Loyal Readers,
I want to announce a new initiative.
Inspired by writers like Virginia Woolf and David Sedaris, as well as my own incessant urge to get my thoughts on paper, I’ve kept a regular diary for a year and some change. Inspired by John McPhee’s fabulous “Tabula Rasa” series for The New Yorker, in which the ninety-two-year-old nonfiction legend shares those core memories and experiences that he told himself he would share decades earlier but never did, I’m going to start publishing excerpts from my own memoirs.
I can’t say that these are necessarily my greatest hits, because, inshallah, I have yet more life to live, and hopefully yet more shimmers of wonder to behold. But nothing in this life is guaranteed. So why wait to share?
I recently planted a virgin coconut palm in my backyard, and my wife has reminded me on at least four occasions of that piece of trivia that everyone knows.
Shit happens. Like death by coconut. I suppose there are worse ways to go out – like death by shark, which, if we are to believe www.gilisharkconservation.com (a completely unbiased source), is less likely to occur by a factor of thirty.
The diaries follow the stream of conscious of a wildly curious young buck who quit his job at a U.S. intelligence agency because he simply wanted more, and because he feared that he was careening toward an inevitable mid-life crisis down the road unless he made a sudden course correction. The tipping point was his realization that the longer he stayed in government, the greater the chance that his worldview would begin to narrow, likely without him even noticing. That scared the turd out of him. How many more years on the inside would it take before he began shouting the names of the Big Four—China, Russia, North Korea, Iran—in his sleep?
You will find much grappling with this decision in my diaries, and I plan to share some of that with you (I also promise that the talking-in-the-third-person-thing is kept to a minimum). You will also find moments of runaway creativity and bouts of existential thought of the sort that are made possible when you’re unburdened by the time and spirit-sucking of a customary 9 to 5. It’s that journey—that quest to find my authentic voice, often in fits and starts—that I’m more interested in sharing with you.
But that ain’t it. Excerpts I plan to share also include:
Everyday experiences – what some might call “on-the-ground reporting”
Colorful profiles of colorful people
Observations (a whole lotta those) about virtually anything and everything
Reactions to news events
Love letters to my plants
Short stories and fictional scenes
Think pieces about the future – mostly regarding geopolitics and AI
Musings on writing: things I’ve learned, struggles, moments of ‘click-age’
Music, film, and literary criticism
Philosophy, psychology, and spirituality: how to live the ‘Good Life’
Playful riffs and satire – maybe too much of that
Much much more that I’m afraid I don’t know how to categorize
I will only lightly edit the entries I publish to ensure proper grammar and punctuation, and in some cases, clarity. I want to retain that stream of conscious quality of the diaries. Virginia Woolf’s own diaries take this form, and I find something so deliciously revealing about it: the flouting of writing norms to articulate a layered thought; how our ‘thinking’ minds translate our feeling centers; how a sentence can unlock a winding detour to a seemingly incongruous memory or line of argument.
Much of my journals are raw, very raw, and of course very personal. There are some entries that are far too personal to share. But I’m going to push myself to get as close to that line as possible.
I’m not doing this out of vanity or because I think I have all the answers or because I want to show off my range or intellect or because I think my life is somehow more interesting than others. I’m sensitive to this notion of TMI – an acronym we typically utter after someone is a little too loose lipped about a sexual escapade or a bowel movement, but which in this context I might distill down to this simple question:
“Who does this twenty-something think he is?”
I understand that judgements and assumptions may follow. By the same token, that is beyond my control, and frankly not much my concern, and if I make it my concern—if I dwell in that sensitivity to being perceived as oversharing—I’m living an impoverished life.
I feel like we’re too often stuck playing a role, a character, a part. Then we play these roles, characters, and parts so much that we begin to identify with them. Then we lose sight of who we really are at root.
I heard it said somewhere that when you “identify with something you are not, it always leads to suffering and unhappiness.” That inauthenticity will rear its ugly head at some point, in some less-than-ideal manifestation. And to think that this anguish is contained to the self would be short-sighted. People close to you—the ones you claim to love—for example, will invariably get caught up in the blast zone.
For too much of my life I feel as if I’ve been juggling any number of masks. Mr. Government Spook. Mr. Politics Junkie. Mr. I’m Going To Try My Darndest To Impress You With The Big Words I Drop In Conversation Because I Felt Stupid When I Was A Little Boy.
I view this initiative as a window into who I really am: what captures my imagination, what grips my thought, what inspires me.
These entries represent the truest expression of me – the real me. And it’s sort of freeing to let the world into not just the good, but also the less good: your trials, your fears, your regrets.
There’s another component to this. Publishing my diaries is as much about letting you in, as it is about letting me in, if that makes sense.
There’s something about transcribing words from notebook to computer. In so doing, you relive not just the memory, but the state you were in at the time of the writing. And you soon realize that each entry represents an individual marker on your personal journey. With the passage of just a little time, you can see your trajectory—your narrative arc—with a lot more clairvoyance. Suddenly, you can condense long-winded, jumbled, multi-prepositional prose into clear declarative sentences. You were feeling X because X, plain and simple.
There are no more important stories than our own. I believe this to be the case for every human that’s ever graced this rock.
I’m reminded of what someone I very much look up to said to me. Sensing that I’d succumbed to that unreliable inner narrator that questions my self-worth and tells me I don’t have what it takes to execute on my dreams, he remarked:
“You know Jack, at some point you’ll come to realize that all your experiences—all your interactions—have been one long drawn-out conversation with yourself.”
At the very least I hope you’ll find some of my diary entries entertaining. Like many who write things down, I’m drawn to the eccentric, the ironic, the quirky. Humor usually accompanies these descriptors.
But a couple rungs up from “at the very least,” I hope you’ll find something more in observing a striving twenty-something trying, oh so hard, to understand, then articulate EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE.
Maybe you could relate to some of my struggles. I recently had such an experience when reading Marcus Aurelias’ Meditations – a compilation of excerpts from his own diaries. My eyes watered not three pages in. A Roman emperor who reigned over a vast empire two thousand years ago—TWO THOUSAND YEARS—whose words I could not only understand but empathize with in such a visceral way. It’s this sort of revelation that serves to flatten human history in one’s consciousness.
The passage that always gets me is one in which Marcus captures that intrinsic human tenderness:
“At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: ‘I have to go to work—as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for—the things I was brought into the world to do?’ Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?”
Maybe in reading me, you too could realize that we (all of humanity) are not that different from one other. I don’t know. Maybe these annoying dispatches you get in your email from this measly twenty-something can help drive home this truth.
Too lofty? Perhaps.
But I got nothing to lose, and, for the time being, no 9 to 5 to temper this idealism. Plus – a coconut could fall on my head at any moment. The clock is always ticking. Why put something off when tomorrow is not a guarantee?
Ya’ll ready for this?