An Announcement: Pausing and Grieving
Sharing some thoughts
Welcome to another edition of Willoughby Hills!
This newsletter explores topics like history, culture, work, urbanism, transportation, travel, agriculture, self-sufficiency, and more.
I don’t want to bury the lede here, so I’ll start with an announcement and then explain more of my thinking: After a lot of careful consideration over the holidays, I have decided that I need to hit pause on the work that I’m doing.
For the foreseeable future, I will be taking a break from writing new issues and recording new episodes of the podcast Willoughby Hills. I have also decided to step back from my role producing the podcast Abolition, Liberation, Solidarity for
.I may still pop into your inbox or podcast feed from time to time: if I feel like there’s something that I have to say, a guest with a project I want to feature, or maybe just to share other work that I’m reading that’s impacting me.
But I cannot reliably stick to the schedule of publishing one podcast per week (between the two shows I produce) and writing two newsletters per week.
The full archive of all of my posts and episodes will continue to exist here on Substack and on your favorite podcast player. At this point, there’s nearly five years worth of content, so if you are a newer arrival to my work, I hope you’ll spend some time looking back on those archives.
That’s the headline, now here’s the why.
For the last several months, things have just felt off. My motivation to live in the virtual world on platforms like Substack and social media was dwindling and the only place that felt worthwhile was the real, physical world. I have been slow to answer emails, slow to edit podcasts, slow to write these columns.
The other day, I drove to work and was sitting in my parked car before going inside scrolling through social media. My feed was full of scenes out of Los Angeles of the devastating wildfires. I had family members under evacuation order, their futures uncertain. Some people I knew had lost their homes or were in danger of losing them. I saw scenes of strangers struggling to evacuate, struggling to breathe from the smoke.
My heart was heavy. I checked the fire maps to see which neighborhoods were affected: Pacific Palisades and Malibu, yes, but also the Hollywood Hills and Altadena. These were places that I knew well from my dozens of trips to Los Angeles, places that I could picture just from looking at the maps and street names. And many of them were reduced to ash.
I felt like sobbing in my car. I couldn’t imagine walking in to work and just pretending like everything was normal when nothing felt normal in the world.
L.A. was on fire. Gaza has been on fire for more than a year. Asheville recently flooded. Florida’s Gulf Coast was devastated. Workers are being exploited in China and Bangladesh to make our cheap, plastic clothes. Children are dangerously mining the rare metals for our smart phones in Africa. People are working for poverty wages to cook our food and deliver our Amazon packages. Donald Trump will be in the White House again soon.
And yet, the expectation, as it has been every day for decades, is to show up and act like nothing is wrong. To sit in meetings and do our jobs while the world literally crumbles around us.
I called my friend
to chat about what I was feeling and I realized it was grief. I was grieving. We all have had a lot to grieve for a long time. Yet we have not been allowed the space for that grief.Here’s how Cleveland Clinic defines grief (with my emphasis added):
“Grief is the experience of coping with loss. Most of us think of grief as happening in the painful period following the death of a loved one. But grief can accompany any event that disrupts or challenges our sense of normalcy or ourselves. This includes the loss of connections that define us.”
As I explored what I was grieving a little more in depth, I realized that my current grief goes far beyond watching the loss of life and homes in Los Angeles, the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, or the election of Donald Trump.
I still have not fully grieved for the pandemic. And I need to.
There were the millions of deaths from COVID that I don’t think we’ve fully mourned. We seem so hellbent on moving past the pandemic that we haven’t stopped to question how many of these deaths were preventable? What policies could have been put in place to save more lives? How do we honor those who are now gone?
There’s also the personal losses during that time. My uncle passed away in 2021. I had hoped to attend his funeral but the logistics and fear of getting sick outweighed my getting to mourn his loss. This is an uncle whom I always knew impacted me, but was reminded again recently when I found a letter I wrote in fifth grade naming him as one of my biggest influences at that age. And I never really said goodbye.
But perhaps, in a bigger sense, I am still mourning how little we seemed to have learned from that quarantine period of 2020 and early 2021.
There was loneliness, yes, and fear. There was isolation. I don’t mean to discount any of those emotions or to look back now, nearly five years later, and see everything through only rose-colored glasses.
But there was also a path to another life, another reality, opened in front of us that we could have followed. It’s Frost’s “Road Not Taken” at this point, but I grieve for the loss of that path because I think it could have brought us to a better place.
When we all stayed home, something miraculous happened in our world. The air grew clearer. The water became cleaner. Wildlife that usually hid away from humans were walking in broad daylight. It was as though our relationship with the natural world was healing. For decades, the idea of lowering carbon emissions and reversing climate change seemed impossible, but suddenly we were living a blueprint for how to do it. And nature seemed happier for it.
We weren’t just commuting less for work, but we weren’t making wasteful trips to the mall to kill time. We weren’t flying hundreds or thousands of miles away just for leisure.
We spent less time worrying about dressing for our jobs and what our job titles were and we spent time on our families and ourselves. We reconnected with long lost friends and relatives through “Zoom Happy Hours.” People gained new hobbies, remembering how to make things for ourselves instead of buying everything.
We were reinvesting in community too. Neighbors checked in on each other. When our globalized industrial economy failed, we had to lean in closer to home to solve problems: buying from local farms, planting gardens, baking our own bread.
Things that we expected to be instant just a few weeks earlier could suddenly take time. It didn’t matter if every package arrived overnight, we were grateful it arrived at all. We had to practice patience because there was no other choice.
This time of a quieter economy and a slower pace of life often reminded me of the opening passage of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, describing her small Alabama town at the height of the Great Depression:
“There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County. But it was a time of vague optimism for some of the people.”
Lee describes what could be perceived as a depressing reality, but the positive note at the end makes me think that’s not really her intention. Instead, she’s describing the sense that everyone had what they needed to survive and that was enough. It wasn’t a time of flashy cars or fancy jewelry or Xboxes, because maybe all of those things that we’re chasing are a mirage anyways. Maybe all that we truly need is food, shelter, safety, and each other.
I’ve done a lot of untangling and deconstructing in this publication over the years, examining our societal relationships to white supremacy, patriarchy, colonialism, capitalism. One subset of capitalism that I haven’t looked at nearly enough is “hustle culture,” the notion that if we just work harder, we’ll achieve what we want (financial success, that promotion or job title, the nicer house, the newer car).
The pandemic taught me to reset some boundaries in my professional life, but I think hustle culture can also help explain the burnout that I’m feeling right now and why I need some space.
The message that I internalized and often heard from others was that we always need to be in a fight to be relevant, to be top of mind. That when it comes to creating our own content, whoever is willing to put in the work is going to succeed. I set publishing goals for myself (for this newsletter and both podcasts) that were designed to preserve that hustle, to keep the relevance, to strive for that success.
I talked about the seasons of life back in the fall, and I think it’s worth considering that metaphor when it comes to publishing. There are times, like late-summer/early-fall when the bounty seems endless, when it feels like the harvest will never end. But those of us who know what comes after that bounty often spend September and October frantically canning tomatoes, turning cabbage into sauerkraut, and carefully storing root crops. Because as chaotic as harvest season is, there’s always that first frost that turns a vibrant field into a wasteland in a matter of hours.
Beyond that, the harvest simply cannot exist without those winter months of rest, the spring months of groundwork and anticipation, and the summer months of early growth. Hustle culture tends to focus only on the harvest, without remembering that harvest cannot exist without rest and patience.
Of course my capacity for creative ideas waxes and wanes at different points too, much like those farm fields. But rather than allow for a publishing schedule that accommodated that, I chose to ignore it and power through.
I took a break over the last few weeks during the holidays, and suddenly I had time in my life to actually live my life. I (mostly) finished my kitchen renovation project that initially began 10 months ago. I had boxes of new cabinets sitting unassembled in my garage since September because I didn’t make the time to prioritize building in my own life. Hustle culture told me that wasn’t possible. In a matter of a few days, I now have a comfortable, functional, and beautiful new kitchen, with nearly all of the work done with my two hands.
To close for today, I want to quote from an unlikely source. I was listening to a recent interview with Jaleel White, the actor who played the 90s phenomenon Steve Urkel on Family Matters. White was being interviewed on the Boy Meets World recap podcast Pod Meets World by Danielle Fishel, Rider Strong, and Will Friedle, and the four of them were comparing notes about various reality show offers that often come in for former sitcom stars.
White had this to say about turning down these offers:
“The things you say no to actually do more for your career than the things you say yes to. You know, the power of a well-placed ‘No.’”
At the moment, I need to say no to two things that I love: Willoughby Hills and Abolition, Liberation, Solidarity. This is not because I love either of them any less, but because I need the space to really grieve some big losses and to think about how that grief will reveal a new path.
As I wrote about a few weeks ago, I don’t have the motivation to try to change people’s minds as much anymore. Besides, this work is ultimately internal and individual- it’s up to each of us to really decide what kind of world we want to live in and what we are willing to accept.
As powerful a tool as social media and the internet are, they are no substitute for real, face-to-face, on the ground changes. I need a break from talking in the virtual world and to start being more present in the real world. I’ve written about it a lot before, but I think getting local and being in touch with nature are the only ways we can truly move forward.
I thank you all for your support over the years and truly appreciate the little community we have built here.
With gratitude,
Heath
If you’ve missed past issues of this newsletter, they are available to read here.
Totally the right thing to do. It is exhausting and I don´t think our minds are meant to deal with it all (the entire world). Focus on your family and immediate community. I think that is where it all starts. The virtual world can drain your soul. I will miss your writings and podcasts as they were actually calming for me, the way you wrote and spoke to your guests, with lots of understanding and empathy. You are a gentle soul.
Well said. From the other side of the coin: I’ve realized that I can’t keep up as a listener/reader/follower with the over abundance of content in just this one platform, let alone elsewhere. It exhausts me. In academia the sabbatical serves a similar purpose: to take a break from producing so the ‘product’ is better. Rest your nervous system and grieve.