What is a newsletter?

I’ve started to really struggle with deciding what to post on here. Not because I don’t have anything to say, but because every time I type something out, I start thinking “Well,,, that wouldn’t look very good on me” or “What if someone from my work read this?”

At my last job, I mistakenly trusted someone enough to give them the link to this newsletter, which they of course immediately began to pass around. I then had to have a long meeting with HR about what is or isn’t personal health information. And also, about my overall behavior at and outside of work. I have learned many lessons since then.

Even if I don’t openly talk about this page, it’s not very difficult to find. All you have to do is google my name, and the first five links that pop up are of these words. Scroll down a bit and you see my HealthGrades profile, which has an outdated address and no reviews. Sprinkled in there is the single online publication I have to my name and my instagram profile for my nail art sets.

Google has me clocked. There is nothing that is safe on the internet. And yet, I keep putting my personal information into it.

I ask myself often what I’m getting out of this. A newsletter with a measly two-digit number of followers, but that also has the potential power to humiliate me and wreck my career prospects. Though I suppose that’s in the very definition of vulnerability: being exposed to the risk of pain or loss. There’s a reason why people applaud when someone else does what they could not or would choose not to do themselves.

I can’t remember exactly the first time I had a blog, but I was very young. Probably all the way back in elementary school. I have been clicking away at letters before I even knew how to properly align my fingers on a QWERTY keyboard. I didn’t take computer class until sixth grade, but I know I was typing before that. I have always loved ranting, chronicling, the illusion of self importance. I get a thrill when I imagine my words eliciting a reaction from someone else.

Even now, I still feel the same sense of awe about the idea of writing and posting that I did back then. To me, a blog is like putting together a time capsule full of current-day collectibles, messages and dreams to bury underground. Or like sending out a electromagnetic signal into the deep vastness of space. There is the hope that someone out there will receive it, receive this.

There is also, always, a sense of urgency—the threat of time on its way to wash away this moment and a fear that these experiences will slip through my fingers like sand. My own singular, faulty memory isn’t enough to capture this very tremendously important version of myself, which is constantly on the verge of ending, and if I can’t write all of my thoughts down fast enough, then I will lose her and this forever. (This, not that. Right here, right now. Not then, not there).

I could take a photo, but it’s not the same. An image shows what was on the outside, but it can’t unravel my insides. In a way, this blog is proof that my body contains more than just organs and cells in a fight for equilibrium. Writing, all art, is some alchemical reaction which transmutes life into creation. Yes, I think that is the sequence and not the other way around.

So what exactly is the point of posting? Could I not just create without sharing? Well, I can and I do. I have lots and lots of drafts and journals containing anything from half written poems to pages full of neat, pretty prose. So again, what’s the point? When no one likes to read nowadays, anyway? I’m not famous enough for a random person on the internet to gather up their limited attention span, either. If I wanted fame, I should’ve kept making TikToks.

Writing a blog is not unlike buying a lottery ticket. It does cost me a bit, and the chances are slim to none that I will see any return. But what it buys me is the possibility of a fantasy. If I won a hundred million dollars then I would quit my soul-sucking job and live out my life in quiet luxury. I would spend my days reading and writing the same bullshit that I do now, except more of it and in a less stressful manner. I would lay around and drink cà phê sữa đá on the porch of my parents’ house in Vietnam as the rain drips down the leaves of their bamboo trees. I’d be happy and at peace.

As I’m typing, I’m imagining that someone reads this all the way through to the end. I imagine they’re thinking, wow, Winna is so smart and cool and not lonely at all. This person felt something, anything, in duration of this post. This person leaves a comment to say, "I relate to you” or something along the lines to remind me that I am not as alone as I always feel. Maybe this person knows me in the physical world and the next time they see me, I’ve become more real and complex to them. I’m not just a caricature in their story, but a living, thinking being that exists in a shared universe.

I have another fantasy. One of the agents with my query will look up my name, read these words and think, not that I am too emotionally unstable to sign, but that I have a lot to say, that my prose is well written, and that they can see me making them lots of money with my incredible ability to combine interest with tension and humor. They want me to get on a call.

Those chances seem even slimmer than winning the lottery, but that’s not what writing this newsletter is about. It is about my imagining the possibility.