Knowing Thyself (and When To Fold Em)
On Honesty, Embarrassment, and Endings
Many, many months ago I was talking to my BFF (who subscribes to this Substack; hello!). I was talking about how fun it was to be writing essays/prose again through this newsletter, and that the format was really juicy and inspiring for me. I meant it. I loved the feeling of simply freewheeling on my thoughts again.
CUT TO: A few months later, and I had swung the other way. Maybe it was the strikes that did it, or the relentless LA heat. Maybe it was that I found myself less verbose and therefore put off. Annoyed by the prospect of writing a weekly post, embarrassed by the lack of progress on my short film, and angry with myself for putting the parameters of “writing about making a short film” on this writing experience. I again turned to said BFF and asked if I should be writing a post to basically say “Sorry I haven’t been writing posts” and she said no, that people who cared to subscribe wouldn’t be mad or annoyed that I didn’t write, just happy when I did. (She was right; As is so often the case, other people are nicer to you than you are to you.)
CUT TO: A few months after that, when I finally had put the pieces together to make the film. Between the barrage of thoughts and tasks to get production going, I thought abstractly about this newsletter. “Oh good,” I thought, “finally I can fulfill the mandate I set out for myself.” Then I went into pre-production, then production. Now I’m at the outset of post. And when the little reminder to post to Substack comes up, I feel my stomach drop. I feel wholly inadequate to the task of talking about the thing I’m doing, making this short. It feels like explaining a hurricane from inside the eye. And when I think about it, all I want to do is keep the thoughts I’m having to myself.
It’s genuinely weird to me to think that I was once a person who not only courted being known through her writing but actively wrote with that as my primary goal. Call it aging, call it evolution, call it years of therapy (or all three, and more besides), but increasingly I feel less called to talk about what I’m doing and more called to simply do it, quietly, and largely unseen. To let the process be joyful and private, and let the product speak for itself.
Of course, this results in a deeply uncomfortable truth: Unfulfilled promises. To you, the readers of this newsletter, and to anyone who really wanted to get an inside look at my process. I think an older version of me (was she perverted like me? Sorry…) wanted this to work, wanted to slip cooly back into a skin that loved to broadcast herself. But Kaitlin now feels this is not a good fit. She can’t slip cooly in. She flounders.
And so, it’s with a measure of honest embarrassment that I announce that I’m going to dissolve IDLING WILDLY in favor of actually finishing IDLE/WILD. If you’re a paid annual subscriber and would like your money back, let me know. Some of you, I know, signed up for this newsletter as a donation to the film; I want to thank you for that but I’m still happy to refund if you desired! Free subscribers and monthly subscribers should be all set, but please feel free to reach out me if you have issues.
If I know and see you in real life, I look forward to doing so again soon. And if you joined up out of interest in my work, you’ll always be able to track it on kaitlinfontana.com. Thanks for reading. Goodbye and good luck.