I started a newsletter called A Transitory Yes. I’ve included my first post below, but please consider going to Substack to subscribe.
Writing these letters has been something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, for many reasons. This newsletter offers me a way to connect with others as platforms like Twitter crumble, to foster my writing practice and create space for self-reflection in a way that provides some structure, and to build towards future projects while creating an archive of my process.
And so, the time is now. Welcome to A Transitory Yes, a newsletter of my reflections on disability, community, games, writing, and so much more.
It’s a perfect time, a transitory time. I’m on the cusp of turning 30 and months away from moving across the country. I’ve just finished my PhD, meaning I’m free from school for the first time in over 25 years and learning to rest after years of hustling. I’m one year out from excision surgery for endometriosis and a partial hysterectomy and am adapting to an altered body with new and absent pains. My relationships have shifted and I’m leaning into solo polyamory in new and surprising ways. I’m surviving, resisting, caring, creating, and being in community in ways I didn’t know were possible.
I am unmoored, yet simultaneously so grounded in the people around me.
Hence the title of this newsletter.
In A Room with a View, Mr. Emerson tells Miss Honeychurch that “by the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes—a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.”
The words roll off Miss Honeychurch and only register with her much later, just as they did when I read them as a 17-year-old. Instead, I remember locking onto the Yes at the end of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, where Lily Briscoe makes “an attempt at something” and paints a line down the centre of her painting, finally completing it after 310 pages of anxiety.
“It was done, it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.”
Her Yes is a breath of fresh air amidst the dark, chaotic, post-war modernist anxiety that makes up the rest of the book. It is a moment of intentionality and of meaning despite uncertainty. Despite, to revisit Mr. Emerson, “the everlasting Why.”
This newsletter is my Yes. My transitory yes. As smog suffocates Canada, as fascism pours through our feeds and our streets, as hate feeds algorithms and empty mouths—I choose the Yes.
Eileen Mary Holowka -- Portfolio 