Seventeen Shades of Green

I deleted three hundred people. You’re what’s left.

Airbnb bedroom in Seattle, a television turned itself on.

The alarm I did not set.

24-hour news.

I had forgotten this existed.

I forgot that there are people who keep a television in a bedroom, who set it to wake them with the news, and let it run as the white noise of their lives.

It would be easier for me to speak Russian.

Felt like I was consuming week old trash for breakfast.

What I consume really matters. Why do I keep forgetting?

fuck.

My dad is eighty-two. He and his twin brother and their two sisters recently found a long-lost cousin, and they all drove and met somewhere in the middle.

Dad came home so happy. So many great stories.

He fixated on one thing, could not get over; his cousin has not turned on a television in twenty-seven years.

Dad said it the way you’d report a symptom.

Is he okay?

Is he informed?

Can you be a good citizen that way?

I thought: my God, imagine what that man has grown in all the hours the rest of us have spent in front of a screen. I would drive a long way to sit with him.

Maybe I will.

I wonder what else I’ve forgotten?

---

I decided to autopsy myself, one of my common practices.

I’m fifty-two years old, since yesterday.

I can’t read long format content anymore.

Not won’t.

Can’t. Or close enough to can’t that the distinction is academic.

I read posts. I read the headline and the first graf. I read the crawl at the bottom of a screen while someone is talking over it. Drip, drip, drip, drip, and somewhere in the last decade the muscle that used to carry me through four hundred pages of someone else’s thinking went slack.

I noticed it first in other people, which is how I notice everything, regrettably, but remember, I’m still under repair.

Then I noticed I’d been building around it, designing things toward this defect.

Example. My new book is called May I Become.

I didn’t write it linearly. Every chapter stands entirely on its own. You can open it anywhere, read eleven pages, close it, and have gotten the thing.

I told myself that was a gift to the reader.

I realize now, I did it semi-consciously.

Unconsciously, more honest.

I’d judged the field and done the math on how people consume now — declaring to myself that end to end is over, nobody finishes anything — and I quietly restructured an entire book around a conclusion I never actually sat down and reached.

Whose attention span was I designing for?

I thought it was yours. it’s so much easier to judge you.

---

It got worse when I looked at the essays.

I’m an essayist. That’s the thing I actually am, underneath the eleven other things I do. It’s my art.

My process for years has been this: write it hot, then cut. If it comes out at seventeen hundred words, I will spend three weeks getting it to a thousand. Kill your darlings, they tell you in every workshop.

They’re right. I’ve gotten good at it.

My writing gets better every time I cut.

Until it doesn’t.

Somewhere in there, the cutting stopped being craft and became something else. I wasn’t killing darlings. I was triaging. I was moving through my own sentences like a man with a bus to catch, pulling out anything that didn’t advance the point, because I wanted you to get it, in a hurry.

Do you know what goes first when you cut like that?

The green.

If I’m writing a literary essay — which is the thing I love, the thing I’d do if nobody read it — I want to tell you about seventeen different shades of green.

I want to linger inside something beautiful. Something painful.

I want to let it take as long as it takes.

I had cut myself down to a word count I never consciously chose, for a reader I had never actually met, in service of a theory about attention I absorbed from the air.

I had taken the art out so the content would move faster.

I wonder what else I’ve lost in the spirit of moving faster?

---

As part of my autopsy, I wrote ten essays where I stopped doing that.

I still cut. I’m not an idiot. An unedited essay is just a pile of bullshit.

But I let myself be gracious, emotional, descriptive in a rolls royce, sunday morning kind of way.

Set and setting.

The long way around.

The tangent that mattered even though it cost me four hundred words.

They came out long.

They stopped being anything you could reasonably call a newsletter.

Then I sent them to people.

---

The responses were slower. Days instead of hours, which I’d have read as failure under the old scoring system.

Slowly the responses, tenfold, started arriving.

Not ten percent. Tenfold.

People wrote back saying they’d found themselves in it.

People wrote back about what they were going to go do.

Numerous people said some version of the same strange thing, which was that it didn’t feel like reading. It felt like they’d just sat with me, live.

I’d been optimizing for consumption.

What they wanted was company.

---

So, what do I do with these autopsy findings?

Me?

I’m starting something new. This. The thing you’re reading right now.

A place to put these.

I pulled my mailing lists. All of them. Fifteen years of them. Thousands of people who, at some point, for some reason, gave me an address.

I deleted over three hundred of them.

I did it by domain, mostly. A cold way to do a warm thing.

Everyone from this company. Everyone from that one. The people who know me tangentially, professionally, sideways — who at some point said yes to a quarterly update about a business, and never once asked to hear about the inside of my life.

I kept the people I feel safe with. I kept the people who told me, in one way or another, that they wanted what I actually make.

Then I printed out the list of the people I deleted.

Three hundred names on paper, which is heavier than three hundred names on a screen in a way I don’t fully understand.

I set it on the desk next to me.

I wrote my next essay.

raw. naked. Gut level honest.

The shame was gone. The whole apparatus — what will they think, will this discredit me, does this cost me in rooms where I need to be taken seriously — just wasn’t in the building. I wrote the thing all the way down to the bottom.

Which means this.

For years, I had been writing to a room I did not want to be in.

Not consciously. Nobody handed me a list of people to censor myself for. I just accumulated them, one professional exchange at a time, and then one day every sentence I write passes through a committee I never appointed and cannot see.

No. Thanks.

I thought my problem was attention. I thought the enemy was the phone, the scroll, the feed, the thing in my pocket that has been quietly sanding down my capacity for two decades. And some of that is true — the TV in Seattle told me how far I’d drifted.

But the thing actually shortening my sentences wasn’t my attention span.

It was the audience I’d never chosen.

I got up and turned it off.

This one I choose.

I love you, keep going.

Tyler