Your Self-Indulgence is Stunting Your Emotional Growth
The following is the Letter from the Editor featured in Issue 002 of The Reprise. The full magazine can be found at inesmeow.com/magazine.
Welcome to Evermore: Yearning in creative and literary expression. I am so excited for readers to immerse themselves in our moody, winter, literary landscape. Readers may notice there are fewer contributors than there were in the previous issue. I made this choice, despite an overwhelming response to the submission call, to allow for appreciation of each author’s style between multiple pieces. With a theme so coded by passing time, this felt appropriate. I’ve aimed to highlight writers with a strong signature as well as others with versatility.
While assembling this issue, I imagined myself locked away in a wood-paneled study, working by candlelight, fueled by black coffee and jasmine tea, listening to brass jazz warbling on a gramophone. My imagination was stretched, replacing balmy, winter sunshine with whistling, bitter winds that leave you wondering if the tears on your cheeks are symptoms of heartbreak or hypothermia. I usually lean into the mild winter that accompanies the holidays here at home, but when making a final decision on this issue’s theme, I found myself drawn in by the melodrama and melancholia of Edgar Allen Poe, Mary Shelley, and a re-read of “Hamlet” and “The Secret History.” After the warmly nostalgic effect of the most recent Reprise magazine, Homecoming, it was alluring to twist the knife further into bleeding darkness, yearning, and obsession this winter.
A few factors directed the tone of this issue. Firstly, a desire to call on a nuanced concept and set it on the operating table for interpretation. Evermore is not by default a word with positive or negative connotation, and I was interested in the depth of the artists’ ability to capture something more cerebral than somatic. Secondly, and more pressingly, as a member of an Internet generation, I have seen within my own youth and observation of subsequent younger generations, a resistance against sincerity and a desperate embrace of apathy and irony in its place. In an age where most community interactions are no longer face-to-face, but shielded by a keyboard and screen, it becomes more dangerous to be unshielded in real life.
It is increasingly obvious that with a rapid loss of literacy and physical media, there has been a weakening depth across our culture of vocabulary to describe emotional intricacies. Heartbreak, yearning, rapture, obsession, seduction, jealousy, desire. Description, and mere admission, of these experiences are what reveal us to be bleeding, fallible, and (god forbid) mortal. What a far cry from the untouchable and aesthetecized neuroses that keep us not only socially assimilated, but marketable. It is rare to hear someone expose their emotions and desires with abandon, to witness someone’s human experience without the postmodern mask of shame and guilt that pays the fee for unfiltered feeling.
Young people are drifting from literature and art as it becomes less necessary to be well-read to assert social belonging. The American education system has proven itself as a pitiful means to a money-making end rather than a living cultural expectation to be educated for the sake of our communities. Even people resisting this loss of literacy are then trapped by the culturally sterilized and cauterized algorithms dominating the Internet. I dream of a society where we do not shy away from the weight or discomfort of experiencing, witnessing, and sharing the messy edges of our unique vulnerabilities. We cannot continue to filter our self-indulged neuroses through the eyes of our invisible audiences. At the end of the day, our lack of sincerity (including within our own self-awareness) will leave us more lonely than we expect embarrassment or inaccurate social perception to do. And without truly individual language of self-expression, how can we ever escape these conditions?
Allow yourself to be stripped of your pretenses and affectations. Feel with your whole body, embrace your sensuality, recognize and metabolize what isn’t pretty and neat about your humanity. Resist the allure of a sanitized emotional existence. Sincerity is a skill and a habit to be cultivated. So read!! Read! Read!! Develop a vocabulary of your own, not one developed by an algorithm that feeds on your diminishing self-esteem. Sing and dance and cry. Write your bad poetry and tell people you love them, or miss them. Speak what you desire. There is no one coming to give you permission to stop being afraid of being known.
Why should you be a stranger to yourself? Who could possibly come to the rescue?
No heart more true than mine to you,
Inés E. Atterbury
