THANK YOU DISILLUSIONMENT
It's giving gratitude for you betches
I don’t know about you, but I always thought “practicing gratitude” seemed sort of cringe—certainly not what I was thinking about during my peak party girl days. Why? It sounded too simple, too Hallmark-y, too close to the dogma of toxic positivity preached by sunny influencers on IG. Gratitude was better suited for witless Pollyanna living by Candide’s creed, I smirked while blowing lines in the backrooms of New York nightclubs.
But a few months ago—perched in the mountains of Colorado ruminating on Buddhism and MDMA therapy—I started keeping a gratitude journal (I know, I know…) and the boost to my cracked brain was so undeniable that the process quickly became praxis. Fact: gratitude is psychedelic—a deceptively simple mind-trick that can shift your entire slant on existence. It is an antidote to a cis-tem that capitalizes off your simmering sense of insufficiency. It is the realization that you have never been a product of your individuality but the collective we (and perhaps a touch of divinity?)
So now I’m channeling Alanis Morisette, pounding my chest and wailing “THANK YOU DIS-IIIIIILLUUUUSIONMENT!!!” Because this newsletter was born out of despair over the constant state of media collapse, and out of that chrysalis of fear came something that I didn’t even know was possible with you—something the mainstream media could never—and it’s called intimacy. See, if you told old-me (the one slogging behind a desk at V*CE magazine) that a few hundred of you would shell out dough to send me across the country, investigating the role of music and drugs at autonomous zone protests during the pandemic, I would have been like, whoa that’s sweet.
But if you told me that I would start a microdosing journey with Rave New World readers on Discord, and that subs would start tipping me off to stories, flying me out to distant cities and paying for my hotel rooms—in fact, one of my upcoming dispatches will be about an underground psychedelic lounge in Detroit that a 55-year-old reiki healer who reads this newsletter brought me to—I would say, OK now that’s some game-changing shit. I’ve only started to chip at the media fourth wall, but for the first time instead of shouting into the void, it feels like the void is… talking back.
The newsletter model is still fucked in its own way—in today’s digital economy, writers are like neo-feudal serfs toiling away for our Substack overlords, and the treadmill of constantly churning out content is only accelerating as the inbox space gets hyper-competitive (how many newsletters are begging you for money this week?) But recently I stopped chasing clicks and started putting my juiciest content behind the paywall—shrinking my audience to a tiny fraction (6%, to be precise) of this newsletter’s total reach. What at first felt like a sacrifice turned out to be liberating—privacy turns out to be pretty useful when you’re writing about underground mushroom parties, fabulous Hollywood drug dealers, and other sorts of uh, semi-illegal scenes. There is freedom in retreat, in whispering secrets in a dark forest vs. shouting over a megaphone into the public square.
Say it with me, babes: POPULARITY IS OVERRATED — THE UNDERGROUND IS WHERE IT’S AT.
Since it’s Giving Tuesday, annual subscriptions are a whopping 50% off for the rest of the year and I’ll be donating half the proceeds to charities of our choosing (hmu on Discord with your suggestions!) There’s literally no better time to leapfrog over the paywall and join us in the VIP lounge, and if you’re already a sub, maybe consider gifting a subscription to one of your fabulously broke friends?
I’m so fucking grateful for you betches, I’m also temporarily unlocking some primo content from behind the paywall (sorry, the sex stories are staying private tho). Whether you’re a paying daddy or freebie sub, thank you for allowing me to slink into your inbox with extremely based takes on the underground zeitgeist as I see it. If you’re vibing with any of the stories below, please share + fave it—and write me back to tell me what you’d like to see in your inbox next year!
