letter ten: roots
ten people are sitting at a table...
hi all & welcome back!
letter 10?!?! one year of FRITH? crazy to me.
this little letter truly means so much to me, and as I conclude a full year of consistently packing all of my thoughts and muses into a 5 minute read of a newsletter, I feel so much IMMENSE gratitude for each and every one of you who has, in the past year, taken the time to support me by reading, liking, subscribing, commenting, sharing.
as I moved into my twenties, the world shifted shapes around me. covid blah blah blah, losing friends blah blah blah, everything is virtual yaddah yaddah. all of that buffoonery aside, I looked up one day and realized how lonely I felt — I felt a true lack of community, and alongside that, a fear of sharing my voice, a fear of being myself. something about moving into my own shell for so long made my voice feel estranged from my body when I heard it aloud.
every time I press share on a newsletter or a radio show or anything where I express myself, there’s a terrible fire in the pit of my stomach. no one wants to hear what you have to say, no one cares about your silly little interests,,,,it burns.
FRITH has truly extinguished a large part of that fire. anyways, before I get teary eyed, let’s move along into the letter, letter 10: roots.
roots is the theme for the month, because it takes strong roots, a sturdy foundation, for a plant to flourish, bloom, and spread its seeds.
I feel like this time of year - the beginning of the year, the first quarter, is truly a time for rooting. focusing on a sturdy foundation so that we can flourish throughout the rest of the year ahead.
similarly, there’s a theme for me during this time of the year of looking at my own personal root rot, the things that are deeply rooted in my subconscious keeping me held captive in certain patterns or ways of living I no longer desire for myself.
I certainly don’t believe that blaming your past is ever productive or good for you. blaming anything, for that matter, is never productive or good for you. but looking into our pasts can be extremely helpful in aiding the formulation of new, healthier patterns that we want to develop going forward, or releasing old, negative ones.
there’s something I keep coming back to over and over again this month, which is my fear of being heard. there’s something so terrifying to me about speaking, especially if it’s saying what I need. Everyone has got their opinions at the ready, it seems. And my brain desperately wants everyone to like everything about me, and I guess, if we’re being honest, it just can’t work that way.
When I was younger, a friend of mine noticed my crippling need for approval. He gave me some advice that has stuck with me to this day. I can’t remember the exact way he said it, but the gist was this:
You’re sitting at a table with five other people and tell a joke. Two of those five people laugh. Those are your people, don’t worry about the other three.
Man, it’s simple. It’s simple but it works. And every day it gets me through the fear of saying something someone might not like, of being someone someone might not like. The people, the places, the things that like you for you are those that are the ones that are actually worth spending your time with. The ones that will have your back no matter what it is you decide to do next.
Jiayue Li
Similarly, I’ve been dabbling at, it’s become a hobby, a little game of mine, to engage with the things that in the past I might have turned my nose up at — or what some might call “cringed” at.
A lot of these things present as minute details, for example, using an e-reader, painting my fingernails, drinking cow’s milk (gasp!), but they’re all things that previously held a part of me captive in a place of feeling more-than.
Ugh, I could never use a kindle…there’s just something so…tangible…so…special about a real book… you wouldn’t understand…
Painting my fingernails? Why would I spend my hard-earned money on that? Just to have my fingers look pretty?
Cow’s milk is for cows, not humans. That’s disgusting. We’re the only species that drinks another animal’s milk,
And, wow, does it make me want to cringe reading some of that, but you know, there’s something to be said for sorting through the voices in your head and finding out which ones are really yours. So yes, I still love books. They’re tangible, yes, and special. But I also live in a tiny studio apartment and want my book with me everywhere I go. And so I have learned to quite love my e-reader, my shiny fingernails, my cow’s milk lattes.
LI HUI
So, as I write this, I wonder.
Will you get it?
Is the formatting too different for you?
Does this letter stray too far away from the typical FRITH letter?
And, most importantly, why the fuck does it matter what you think?
Why do I care what you, some distant faraway creature, a twitter or instagram friend, a person I haven’t spoken to in years, think about my letter, that I write, solely for myself?
And so I come back to the picture of ten of you sitting at the table with me, listening to my joke, only three of you laughing.
And so I’ll post this letter without a proofread, without an edit.
Hey, y’all. Happy to have you here.
Hugo Grenville