Transparent Tuesdays

Issue 200

You guys,

Just get the ball over the net.

It was a sunny day in December and I was playing tennis. I took my first lesson in the summer and by winter I was planning my Olympic debut. Currently I faced my fiercest opponent to date—my husband. 

My forehand was improving. I could blast the ball right over the net, sometimes. If I tried for that perfect shot—if I tried to win the point—I hit the ball into the net. I knew I could just lob the ball back to Sam. It wouldn’t be a good shot but it would stay in bounds and I’d still be in the game.

I had just hit a ball at the net and was giving myself a pep talk. Just get the ball over the net became my new mantra. As I repeated the phrase over and over I hit more and more shots in bounds. 

When I started this newsletter four years ago my goal each week was to write something good. Two hundred issues later I never try to write something good. I just get the ball over the net. 

Rather than attempt a perfect shot with each piece I publish I only try to get better at writing, work through my feelings, or tell a story from my life. This approach makes the writing purely selfish, fun, and easy. 

Get Better At Writing

How do I know if writing my newsletter each week is making me a better writer? Seems vague, subjective, not necessarily true. Fortunately I have proof. I can look at an issue from a year ago and compare it to something I’ve written in the last month. And it’s better. It just is. So week to week I can’t see it but I know it’s happening over time. Nothing interferes with the Tuesday deadline because I trust the process of publishing weekly.

Work Through My Feelings

More often than not I ask myself, What am I struggling with? or What am I fired up about? And the words spill out. None of these questions yield answers that claim I know what I’m doing or have figured it out. There’s often no answer, no resolution, but the act of sharing the thing that is taking up a huge space in my head and heart feels good and necessary and easy. I struggled when Sam went away to Canada for three nights, struggled through potty training, struggled through a hard conversation with my sister. I was fired up when my mom called my 3-year-old manipulative, when I read The Glass Castle, and when I learned about the term Casuals. When I start writing these pieces I have no idea where they will go or how they will end. I just know I need to get it out of me, on paper, and out into the world. 

Tell A Story From My Life

Last year I lasered into my main focus: memoir. Reading them, reviewing them, and eventually writing my own. While a book has not yet formed in my mind, each week I can dip into my past and tell stories that have stayed with me. So whenever I’m stuck I ask myself, What’s a story from my past I can tell? This is how I wrote about when I lived in New York City for nine months, when I started doing cocaine in secret, and a story from second grade that I don’t remember but my mom has told so many times I feel like I do. Until I write these stories I don’t know if they will be something I can expand on in my book, I don’t know if there’s something more there. Until I write them I don’t even know how much I remember. The act of writing them becomes its own vehicle for time travel. Will the story be included in my book? Maybe, maybe not. The only way to find out is to write it. 

This is how I’m able to easily publish my newsletter each week. I lower the stakes on quality, release the things that feel heavy and shameful, and travel back in time. There is no blank page syndrome. When I sit down in front of my computer (not every day, by the way, more like two or three times a week) I’m ready to write. And I just get the ball over the net. 

Sam stood on the opposite side of the court. He plays a lot of tennis—he’s good, in shape, and very competitive. So after 45 minutes my mantra stopped working. I couldn’t physically get to the ball. I was too tired, too winded, too weak. 

I could have given up and said tennis wasn’t for me. I could have felt defeated that I was so out of shape. But this was the beginning of something new, of something exciting, of something that made me feel alive. The only way to get better was to keep playing, week after week, month after month, year after year. 

Here’s to the next 200 issues. 

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Bleecker Bombs

A new podcast episode is out!

A Life’s Work by Rachel Cusk is one mother’s account of pregnancy and the first year of her baby’s life. After it was published the author was accused of being a terrible mother who hates children, when all she did was write what motherhood was really like. 

My biggest takeaway: If you make an admission of something unflattering about yourself and then include a disclaimer, you water down the thing you just said and it makes you unlikeable. 

Listen to the episode on overcast.fm, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Google Podcasts.

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Until next week, 

Charlie