Linen Anniversary

Notes on a project lasting longer than a presidential term

I think I still have a few of these left if anyone’s interested. Check out that union bug

A few Mondays ago, March 27th, marked the fourth anniversary of me publishing this newsletter. I meant to have this piece out then, but that’s how she goes.

At first I almost ignored the anniversary. Four years is sort of a weird number for marking time. It doesn’t have the round completeness of five, nor the celebratory newness of one. But then I thought about the only other things in my life I’ve marked on that same schedule, school terms, and it fully recontextualized itself. I’ve been writing this newsletter as long as I was in college, or in high school, or in middle school. (Longer, really, since those “years” were each a September-to-June thing.) College in particular still feels both recent¹ and like it took forever, so accomplishing any kind of project that has lasted longer than that period of my life feels like something worth noting. The word count I’ve produced here is certainly greater than the sum of my college efforts, too.

But there’s a central question that has plagued me during these four years of writing a newsletter in the age of Content Creation, one which is partly responsible for my recent pivot to publishing every few weeks instead of every week. It is simply this: How much of myself am I willing to make available for public consumption?

As I get older, the answer has changed, sliding pretty steadily from “I don’t care” to “a lot less than before.” The difference between ages 28 and 32 might be scoffed at by people a good deal older than that but since it’s my life I feel a gulf between then and now wide enough to pay attention to.

The change in the reach of this publication during that time is a big driver of that. When 150 people were reading this every week and I recognized almost all of them by name, pouring out my heart and soul onto the page seemed to matter less, in part because I was hungry to grow an audience and so held nothing back, and in part because most of them already knew me and I felt little compunction about telling them a little more. As of press time there are now 744 Tabs Open subscribers, and most issues are read somewhere between 800 and 1,000 times.² That’s nothing compared to the biggest names in internet newsletters, but it’s still a whole lot of people to tell the deepest parts of myself to week in and week out.

Well then, don’t write about yourself, you might find yourself saying. Write about something else. I’ve certainly tried saying it. But it turns out that in my world, writing is writing about myself. I suspect this is true of all writers although *Dan Dority voice* I couldn’t swear it to a certainty. I don’t claim to have much wisdom but I think I am wise enough to understand just how little I know, because I know my physical and emotional lenses for processing the world are just one mode of being on a planet with an infinity of them. So even if I wanted to remove I and me from the writing entirely, and convince myself that I wasn’t opining but writing objectively about a tree or a poem or a political problem…well, I’d still be the one writing those words, which means they’re being mediated through my particular lens, the product of thirty-two-and-counting years of life experiences and chemical reconfigurations and material conditions.

I don’t mind knowing this. If I thought nothing about myself should be publicly expressed, or I had nothing at all to say, I wouldn’t be publishing a newsletter at all. But I am learning the value of keeping some things unsaid. Which is not to say unwritten. I write for many reasons, not least of which is to figure out what I actually think about the world; the only thing that has really changed is whether I publish those thoughts or keep them tucked away in my drafts. A few weeks ago I wrote an entire newsletter about a problem I was having and then decided not to publish it because I got what I needed to out of the exercise. What’s more, the end product of that effort was so self-reflective and self-indulgent that I couldn’t imagine it being interesting to anyone else. I tweeted something about it to that effect and a kind reader said “let us be the judge of that,” but for one of the first times in my life I made the choice not to. Strange, and liberating, too.

Anyway I think that daily question of how much of yourself to share with the world via the internet is one that everyone has to confront in some way or another, even if you aren’t a “content creator.” For ten or fifteen years, the personal essay has been one of the most reliable ways for new writers to get a national audience, with people pouring out their reflections on their innermost fears, traumas, and tragedies to great acclaim in outlets like Slate and The New Yorker. It’s slowed now, but for a while there was something like an arms race to see who could publish the most scorching revelations about themselves.

This birthed some incredible writing, to be sure. But even for people with no aspirations of seeing their name in prestige publications, the personal essay impulse has firmly taken hold. Your Facebook friend telling a five-paragraph story about getting bad customer service during an oil change. Your Instagram friend sticking a hundred words of throat-clearing apologetics about the reasons for their messy house and unwashed hair into the caption below an adorable picture of their baby, as though the picture of the baby isn’t a pretty clear indicator of those reasons.³ We are a nation of chronic over-sharers, and I say this not to judge but to commiserate.

To put yourself out there into the world, in the form of your ideas and feelings, is to be consumed by others. And to be consumed you must first be objectified, with your humanity and complex interiority taking a backseat to whatever idea you’re standing behind. (I know some fine, lovely people whose social media presence I find so personally irksome that it can be easy to forget all the things I like about them. Maybe this newsletter is doing the same for you right now!) None of this makes the process good or bad, but like our relationships to anything it’s worth keeping an eye on.

Anyway, thanks, as always, for reading, and for four great years over here at Tabs Open. I have no idea what the next four will hold—if you do, please get at me, I’ve got some questions—but I’m happy to have this connection with you all for however long it lasts. I’ll talk to you next time.

-Chuck

PS - If you liked what you read here, why not subscribe and get this newsletter delivered to your inbox each week? It’s free and always will be, although there is a voluntary paid subscription option if you’d like to support Tabs Open that way.

1. I finished undergrad eleven years ago so maybe this perspective also needs some re-examining.

2. And I am beyond grateful for that. To know that anyone cares enough to dedicate a little of their precious time each week to hearing what I have to say is something I will never take for granted.

3. Instagram is an interesting case study. Some of what I describe certainly does come from our cultural personal essay impulse. But much of it also comes from the fact that no one seems to believe that anyone else’s social media presence is a curated, polished version of themselves, despite knowing it about their own, and accordingly we all do constant triage trying to keep up.