No. 99: Enough.

A Threshold for Darkness

Lots to say, but before we get there, an answer to a recurring question —

A lot of you have asked whether there will be a YOUNG WORLD galley giveaway to Diary readers and if that will only be for the paid tier of subscribers.

First off, there is no paid tier and there never will be. This diary is 100% my cathartic release and the fact you come along for the ride is a joy and a wonder, and if I ever start charging for it, then something in me has gone wrong. I’m even giving away the Diary of a Novel special-edition paperback with preorders of YOUNG WORLD, at a ridiculous cost to myself, because I see the whole experience of documenting the journey of this book as something to be shared.

The real reason I’ve been reluctant to give away galleys to you is because the finished book is just so much cooler. Here they are side by side:

This is why I want you to wait for the real thing.

Now, onto more real things…

* * * * * *

There is a threshold for darkness.

A threshold for the amount of pain we can take as the protagonists in our own lives before we’ve had enough and stand up to take action.

That threshold for pain has increased over the years — primarily because we have more distractions and comforts to convince ourselves that the darkness isn’t happening. We play video games and read fantastical books and watch true-crime on Netflix and listen to podcasts and drink and smoke and swipe and surf and scroll until our eyeballs are sore, all so we don’t have to actually be in the world. Escaping isn’t just easier; it feels nice. Because it replicates how we’d like our lives to feel: peaceful, self-directed, ours.

The problem is, it’s your conscious mind that wants to escape.

But your subconscious mind isn’t under your control. It doesn’t know how to escape. Instead, it’s quietly absorbing everything that you’re trying to flee.

And at some point, it’s had enough.

I think about the difference between the conscious and subconscious mind a lot. When you grow up secretly gay in the homophobia of the 80s; when you are one of the only brown people on your island and at your school; when you are severely underweight so you look like a twig next to all the other growing boys… it leads to an absolute fascistic desire for control. You have been born into the wrong body, spirit, world, and all you want to do is bend it to your will so that you will better fit in.

This was the source of all of my suffering.

To explain the journey I had to go on to undo all of this wiring would take many books — I tried everything, everything — but it was two books that finally set me on the right path.

One was A Little Life by Hanya Yanagahara. Perhaps the saddest, most immersively intense book ever written. I’ve tried rereading it recently and it sent me to such a dark place that I put it back on the shelf, accepting that it is at once my favorite book of all time and yet I will never be able to re-read it.

The book centers around Jude (a close relative of the Bible’s “Job”) who is subject to unspeakable horrors as a child and seeks a way out of that swamp of trauma as he gets older. Something about the haunting legacy of pain resonated with me (and millions of others) — because no matter how much love and comfort Jude finds in the present, he keeps being pulled back into the darkness and shadows of the past. At its core, it’s a book about the war between your conscious mind, trying to control your life and move on, and your subconscious self, where all your secrets have taken root and grown into a swallowing, inescapable fog.

I know that feeling. Too well.

The relentless push forward, without acknowledging that there are hidden binds holding you back. And that those binds will win, terribly, tragically, unless you find a way to sever them.

A Little Life was the book that taught me the stakes of the battle.

Then a second book — Awareness by Anthony de Mello — showed me the way out.

It’s a strange little book, very slim, almost riddling in its prose, but I just read it over and over until it started to sink in. Namely, the understanding that underneath the conscious, underneath the subconscious, there is a part of you untouched that is not only pure and clean and clear, but also naturally intelligent and able to respond to the present moment in the best of all ways.

The proof that my journey was heading in the right path — that I was not going to become Jude, that A Little Life was more of a wake-up call than a forecast — came when I blew up my life and started over.

That process I’ve documented fully in these diaries, my abandonment of Manhattan, my previous type in men, my fairy tale and fantasy career to move to Missouri for a farmer and take a total 180 to write YOUNG WORLD… but it’s the last that’s worth honing in on.

I’d hit the threshold for darkness.

That’s what forced me to implode my life. A rock-bottom, maximum level of self-suffering that required bold action.

And once you blow up your life and get rid of all your old comforts… only the darkness is left. For the first time, I was facing it square on, with patience, silence.

That’s what finally allowed it to leave.

Ironically, the clearer I got from the shadows of the past, the more I was able to acknowledge the darkness of the present.

There was plenty of it.

In those years of writing The School for Good and Evil, I was sensing how our world was starting to abandon youth — eviscerating the right to carefree childhood and replacing it with surveillance and social media and data farming and dopamine addiction and all the things that have made growing up so angst-ridden and confusing these days. The old coordinates and structures of a map for youth and adolescence hammered and shattered to nihilism.

None of this was registering consciously, though.

I was writing fairy tales.

But it was accumulating, this darkness, little by little, until I must have had enough.

Because when I went to write my next fairy tale, YOUNG WORLD came out instead.

A deep-born response to the darkness.

An incendiary, nuclear-bright, supernova neon blast meant to blowtorch that dark to fire.

When the book was done, I felt lighter, clearer.

Not just because I’d expunged whatever had built up, but because I had a new understanding — I no longer had to be a slave to the shadows of my past, recycling them over and over in my work. Because I’d cleared out so much, I was alive in the moment. Able to see the difference between darkness and light here and now. And by following my subconscious without trying to control it… I’d now trained my creative engine to be its own little life.

No longer would I plan my whole career in advance and be an authoritarian dictator over my own art. I could just live between projects and wait… until whatever darkness had piled up would hit a threshold… and then the new work would begin.

But the more I thought about it, I realized there isn’t just a threshold for darkness in you.

There’s also a collective threshold for darkness.

A threshold that once we hit together — we turn back and seek the light.

All of this was on my mind this week, because I had a friend over and we were talking about frivolous things (whether we need to get on peptides, how my one-year old Bernese Mountain Dog decided to impregnate the farm’s 11 year-old unsocialized Great Pyrenees, why Rachel Zoe is not cutting it as a Bravo housewife), before a strange, loaded silence seemed to fall, as if both of us had converged on a deeper thought, one that both of us were sitting with.

“I think it’s turning,” he said.

I knew instantly what he meant and spoke it out loud. “That we’ve had enough. That we’re done with all the negativity.”

“Yes,” he said.

Expressed in a moment, but something I’d been feeling all week.

That the tide had shifted. That we, as a people, have found our tolerance for darkness and pain and now we want to turn back.

But how? What does that look like?

YOUNG WORLD is my best guess — when I wrote it, my subconscious’ fantasy of how we could fight this darkness, but now increasingly predictive and real.

There is one point, though, that my friend and I left out. One that is a central tenet of the book unfortunately. Of all the books actually. A Little Life. Awareness. And mine.

We might have a threshold for darkness.

But the darkness has no threshold.

It will go darker, darker, as dark as it needs to go.

And the only way through is to blast it with so much light — quantity and quality — that it becomes a single, lonely shadow on a bright, cloudless day.

Your turn.

Do you feel it too? That we’ve had enough?

Until next week —