I just sent out a paid-subscribers post related to April’s newsletter. Unsure why I thought taking photos at rehab made sense but I posted one. Here’s hoping I run for office someday!
I’m using this post to answer one question I keep getting a lot.
I leave early in the a.m. for my BIRTHDAY TRIP, Y’ALL and still have to pack. Must. Type. Faster.
The question I keep getting is what I do for work — and I get why, because I’ve always had many irons in the fire and been pulled in lots of directions, which is just a fun way of saying I have ADHD.
I’ve been working with Holistic Life Navigation since 2019. I started with Luis as a social media tinkerbell — after he toured with Rasputina, he toured his own music and I did his tour graphics/social media posts. From there we became friends and when he asked if I knew anyone looking for a part-time gig (which went full-time in a heartbeat), I volunteered.
Luis is the type of person I would work with no matter what the industry. I joke that he could have offered me a job plucking chickens and I probably would have said yes. His energy is undeniable and I’d worked enough odd jobs to know the people you’re surrounded by will usually make or break it. Turns out he was a somatic therapist and nutritionist in private practice, so I became his admin.
Fast forward four years and I run a business I’m really proud of, which continues to scale up at an aggressive pace. We left the private practice behind and, before/through the pandemic, started offering stress and trauma recovery webinars, courses, support groups, the podcast, etc. We have a membership now, and do in-person retreats — this means I get to travel for work, which sounds so fucking professional. I have a business coach, okay? This is my Tess McGill moment! Watch out, Trask Industries.
Jokes aside, I appreciate having a job that helps people. I get to watch people connect to themselves in ways they never have in real time. It’s meaningful work, it’s cathartic, it’s hard and challenging and rewarding and fun and a total circus. The perfect storm made just for me.
I can’t properly put into words how this job has changed my entire DNA. So many piles of Marikas shed in the past four years, so many internal pivots. A lot of heeealing (with eye rolls) and healing (sans eye rolls). My ignored-for-decades body did not enjoy waking up, but it’s been in good hands ever since (mine!). I trust myself now, which is wild. And while I’m not without anxiety sometimes, it’s not my entire personality nor does it make all my decisions anymore. I love this for me.
My birthday is May 7 and I’ll be in Santa Fe for a week with my bestie. If you want to follow along on our trip — which includes SWAIA’s Native Fashion Week! — I’ll be posting throughout the week on my Instagram page.
Happy Taurus SZN to all who celebrate [confetti]
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Steinbeck might have written about you in this tunic. Your agrarian symbiosis with nature. Your affinity for getting your hands dirty.
You could write books on the subject of leisure, early retirement, and casual encounters along the Zambezi.
You can do all that and wear this tunic with a colorful Japanese-inspired obi wrap.
The attitude is totally different, yet some core principles remain.
Even your confusion will be seen as contemplation.
Unencumbered pullover-style cotton voile tunic for comfortably and elegantly mixing it up in the non-virtual world. 14 pintucks down each side of the front placket that, when coupled with Indonesian embroidery, conjure up a cadence of old-world charm. In this, you’re already halfway to wherever.
-J. Peterman catalogue, 1992
I remembered the J. Peterman catalogue at rehab while standing in line for the salad bar. I had just been in the room of a young girl going through heroin withdrawals - which was every kind of awful one could imagine - and though I worried about her, I worried more that she’d ruined my appetite. The side effects of turning her life around (namely the sweating and Exorcist vomiting) had turned us all various shades of green, and it was lunchtime. There were few pleasures at the isolated Rehab Ranch beyond the flat, sunny weather; smoking cigarettes, the only drug available; and meals, which were three times a day in the dimly-lit, carpeted cafeteria.
Being there often felt like practice for one day living in an old folks home: boring and comfortable to a point, but not so much you forgot it was more prison than hospital - more hospital than school - more school than camp - and more camp than actual home.
I stood by the salad bar and scanned the lettuce for signs of decay. ‘When I get out of here, I’m going to eat salads every day,’ I thought. How hard could it be?
Answer: Monumentally.
For the duration of my stay, I never actually ate that salad.I added those greens to my plate twice a day for 28 days, then pushed them around and gestured with my fork like I’d seen women do in movies from the 80’s. I was cosplaying a healthy person! The salad was merely performative, like so many things in my life at that time.
I hoped my fellow rehabees would notice and judge me favorably for this foray into healthy food but they didn’t care. Nothing shocked those women. I could have eaten a bag of powdered cat paws and donkey feet mixed with radioactive soil from Chernobyl, and someone would’ve just shrugged and said Hey, addicts are fucked up, man, addicts always doing all kindsa fucked up shit, you name it: cat paws, donkey feet, dog dope, whatever and everyone around them would nod. My stepdad gave me cat paws when I was nine before he molested me. My cousin died in front of me from a donkey feet overdose. The women I passed in the hallways and stared at during daily group meetings had lived through every story imaginable. Shock fatigue had already set in. Nobody cared what I ate or wore or that my family thought I had endless pools of unused potential.
At Rehab Ranch, that was everyone’s story.
Despite this, I put that salad on my plate every day so people would see me as I’d always seen salad eaters: Responsible. Organized. Shiny hair. Running shoes. Salad eaters made it to work on time and paid rent with American currency. Salad eaters didn’t neglect their kids, and drank two glasses of good wine on a Monday instead of two cheap bottles. A salad eater didn’t need this place.
I waited for someone to say something to that effect, like maybe a counselor would lightly suggest I lead one of the groups myself since I was just so with it. Maybe they would even send me home early. “Marika, you have such great insights in group and eat so much salad, we called a special meeting to discuss it and decided that you just don’t belong here.” Then I would pack up my bag of powdered animal feet snacks, tell everyone I told you so, and bounce.
Instead I suffered in silence, seething with rage and shame and untouched salad. I tried in small group meetings to be invisible or “get the right answer,” and though there was never a “right answer,” there were definitely wrong ones. No one was allowed to give you tissues, and everyone learned that the hard way. If you handed out a tissue while someone was crying, you were enabling them; if you received one, you were supposed to reject their help and get your own damn tissue. Each girl was harshly reprimanded for their tissue fuck-ups like they personally put a bottle of whiskey to their neighbor’s lips, screaming DRINK until she did.
Back at the salad bar, some girl with a vicious V-name — Veronica or Vanessa — started bragging about her appearance on The Jerry Springer Show. The story was loud and disruptive — Too loud for a salad bar, I thought, like some kind of salad bar sound engineering professional — and winced at her 15 minutes of fame.
“That stupid ass hoe, she didn't see that shit coming. I was gonna fight for my motherfucken man, apologies to The Good Lord Above for cursing, but I swear to fucken Gawd I was gonna go fucken off. I threw a chair at that hoe and Steve had to carry me off the fucken stage! That's right, ladies, I handled my damn self and took care of fucken business.”
I was embarrassed for her — from the smug tone to the absence of -ing at the end of every fuck — and for the women around her making sounds of support and respect. These bitches have no fucking class, I thought, irony lost on me that none of us bitches had any fucking class and that's in part why we had landed there. At a minimum, we had failed to keep our drinking, drug use, parenting and professional fails leading to this line at the cafeteria rehab all that fucking classy.
At our core, we were a group of women who had unraveled around the same time; whatever the substance or reason for being there, our sameness was rooted in hopelessness. Having a place like that in common made connections intense and necessary, but inevitably doomed to fail. Why stay friends with someone who reminds you of that time you lost it all? Here, you had a front row seat to various levels of despair with brief intervals of trying to act normal. But no one knew what normal looked, felt, or tasted like. It was just something we had poorly mimicked and performed in real life until we wound up together at this salad bar.
As I shuffled through the line with my plate of greens, garlic bread, and cold spaghetti, an administrator walked by in a white linen tunic. I stopped suddenly, and the woman behind me rammed her tray into my back - I said sorry at the same time she said asshole - so I stepped to the side, staring at the administrator while she grabbed a plate of food. Her white linen tunic punched loose a memory that felt immediately like home.
I knew what she was wearing because I’d spent my childhood looking through my mother’s J. Peterman catalogue, which sold the romantic stories of shirts - sorry, white linen tunics - like the one she was currently wearing. It was embroidered and had a bib front. At that moment, I felt the catalogue paper between my fingers, slightly heavier than magazine paper and a little bit matte, which made turning the pages a pleasure and not an afterthought. I felt the sun, hot on my skin as I sat in our kitchen, poring over every word and savoring the clothing adventures each page had to offer. I felt the promise I’d had as a child, which was the last time I could remember truly being happy, and saw so many of the steps I could have taken instead of the ones that led me here.
The J. Peterman catalogue was the very first reason I wanted to be a writer. Other reasons included Judy Blume, Madeleine L’Engle, Tom Robbins, Raymond Carver, some key teachers, The Last of The Really Great Whangdoodles, and my dad. To a preteen/teen/beyond, the descriptions in the catalogue were lush and mysterious and nonchalant and effortless, that barely-attainable older cousin of cool. They sold an aspirational aesthetic that centered around the lives of their clothing and the people who lived in them. Instead of photos, they had watercolor drawings of handbags and floaty dresses and structured aviator jackets. Those drawings were marketing GOLD.
I wanted to live inside those made-up worlds of privilege, and write new worlds into existence. I didn't know you could tell the story of a $100 shirt whose life had humble beginnings. I didn't know the shirt’s story would reveal the bold plotline of its owner, or that the owner would take that shirt on extravagant adventures. I didn’t realize you could sell a shirt by describing the antique wooden boat it was on, or how the flowers bloomed early that Spring in 1968 Paris. Knowing everything had a potential story lurking within, from a flower to a pair of pants, changed how I saw the world around me. Everything had a potential voice from that moment on. I whispered things to plants after that, and made up dialogue for the mustard.
The J. Peterman catalogue also taught me all I needed to know about being an erudite woman of means with simple taste and endless privilege. The romantic life of this perfect woman I might possibly become — tiny waist, aviator sunglasses, no dairy allergies — filled me with enthusiastic hope for my future. Someday I would grow up to be a wealthy Indiana Jones type with no responsibilities beyond a dedication to nostalgia and old, beautiful things. I would wear a full-length skirt that a governess or duchess might wear in a novel and be this pioneer of style and womanhood. A woman with choices and tunics and power. An active seeker of adventure. 12-year old me couldn't wait for that life to begin.
I stood there in dirty cotton-polyester blend sweatpants that I’d gotten on sale at Ross, staring at the woman in her tunic, remembering all the things I thought I would become and the adventures I hoped would shape me. Disappointment bloomed in my chest, knowing how far I had to go.
Rehab was a chance to step back into reality again - or for the very first time - which was not the dreamy adventure I’d longed for but the one I needed most. I heard Veronica/Vanessa make a joke about Jerry Springer’s hair gel, and all the women laughed, and I saw myself as I was in that moment:
A lonely, frightened girl with frizzy hair and poor impulse control.
An angry, self-destructing tornado draining everyone of their everything.
An absent, heartbroken mom wearing ugly pants at a salad bar for addicts.
J. Peterman never wrote about this particular adventure, so I didn’t know how it would end, or what I would be wearing when it did.
Up Meets Down.
Someone might have written about you in these sweatpants. Your defiant nature with cops. Your affinity for fucking shit up.
You could write books on the subject of poor planning, disappointment, and casual encounters at bars you don’t remember being at.
You can do all that and wear these sweatpants with a three-day hangover and a sinking heart.
Your confusion will be seen as confusion.
Unencumbered cotton-polyester heavy knit blend sweatpants for comfortably mixing it up with addicts of all different backgrounds. Elastic waistband and cuffs at the hem of the leg that, when coupled with the word JUICY across the rear, conjure up a cadence of long-suffering despair.
I sent this newsletter on 3/2 and added to/amended it on 4/1. Anything new will have that hammy pink line in front of it. Blame perfectionism or insomnia or too much cheese but this felt incomplete when I sent it. Feels good to flesh it out a bit more.
The first newsletter I started was through Mailchimp in 2011, years before Substack was a twinkle in some unwashed engineer’s eye. Like any writer, I was lured by the promise of what I hadn’t written yet — what brilliant stories would Future Me conceive to stir the hearts and minds of the masses? Expository, satire, investigative journalism, creative writing, food reviews, confessionals, poems about cake, love letters to cheese, parodies, lists, a Danielle Steel book club?
Nope.
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Before meta was Meta…
As you can see, I went in a much cooler direction instead and sent out a newsletter about newsletters. This was a hat-on-a-hat newsletter wearing a third hat that was hiding a secret tiny fourth hat underneath. I sent that missive to living human people who liked me enough to blindly subscribe. I sent it to my mother, and my neighbor. I sent it to my boss.
I imagined friends opening the email, mildly interested, like “Oh yeah, she was starting that thing,” then spending the next two minutes gradually frowning in confusion, eyes narrowed, forehead wrinkled — like wait… is the entire fucking thing about newsletters?
After that, I felt complete (also lazy) and that was it. That was the only newsletter I ever sent out before Substack was birthed into the writersphere. I can’t believe I failed to mention that part in Round One. I sent out the ultimate newsletter and then retired.
This was around the same time I’d started wondering out loud if my high school Attention Deficit Disorder “was back,” as though my diagnosis had just packed up after graduation to go live in Disorderland and run free with all my other abandoned maladies.
If you’ve ever thought of your brain as
-broken
-an untrained Labrador on speed
-a deserted town filled with tumbleweeds
-donuts, the kind you do with a car
-a never-ending plate of pasta
-the picture of Dorian Gray
or
-compromised
then we share the same brain except mine has tiny legs and feet and they’re wearing Crocs.
Putting out a newsletter is strange. I keep asking myself how much I want to share, in what capacity, and why. On the one hand, I crave connection and miss writing and this satisfies both. On the other, it could be like everyone coming over unannounced while your house is a mortifying mess that reveals all your inner red flags.
“Is that a wine bottle opener in the shower?”
This initial newsletter was so short because I’d already posted about it on Instagram, but not everyone follows me there so I’m including that post here:
2/21/24: I resurrected my newsletter this week, which was both surprising and not surprising. At my [writing] retreat last weekend, I was supposed to work on a pilot that's nearly finished but found myself wandering over to Substack instead. ADHD and procrastination are very good bedfellows - I doubt they get out of bed at all - but lately I've just followed whatever writing urge comes up in the moment. If I plan on writing a poem but a PowerPoint presentation on potato chips rears its salty head, I don't push for the poem. Team Potato Chips forever. The least surprising part is I want to connect more intentionally to myself and others in 2024, and writing tends to be my easiest bridge. Having focused on screenwriting for the past 5 years, I've really missed "blogging" or "newslettering" or whatever we're calling it now. I'm at the age where all the stories of my youth and the traumatic shit I lived through has intersected at a time where I also have the tools and humor to look at it. This seems ripe for learning and storytelling, two things I really crave right now. I originally started the newsletter so people could keep up with my Newsweek articles -- a job that quickly devolved into writing about Tucker Carlson (a lot) -- but luckily I was canned right before the pandemic shutdown. Divine timing at work! There's NO WAY I could have reported about the pandemic in 2020 and mentally or emotionally survived the impact. I don't think there will be a specific format for this adventure but I will have *some* writing behind a paywall if it's something that took a lot of time, energy, and research. Mostly it will be the free monthly newsletter, though there's an option to pay for that, too, if you are so inclined. I'm trying to get better at valuing my time, so this is real life practice for me and it still feels super cringe. Everything does when you're asking for attention or money on the internet. First initial post is up (link in bio) but I'll send out a welcome newsletter on 3/1. It's nice to be back!💛
And then I didn’t get the newsletter out on 3/1, it was like 15 minutes into 3/2 and I felt like burning down the entire endeavor and going to live on a farm because DAY ONE AND YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG ALREADY but that’s literally impossible because it’s my page and I can do what I want. So I got over it and pressed send on 3/2 and we all survived.
To those that have asked, I pivoted to screenwriting during the pandemic and have loved every minute. Currently working on two very different pilots, and hope (work willing) that I’ll be able to submit one this week to the NY Women in Film & TV writers lab. It’s submission SZN!
One of my words for the year is SUPPORT. I’m leaning on more people than I ever have, in ways that are new and exciting, and I thought of this blank arena just sitting here, waiting for me to fill it.
Let’s expand on the support: We signed up for the gym (booooo, why can’t we all be disembodied heads in jars???). I went to the dentist after 4,000 years. I’ve got a somatic therapist and a great business coach. I’m working with a hypnotist. I start school in June. And I love my crazy ass job (more on that later).
So fill this space I will, with at least one newsletter a month and some extras along the way. Paid subscribers get early access to anything I put a lot of time, energy, and research into. Here's to trying something new, again!
One thing I love is hearing from you and getting to connect. Anytime you want to comment, respond, ask a question or just say hello, hit reply in your email or comment below. Thanks for coming along for this absolutely unhinged dive into the pile of ham I call me.
Hamletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
There’s this story about the time my friend and I jumped on a bus headed to the U-District, a kitchen knife hidden in the sleeve of my sweatshirt and nothing but youthful anger and a bus pass to guide us. You could tell we were young because
1) it never occurred to us that we would not find the man we were looking for, late that night, in the greater city of Seattle;
2) it did not seem weird at the time to bring a knife on the bus when it was, and I quote, “for the right reasons”;
3) we thought two vigilante teenagers could overpower and implore an adult male in the crippling throes of drug addiction to…I guess be nicer? and maybe stop crime-ing?
When I’d caught him leaving our house with my computer in his hands, I wanted to believe when he said he was getting it fixed (it was not broken). His disappearances were just mysterious, not actual red flags. He most definitely, most certainly was not going to steal our roommate’s ATM card.
Adrenaline and anxiety hit my spine as the streets passed by. I saw my reflection in the bus window and laughed at how guilty I looked. An older woman on the bus eyed me suspiciously, which I resented, even as the knife tip pressed against my wrist.
I didn’t know which stop to exit the bus or where we were going, but my friend somehow did. She pulled the bus cord and we walked unevenly to the front. When those bus doors opened, there he fucking was — jean jacket, cigarette tucked behind one ear, looking like the greasiest definition of caught.
He froze, smiled, and ran. This grown man said “Just a minute” and then ran like a SWAT team from the future was after him and not two teenage girls — one a UW science major, the other a pre-Jared Subway Certified Sandwich Artist wearing the wrong shoes (that was me). My friend yelled his name and he took off in the direction of Frat Row on the University of Washington campus.
I also ran after him with the strength of one toddler and half a Tylenol but succumbed to atrophied muscles and geriatric wheezing before the next block. So glad I brought that knife! I waved my friend on, happy to die alone in the dark on the sidewalk.
There’s this story about a summer I went to practice college, where we attended classes and lived in dorms and tested our readiness for life after high school. The school I practiced at — Pacific Lutheran University — was only 25 minutes from my house but it felt like I was on another planet, the most amazing destination of them all: Planet No-Parent.
My roommate, MaryAnn, wore a Mickey Mouse t-shirt and spoke with a cheerful lisp. We had a computer in our dorm room — this was a big deal, that’s how long ago it was — which we played games on and talked to random people via AOL Instant Messenger. Sometimes I joined the foosball tournaments on the first floor, sometimes I hung out with this perpetually-drunk resident advisor named Dan. On weekends, he would drag a garbage bag full of Zima behind him while imploring the students to drink clear beer. We called him Zima Claus or Santa Dan.
I once overheard MaryAnn tell her mom over the phone that our dorm room was “the cool one where everyone comes to jam” but I knew cool kids never had to announce their status and they never used the word jam.
One night, MaryAnn met a boy online and, sight unseen, decided to meet him at Disneyland — the one in California, a thousand miles away. She booked her plane ticket with a confidence that both terrified and excited me: for the sheer boldness of it all, for knowing what she wanted. For knowing the whole thing was bonkers and doing it anyway.
I knew MaryAnn was meeting her soulmate for life — that much was obvious by the nothing we knew about him and the zero pics we’d seen. But also: this was happening on Planet No-Parent. That meant no parents knew what was going down, despite my growing protests and attempt to poke holes in her plan. Even my Zima-filled brain knew this was a bad idea. If I lost MaryAnn to a strange man two states away, I’d face a lot of ugly questions. Answers like “But he seemed nice” and “It’s the happiest place on Earth!” would probably not suffice.
The next time I saw her was three days later.
“It wasn’t a match,” she said with a finality in her voice. I was disappointed — this had all the markings of a real life rom-com. They were going to prove that romance and magic existed outside of a dial-up connection. What had gone wrong?
“He was Asian,” she whispered, looking around. “My mother would kill me. She has much higher hopes for me than that.”
There’s this story about a time we did mushrooms in the woods and encountered a barefoot escapee carrying a 24-pack of Bud Light. The lake we were camping by was a good five miles from the main road, and once you got into “town,” it was just a standalone gas station. There was nothing around for at least 20 miles, so we weren’t sure where this shoeless man had come from.
When someone asked, he said he’d escaped from a nearby mental institution.
The stranger had light meth energy but he seemed pretty harmless overall. Someone invited him to sit down and join us, which I had reservations about, but he sat by the fire and told some nutty stories about his life and the institution. How they always caught him and how he always escaped. These stories were peppered with wild conspiracy theories, opinions on everything from God to country music to aliens, and the sound of another cheap beer being opened.
“Here’s how to kill a deer with Mike’s Hard Lemonade,” he said. Someone had asked how he had survived in the wild. “You watch what they eat, then pour Mike’s Hard Lemonade — any flavor — all over their food source. They eat it and get intoxicated, which makes them much easier to kill.”
This made a sad sort of sense, but all I could picture were big game hunters in their killing gear and glory, moving silently through the forest, armed with nothing but six-packs of Mike’s Hard Strawberry Pineapple Lemonade. On the one hand, it sounded like a brilliant way to cheat the dominance hierarchy, but on the other: Was it really hunting if you killed some drunk, sleepy deer with no fight or flight response?
Camping is an ideal time to do drugs because Nature finally gets to show off. Colors get more intense, the wind dances around you, stars explode across the sky like fireworks, and the friend you’ve hugged for the past two hours is actually a tree that you named Ryan.
I wandered through the woods to the edge of the lake which, during the day, was a deep teal green. Standing by the edge at night, mushroom medicine flowing through me, the lake reflected a billion colorful pulsating stars that I desperately wanted to swim in. I bent my knees, ready to jump, but felt someone grab my hoodie.
“Stop! That’s not the universe,” said my then-boyfriend like some kind of second-rate Neil Degrasse Tyson.
“YES IT IS,” I replied, pointing at the twinkling lake. He shined a flashlight in front of my feet, which erased the illusion immediately. All I saw were weeds, some dead little fish, and old cigarette butts. I recoiled, impressed by Nature’s ability to be both beautiful and disgusting.
The next day, we saw the shoeless stranger standing by the lake. Without warning, he ran into the water. He swam to the middle of the lake like a madman, as though Godzilla herself was after him, and then proceeded to have an epic water battle with a giant invisible lake creature. He attacked, he swerved, he flailed around and at times he got pulled under.
It looked like he might lose, but then he roared with newfound energy and went back to punching air and water. Dude fought valiantly against this unseen enemy like his life depended on it. Time stopped for all of us as we rooted for him from the shore. We didn’t understand what was happening, but we wanted him to win.
The Hamletter is back like an Orca on fire headed straight for a boat named You.
More details to come, March 1st.
“I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.” (Richard II)
