The universe is made of stories, not of atoms
The universe is made of stories, not of atoms
Introducing Love Language Models
Dear Readers,
I am writing to you today to introduce you all to a small new experiment on my blog. I am very jittery, slightly nervous, and mightily excited to introduce you to Love Language Models - an anonymous advice column to collectively ruminate on matters of love, life, and the other mess of life.
To give you a little context on why I’m doing this. It is because, one night I woke up in the middle of the night and decided I should.
And because, I hadn’t done something truly crazy in a while, and believe my idea of me is more unhinged, risqué, and off the nuts than I truly am, in real life. My imagination of the girl that I am does 70x more absurd shit than I have ever allowed myself to do. So, I felt it was important for me to start taking up some controversial, risky, cancellable ventures like this in my life to actualize that hysterical idea of myself.
If you ask truly ask me, I have always found advice columns to be a little cringy. I haven’t even read a lot myself. Just the idea of it seemed a little - meh. But that! was until I started reading Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed and decided - holy fucking god, I love advice columns, advice columns are my shit, I should start an advice column. So following my stinky tradition of wanting to become the writers I read - I have started, yes let me say that one more time for you, that’s right - an advice column. Last month, I was David Thorne, the month before that I was Durga Bose and in this next phase of my life, I am excited to announce that I am going to be Cheryl Strayed.
On a more sincere note, I believe an advice column could be an excellent creative tool for writing, and fostering a community that is cognisant, tolerant, and empathetic to a stinky trove of big and small, old and new issues that govern the lives of our fellow flesh prisoners. To bring to the spotlight all our icks and woes and build a safe sanctuary to shed skin, and unveil the sweat of suppressed shame and trauma, open to be fanned by the solidarity of an equally icked community (screams in empathy).
I would urge everyone to think of the issues we receive here, as reflective prompts for their own journal. To give you an example, one of the queries I got a few days ago was from a man who told me he is married to a woman who does not want to have children, and that the thought of never being able to ever be a father is killing him every day.
I do not hyperbolize, but I have spent the last two nights thinking of the man in question, and his plight. What had me most worked up was not only my misgiving about how I was supposed to ‘advise’ this man but also my curiosity about what I would do in a circumstance like this. It has made me meditate over questions about my own will to marry, to rear children, and the modus operandi of familial communication with a partner. Over the weekend, I have tabled this question to my friends over countless drinks, asking how each would react to a conflict like this. And while I wouldn’t say we were able to mutually agree on one best answer. What I will tell you is that that night, six twenty-somethings have gone back home with the consciousness and readiness for the possibility that they too, could end up in a marriage with an unfulfilled dream of ever becoming a parent, one day. The night, six twenty-somethings have gone home, slightly more ready - for life.
To llm-user-7452, I’m sorry that even after three full days of mulling over your predicament, I have not been able to come up with an answer practical in the context of brown society, convincing even to myself - that could be, without encroaching on the agency of your partner, mildly remedial to you.
Maybe I am not ready to tackle a question of this gravity for my age and vantage point. Maybe I am too washed by western wisdom to dissect the newly evolving dynamics of love and matrimony in the times of heightened ambition and eroding gender roles in urban India. Maybe I have not collected enough experiences to expand our perspective on an ordeal that is so painful to you. But the complexity of your qualm, llm-user-7452, has made a tiny tear in my heart. And I know that I (and hopefully a lot of others after reading this) will walk this earth with a fresh quest to seek threads of knowledge and experiences to sew it in an answer I can possibly share with you, or anyone who finds themselves in a similar position one day.
Through the stories in this column, dear readers, I intend to probe my own crooked experiences, match patterns and show you that even with your dark-edgy-esoteric lore, you are neither alone nor unique in your pain (sorry about that).
Some days I will shamelessly make it about myself. Some days I will make a full mockery of your issue for a few petty laughs on the internet. Some days I will direct you to other art, books, or artists I believe could help you better, and some days I will point-blank call your bullshit. I am also figuring this out as I go, and I plead for your patience and feedback while I do it.
It is a very new form of writing for me and I am aware of how risky and possibly presumptuous a project like this could be. But I am driven to fiddle and finesse my way to good art and I'm more desperate to get better at my craft than I am afraid of public scrutiny and judgment.
Yes, it is an advice column but you are stupid if you think you can take advice from a random stranger on the internet. If you indeed think I could give you prescriptive advice to guide you on what to do in life, you should actually not write to me. Actually, no I take that back. You should write to me and watch me make it deliberately worse for you.
You should write to me for the same reason you turn to music, or books or film or even to reddit - to look for cues in life. You should write to me if you’ve blown enough music, finished enough films, and believe that I could offer you something you could not, at that point in time, find in any other work of art.
That being said, when you write to a writer, you are seeking the writer’s input, biases, worldview, politics, prejudices, and a big hulk of their hearts. Now once again, to break this down - these. are. subjective. As most think pieces and works of art are. You have no obligation to accept it. Heck, you have the full right to discard it. But you have no right to charge me for being biased or having a brain of my own after literally asking me to use mine for you. We can weave beautiful stories together. Just don’t be a dick to me.
Speaking of, don’t you all love a good voyeuristic story now?
I was going through my Substack analytics and a very interesting stat I have gotten is that through the two years of my intermittent writing, I have written blogs on love and work and comedy and bollywood and pop culture, and out of all of those - the stories that have been most personal (and emotionally painstaking for me to write might I add) - have just invariably done better.
One thing I have learned about you, dear readers, is that you have great judgment of a story that is real, and authentic. You have great intuition to pick when a writer has emptied their insides out, and when they have not been stingy with giving themselves to you. If you ask me, I don’t think the stories that performed well have objectively better writing than the others. They have all, however, positioned me in very vulnerable states that have in one way or the other, required me to do the emotional labor of being okay with being seen. They took a lot from me, but they have all almost always given me back multifold.
Because the thing is, we have a desperate need to be seen, but an inherent fear of showing up. We are wired to think we will become less if we share more, but anything we lose by speaking our truth is not loss, it’s alignment.
What I think, besties, is that we love to hear people’s stories of love, pain, trauma, family, friendships, and the rest. We are very involuntarily invested in them, sometimes grudgingly, sometimes nosily. What I’m saying is, I want to explore if we can do it more consciously, and constructively.
So, write to me to tell me about the beautiful terrible things in your life - fearlessly, anonymously, and I will tell you about the beautiful terrible things in mine - fearfully, publicly.
I will wait for you at the table where the tired girls rest and write.
"One thing I have learned about you, dear readers, is that you have great judgment of a story that is real, and authentic. You have great intuition to pick when a writer has emptied their insides out, and when they have not been stingy with giving themselves to you. If you ask me, I don’t think the stories that performed well have objectively better writing than the others"
interesting points
hey gr8 piece. atb on ur new startup.