is available if they want to be more engaged in the conversation. I hope after reading some (or all) of them you’ll seriously consider becoming a paid subscriber if you haven’t yet.
Kiese Laymon’s Ethic of Revision
Back in November of 2021, I shared a podcast interview with Kiese Laymon, one of the greatest writers of our time. In the interview, he talks at length about his commitment to revision, creatively and as a person, which is essential to his practice of integrity.
[T]hat’s the thing about, I think, revision, I think if we’re honest. You know, like sometimes I think, yeah, like the goal is to make something necessarily better. But I think sometimes making something have a bit more integrity is not necessarily making it artistically better…I was trying to make this have more integrity for me, you know what I’m saying?
The Deep Wisdom of Near Enemies
I think this might be one of my favorite newsletters that I’ve ever written. The Buddhist teaching on near enemies brings nuance and accountability to our integrity practice unlike anything else.
It is so easy to fall into behavior that seems like it’s integrity but effectively points us in the opposite direction. I return to the challenge of avoiding rationalization, placation, and righteousness— the near enemies of integrity discussed at length in this newsletter— over and over and over again.
Let Mystery Have Its Place In You
In the pursuit of self-knowledge we can, I can, become relentless in turning over every psychic and emotional rock. But sometimes we have to submit to our own wildness, the parts of us that resist being tamed, because that’s part of our wholeness, too.
Clearing out the dead brush, giving those tender bits of ourselves trying to emerge space to breathe and grow is honorable work. But trying to prune ourselves into perfect shapes, to tame all the wildness out of ourselves, may just kill our magic.
The great Audre Lorde, in her essay Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, teaches us that grounding deeply into the erotic allows us to source all our discernment internally, not just those decisions having to do with our sexual or sensual lives. This makes our integrity practice not simply authentic, but also joyful.
The only way to sustain a joyful integrity practice, rather than one that is ruled entirely by external duty, is to root deep down into our own erotic yes. From that anchored place, we may find resonance with belief systems that originated outside of us. We may find belonging in community with like-hearted folks. But we are always grounding our discernment within, rather than trying to source it from ideas and people outside of ourselves.
Integrity without grace and mercy is a hard, shameful slog. In the podcast conversation I reference for this newsletter, MeToo founder Tarana Burke talks about her desire to “revolutionize grace”. I argue that if we’re going to revolutionize grace then we also have to talk about mercy and forgiveness. We have to recognize the ways in which we are subject to each other’s power, and how wielding that power affects our integrity.
Integrity is not a theory. It’s a praxis. Meaning that it’s always a work in progress. You’re always a work in progress. I am, for sure, always a work in progress. And that work can be, even in its difficulty, ennobling. It can elevate and strengthen us. It can also soften us and make us more supple, more able to hold ourselves rooted while the winds of change whip us about.
When the world wants to make us hard, when shame wants to make us brittle, grace and mercy keep us flexible and loving in our integrity.
The question of whether two people with diametrically opposed views can still exist in their respective integrity is one of the greatest conundrums with which I wrestle. In this newsletter, I grapple with this question through the lens of abortion rights. My answer may not be your answer, but I hope that the questions I pose inform your own discernment.
I don’t actually talk about current politics much in this newsletter. To talk about the lack of integrity in our national politics is like shooting fish in a barrel— easy pickings and not terribly impressive. But sometimes someone really steps forward in politics and shows us how it’s done. Liz Cheney has recently been one of those. And yet, the media conversation around her choices is also instructive concerning what we misunderstand about integrity.
Cheney has stood up with tremendous integrity recently on specific issues of deep importance to the fate of our country. This is worthy of applause. But, like all of us, she has many choices to make in this life. Whether or not she chooses integrity consistently is anyone’s bet. I’d argue her batting average isn’t great so far, despite her knocking it out of the park of late.
Integrity is like democracy. It only stays alive because we participate. Cheney has modeled recently how to participate. Now all of us, including Liz Cheney, have to decide to keep participating.
I’m a storyteller at heart, descended from long lines of storytellers. Sometimes the necessary thing to illustrate a point is to dig into my vast trove of personal stories. In this case, stories of the women I come from. Through them, I tackle the question of what motivates your integrity practice. Do you have something that gets you back on the horse over and over again? For me, it’s a deep calling to undo generational patterns that sacrifice women’s well-being in the name of virtue.
For me, breaking generations-old cycles of abuse and addiction brings me back to my integrity practice every day. I come from long lines of women who, despite whatever affection or love they offered, suffered at the hands of the men in their lives. In response, they crafted their identities around keeping their heads down, taking care of business, and spinning stories to justify it all. To be fair, their communities and families encouraged this self-abnegation and dishonesty, painting it as virtuous. They were “good” women in the eyes of society, bearing their burdens with grace.
I have no desire to be a good woman.
In honor of the one-year anniversary of going paid I’m running a sale through Sunday, September 18th— 20% off annual and monthly subscriptions. That’s an entire year for only $56, or one month for the cost of a fancy coffee.
I hope you’ll join us!
Oh, and hey! If you really hate things cluttering up your inbox, why not try the Substack app? You can turn off emails entirely and all of your content, free and paid, will show up only on the app, where you can check it any time you like.
A whole year! It’s great to be able to look back and see the diversity of topics you’ve covered in your exploration of integrity. Well done!