What happens when you fail to keep a promise?

The answer is satisfying, if unexpected

When I was in college, I wrote and illustrated a children’s book about a garden of lost promises. In the story, a little girl who is feeling down goes outside one evening and discovers all these lost promises. They wink and sashay in the soil and tell her stories. She follows them as they glitter in and out of focus and discovers—well, I promise there’s a plot twist and resolution. It’s a sweet story. And when I rediscovered this manuscript a few months ago, I saw a theme in my writing that I hadn’t realized before.

Repetition.

I am asking the same questions over and over! About timing. About attraction. About getting so close to something but never quite having it. About turning away. It’s like, have you ever suddenly realized you have been circling around something, like a ravenous vulture, eager to suck the bones? All the while you thought you were wild and free? Okay, okay, I know I’m not wild and free. I’m a Cancer, for one. And I have two children and a mortgage. But. Repetition. Maybe it’s my way of trying to control what’s just out of reach. I’m not sure. And I’ve misplaced the book.

I haven’t misplaced this newsletter, though, thanks to servers. Which brings me to an announcement, it’s The Gift’s first birthday! 🎉 Happy birthday! 🎉 I promised a cake to my newsletter, because, imho, she’s a darling. A cake frosted like a gift. Wouldn’t that be neat?

My children are obsessed with Is It Cake, so we could get that knife out like Mikey Day and surround the cake with actual gifts and do the TEST. Then, eat the gift. So apropos! I was, for at least an hour, delighted by my cleverness.

Until we had too many plums. They were going to rot. And reason came knocking, so I made a plum tart not a cake and we ate without taking photographs. Nary a crumb for my digital diary.

I might as well tell you what else I’ve been doing this rainy June (the heat wave didn’t come to Western Washington, it’s 52 degrees F and rain). I buried my myself in writing and didn’t follow the presidential debates. And you know, it’s so terrifying—.

To calm myself this month, I made teriyaki poke from a meal kit (it was a hit!), I’ve also made several oatmeal breakfasts, I made healthy snacks (celery and carrots and apples), and meals of pasta, vegetables, pizza, grilled fish, and salad. There was vacuuming and toilet cleaning. Laundry. The tomatoes and peas are growing. I texted my friends, my parents. I bought focaccia from my neighbor who is starting a cottage bakery. My sister and niece visited for the weekend. It was the last day of school. My daughter had several important dance performances. A big graduation party. A new select soccer club. Two birthday parties. I wrote two drafts of a grant proposal. I led a workshop and worked out a few thorny issues for a website I’m building. I went to a meeting on equity and feedback loops and made new LinkedIn connections. I met a wondrous new intellectual colleague with whom I will work with this summer.*

That idea, is it cake? It was a good idea. But, as I remember one of my mentors, Eva Fodor, saying: “ideas are cheap,” mere promises, and it’s the effort that matters not the promise, right? I’ve been tending to living.

Is it cake? Photo by Ekaterina Shevchenko on Unsplash

But cake isn’t the only promise I’ve failed to make into matter. Here are a few more you might remember:

1. When I first started The Gift, I promised to compile a list of ways to stoke your imagination. But after four or five items, I stopped. I already know I behave—and write—like a fraud when I try to accomplish something for superficial reasons. So, despite my enthusiasm, I let the list trail off, like an ellipse. It was honestly a flop.
   
   I want to come back when I’ve read more. On my reading list are my brilliant colleague Cristina Visperas’s book Skin Theory, Julietta Singh’s No Archive Will Restore You, because what is the imagination but culture. Then there’s the unconscious to consider, so I’m considering enrollment in Juliet Mitchell’s course on Feminism and Psychoanalysis at the Freud Museum. In my free time, of course.

2. I also promised to make a BookTok video about Doppelgänger by Naomi Klein, in my free time. Bur my first efforts were awful. On screen, I’m bookish, raise my eyebrows too often, and awkwardly flirt with the camera—not to mention, my neck. Ugh. I prefer the screening effects of words to being on-screen. It took months to recover.

   During that time, I forgot Doppelgänger.

   
   As a compromise, I’ve edited a clip from something I was saying about the dangers of our platform economy that could double as a yes/and reply to this question: “How do you feel about making videos of yourself, Monika?”

   
   Cute as it is, I’m sure the clip doesn’t fulfill the promise I made. This might be like getting served a soda water when you order a vodka soda? A scam! And you know, it’s so terrifying. Because they do look alike. As do doppelgängers. I wonder what my digital twin could tell me about myself, but the best I’ve got is a home video, because I can’t control my digital twin—she’s made of my data traces—I learned that from Naomi Klein, among other things. And I do recommend her book. Because, you know, it’s so terrifying. You need a friend along the way.

3. I promised a long-time collaborator to co-write an academic article, in our free time. We have been involved in information activism with Art+Feminism for some years and had an abstract accepted for publication in a competitive, peer-reviewed academic anthology. But in the months since the acceptance, I’ve misplaced my motivation! Where did I put it? I care about the topic—the chasm between research, policy recommendations and on-wiki action, the impact on marginalized communities—but I’m feeling dispirited without motivation. Does it even matter? Where did I leave my motivation?

4. I promised my protagonist, Maggie, in my unfinished novel, How To Lose A Promise, that I’d really finish her story by this July. Unfortunately, Maggie, I don’t have your ending down and the middle is really messy. I’m not sure if your mother is actually dead and I don’t know if you get back together with your estranged spouse or not. Do you forgive him? I know you have a lover. Do you solve the problem you set out to solve? You were training people to feel emotions, but it’s a complicated, disenchanted world and you are searching for a friend. This is your story, I want to do right by you and I’m afraid of letting you down if I finish in the wrong way. But if I don’t finish, I’ll also let you down.

   Of all the promises, what does it mean that keeping a promise to an imaginary person matters most to me?

   
   

To cope with my feelings about these unkept promises and living, here’s what else I have been doing:

• Watched Julie & Julia and ate buttered popcorn, felt much better

• Decided to take a cue from Julie’s focus on one specific topic and persistence in finishing something

• Decided to write out my questions and then close my eyes and consult a nearby book for expert answers

• Decided to do this, now

What happens when you fail to keep a promise?

“[Accept] fragility … a methodological counterpoint to the hubris that animates so much tech development.”

-Ruha Benjamin (2019) Race after Technology. Polity Press. pg. 46.

Maybe when I find the children’s book I once wrote, about the garden of lost promises, I’ll remember again how to navigate fragility and unkeptness. How to accept that lost promises, wonderfully fragile, might be lost but not yet gone.

*Meeting-of-the-minds offering

I’m giving, and offering, bespoke “meeting-of-the-minds” / thinking-with sessions for people who find themselves in want of intellectual interlockers to deepen and strengthen their thinking, creating, and writing. I will read your work and meet with you one-on-one to engage in deep, winding conversations about your writing and creative/intellectual strengths and intentions. I’ll help you identify invisible or understated threads and themes in what you do and engage with you to best serve your goals or intellectual emergences/becomings. I am currently working with one wonderful client, and I’ve previously worked with two other clients. Keep in mind I am not currently trained as a professional coach. My training comes from my work in and around higher education, my deep reading and listening skills, and my experience working with children, students, writers, academics, libraries, and editors for two decades. Thinking-with sessions are the same market-rate for what you’d pay for developmental editing or coaching. They’re negotiable and designed to meet your needs. I will likely best match with people who are engaged with or interested in cultural, queer, and feminist theories as well as humans who are or wish to be engaged in artistic curation, production, and world-building and, in some way, curious about themselves and technologies. Inquire for details.

Book recommendation

A few years ago, I met journalist Stephan Harrison in Ohio at a bar packed with Wikipedians. I remember no small talk, just a sudden deep dive into the nuances of Wikipedia’s subculture. How people who participate—usually only known by usernames, think Dolphinnaeus or DonutCat—are obsessed over tinkering, niche topics, notability guidelines, formatting standards, all with the constraints of open source code.

While “anyone can edit” Wikipedia, not everyone does. Active editors—which are around 1,500 for English Wikipedia—are known to each other through Talk pages, reverts, and edit summaries (an incomplete list). Of course, some amazing humans behind Wikipedia attend in-person conferences!

And Stephen has gone on to provide excellent, well-deserved coverage of what makes the Wikipedia community special—and deeply political—for the likes of Slate and Washington Post. I’m also grateful he’s a reader of this newsletter.

Reported fiction! My early copy of The Editors by Stephen Harrison

A few weeks ago, I was lucky to be an early reader for his novel, The Editors, which is now available for preorder. The book absolutely delighted me, in no small part because it’s a “reported novel,” a deep sketch of the community he’s reported on for nearly a decade. I saw aspects of my experience in the book! For everyone who isn’t a Wikipedia editor, The Editors exposes the complicated ways that “facts” become real online from the vantage of relatable, imperfect characters.

As the pages turn—it’s suspenseful!—the reader roots for the underdogs to restore the authority of reliable information.

This reader appreciated the satisfying twists and ending of this story, where everyday people are heroic and justice is served.

Irl authority is contested and contextual and justice is an ongoing project. So there’s nothing more reliably satisfying than a sudden deep dive into the nuances of Wikipedia’s subculture. I love the reported fiction. Hat tip!

Preorders matter for authors, preorder now anywhere you buy books!

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Thank you for reading The Gift.

Yours,

Monika
The Gift

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