Why worthiness?
I started this newsletter in January 2023 because I wanted to talk with you about art, literature, food, and worthiness. After six months of weekly writing, other reoccurring topics have shown themselves to be parenting, estrangement, memory, and the writing process. After spending 2022 finishing my novel manuscript, which is still resting in a nice soft drawer, I had a lot of flotsam and jetsam in my head. Fragments of the novel. Unanswered (unanswerable?) questions. Feelings and more feelings. It was time to reach out.
"To go on writing is also a means of delaying the trauma of giving this to others to read. I hadn't considered this eventuality while I still felt the need to write."
—Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux (translated by Tanya Leslie)
The working title of my novel manuscript is Good Enough People, and this newsletter originally had that name before I shortened it to Enough. (Partly due to practical reasons when I switched to Substack.) I am still obsessing over these ideas: What does it mean to be a good person? What does it mean to be enough? Who or what defines it? How do we derive our individual worthiness? How does a family or environment, or country impact our feelings of worthiness? How are feelings of worth and actual worth different? This newsletter has been a place to continue this line of questioning and I’m so grateful you’re here reading.
A favorite link
We're not good enough to not practice by Kiese Laymon