Life begets death begets life
A conversation with Leandra Medine Cohen
can write. Over and over again while reading her work, I was hit with this feeling of loving jealousy, like, “dang, I wish I’d written that.”
Also, “dang, there’s no question I can ask that’ll be better than just reading this back to her during our chat.”
So that’s what I did.
In case you aren’t familiar, Leandra founded Man Repeller at 21, transforming it from a personal blog into a cultural phenomenon that became a voice for a generation before shutting it down in 2020 amidst public backlash and controversy. These days you can find her writing and outfit inspo at The Cereal Aisle (if you're not already one of her 140k subscribers).
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation in which I read part of Leandra’s candid reflection on starting over along with her response:
Alex Dobrenko—
I want to read you something you wrote if that’s ok?
Of course the thing about beginning again — about starting over midway through is that you have to be willing to watch yourself die.
I learned that from writing this newsletter.
Next week, it will be three years since I launched The Cereal Aisle, and I think the most important thing I have learned in the time since is that rebirth is on the other side of death.
But also, that if you want to live again, you really have to let yourself die.
So many times in the early days of cereal, after taking a parade of pictures of myself with the timer on my camera phone, I would sit down on the edge of the couch where I’m usually standing to pose and I would think to myself: You are such a loser.
I’d think about Man Repeller and the big Soho office I used to walk into every morning, about how at peak, I employed almost 25 people to work at a media company that I had started when I was 20 years old.
Then I’d return to present awareness, where some days I’d walk to a coffee shop situated right above a subway station 11 blocks away, just to feel like I had somewhere to rush to, then come home to take pictures with the selfie timer in the silence of my living room while my twin daughters were at school and my husband was at work and that’s all I had planned for the day and I would think: how did I let myself fail so completely?
And days, even weeks, would go by in the beginning where I wouldn’t speak words out loud until I had to go pick up my kids and on those days, I remembered how big my life used to feel. How many new people freckled my days. That there were always questions that had to be answered. That I was the one to answer them! There was no time to ask what I was doing with my life. No time to answer either.
In my old life, I believed, I had ascended to the top of a mountain and there was a throne there where I used to sit, and now here I was ten years older, in the valley of beginnings, in a ditch on the floor, just me and my butt and the ground beneath us.
I love that piece so much. I want to ask about that experience, of shutting down Man Repeller, this kind of crazy rise and then walking away from that and now doing something new and feeling the rebirth. How does that feel these days?
Leandra Medine Cohen—
Yeah, the death is obviously really painful, or I shouldn't say obviously. I think death is scary and so it often comes with resistance. If you can completely surrender to the death and just let it pass through you, it probably doesn't feel like it lasts as long as mine did. You know, it's like I sat Shiva for a year instead of a week. There is also a wild lull between death and rebirth when you're kind of just in the valley of nothing, when you're sort of like a floating head in limbo. And I remember that time so vividly.
My husband would get home from work some days and I'd be sitting on the floor in the kitchen crying and he's like, what's wrong? And I'd be like, how did this become my life? What, where, what am I, where am I?
But those moments were also some of the most intimate moments I can remember with myself. And they're the ones that I reflect on and turn back to when I'm feeling anxious or alone or kind of scared because I remember the feeling of that depth and like what I did to get through it and how I stood up. And it's just a reminder that I can keep going. So that to me is the gift and the blessing of death, you get to live with this insight that life begets death begets life.
The hard part, maybe not for everyone, but for me is what happens post-rebirth. You know, once you're out of your own birth canal, once you've given birth to yourself again, and like, you're kind of just going, you're coasting. That's where I am. And this is historically a hard part to be in.
To read, listen, and watch the full conversation, grab your copy here if you’re in the US, and here for international.
P.S. If you’re scrambling for last-minute gifts, we have the perfect gift for the idea-obsessed that doesn’t require postage, wrapping or waste.
Gift someone you love (or yourself) a Sublime Membership. From... those organizing book notes to those organizing revolutions venture capitalists to anti-capitalists web3 prophets to web1 nostalgists Whether... their ideas come from academic papers or acid trips morning meditations or midnight doom-scrolling Renaissance art or Reddit threads Sublime is where their ideas find a home.