#21: An eternal ledger
Plus, the Kenough masculinity of Wham!, aliens are real and what to do with climate emotions.
You’re reading This Might Resonate, a monthly newsletter from me, Emily. Welcome to all 766 of you! A favour: if you enjoy This Might Resonate, please forward it to a friend - they can subscribe right here.
Reading and listening
The Tidal Year: a memoir on grief, swimming and sisterhood. Some lovely, evocative writing and a willingness to be unlikeable, which I always appreciate in a memoir.
Some of Us Just Fall: On Nature and Not Getting Better. More chronic illness x nature x literature memoirs, please.
Constructing a Nervous System: A Memoir. I enjoyed this; it’s as referential as you might expect from a professional critic. But I found myself hankering for more of the personal and less of the cultural.
What to do with climate emotions.
Aliens are real and no one wants to talk about it with me! Thank god for Ezra Klein and his podcast. What the heck is going on? And, should we talk to aliens?
The supermoon got me bad earlier this week (insomnia, wild dreams), so I had to include this edition of
about the Sturgeon Supermoon (plus more alien chat, art, Kubrick and Lennon).Witch. I found this podcast suprisingly moving. Beautiful sound design too.
Fatigue can shatter a person. The best description of the hallmark symptom (Post Exertional Malaise, or PEM) of my illness (ME/CFS) I’ve read. PEM is “the annihilation of possibility”. PEM is the reason I publish this newsletter so sporadically. To write this newsletter requires intricate energy calculations, mentally totting up activity (expenditure) and rest (income) in an eternal ledger from which there is no escape. When will there be an energy surplus large enough to contain writing? Or, should I spend the surplus on food shopping, or socialising, or a trip to the post office, or paid work? There is only ever room for one in the universe of potential activities. I am never more than one accounting error away from enduring weeks of PEM. Currently, there are likely 1.25 million+ people with ME/CFS in the UK (an increase of approximately 1 million since the start of the pandemic, due to Long Covid). 10% of Covid infections result in Long Covid, and your risk of Long Covid increases with every infection. 50% of people with Long Covid have ME/CFS (see this Nature article for a data deep-dive). Within a few years, either you will have experienced PEM and/ or someone you love will have. It’s worth spending 5 minutes now gaining a deeper understanding of the phenomenon.
Most read from the last edition:
Watching
Colin from Accounts and Survival of the Thickest, both charming
Dreaming Whilst Black. Episode 3 has the funniest collective email-writing scene you will ever witness
Dave season 3. This show gets more hilarious and more sad with every season
Hijack. A proper, enjoyable, old-fashioned thriller
The Gold. A fun drama about Britain’s biggest gold heist
The Bear Season 2. The most sincere show I have ever seen. Geninely heartwarming, like Ted Lasso, if Ted Lasso was a good show. I said what I said!
The Wham! documentary. A beautiful model of masculinity: making stuff with your mates, having a laugh, wearing short-shorts, and, in the case of Andrew Ridgeley, having the grace and humility to step back and let your more talented friend shine. Those boys were thoroughly Kenough
Barbie, of course. An instant modern classic, a millenial The Princess Bride. The BBC Pride and Prejudice cameo was an attack on me, specifically.
Writing
Well, co-editing rather than writing: Moral Imaginations’ report on our Camden Imagines work
A post about the magic ingredients of the writing accountability club I started two years ago (the magic = body doubling and intentional governance)
A regenerative organisational design primer. This has gathered 5,000 views and upset several men on the internet, which has taken it from a blog post I dashed off without too much thought to a heartbreaking work of staggering genius that I will defend with my very life.
Still enjoying…
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Excellent newsletter as usual Emily, thank you for the energy you invested in it. 🤩
I particularly appreciated the excellent fatigue article. I found it interesting that it said that PEM "is more correctly understood as a physiological state in which all existing symptoms burn more fiercely and new ones ignite". For this exact reason, I am tending to talk more about PESE nowadays (post-exertional symptom exacerbation). I wonder if using this term, rather than PEM would better help friends/ relatives/ clinicians to understand/ accept/ believe. In much the same way as talking of ME, instead of ME-CFS and highlighting symptoms other than fatigue, seems to. I find this tends to cultivate a subtle shift in others' compassion that grows over time.