Eight Months In

Eight months ago, I made you a promise, and it was a simple one. Every week, I would take the headlines and set them beside the history nobody bothered to teach us — and dig at the pressing questions of our time, the things people feel but have no words for yet. Every single week.

And I kept it: marginalized history, late-stage capitalism, empathy, power, the soul of a country. Eight months, and no missed weeks. Through the gold going up while the food stamps ran dry, through the harder weeks when I sat down certain I had nothing and found the thing to write anyway.

I’m missing this week.

Here is the part I find hard to type. I’m tired. Not the weekend kind, but the deep kind, the kind arriving after eight months of looking straight at the machinery of power and refusing to look away, until one morning you feel it has gotten into your body and set up house there. So I’m taking a week. A mini-sabbatical, if we want the dignified word for it. I’ll be back next Saturday or Sunday at the latest.

Thank you. You are the reason this exists. I’ve never once written into silence, and that is because of you.

And here is something else, because the whole point of this newsletter is to say quiet parts out loud. I feel guilty. Typing the words “I need rest,” I feel like I am confessing to a crime. I am a workaholic who built himself a tidy little bubble where the work never stops, where a week off reads as a moral failure, and where rest is a line item I keep deciding I cannot afford. Side note, or really a confession: I spend every single week writing about a country grinding people down and teaching them to blame themselves for the grinding. Then I go and do the exact same thing to me.

So this is me practicing what I preach.

The oldest peoples on earth wrote rest into law. One day set aside and held apart, a day for sitting still and breaking bread and remembering you are more than the work of your hands. They understood it in their bones. We took that wisdom and called it a luxury, then a weakness, then a thing to apologize for. This week I am finally going to live it, apology and all.

Here is why I do this work, and why I am about to ask you for something. I write because the history they hand us is a comfortable lie, and the truth is the only thing I have ever found to set a person free inside their own country. I write because somebody read a piece of mine and saw their own life differently and wrote to tell me. That is the whole engine, and it runs on readers deciding this work was worth paying for.

If these eight months have meant something to you, become a paid subscriber. Eight dollars a month. It keeps the lights on, and it keeps me free to come back and write the next eight months the way I wrote the last.

The work is not going anywhere. Neither am I.

See you next week.

— Jermaine

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