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A brief guide to slug town

Hello and welcome to Sluggish, a weekly newsletter by writer and artist Jesse Meadows.

Sluggish is a place for deviants, mis-fits, and creatives.

We take as our symbol the slug, patron saint of all those who cannot keep up, who revel in their own slime, which the world would have them hate. For our goo is how we travel, not in a straight line, but meandering up the walls, across shards of glass, through millennia again and again. The Order of the Slug is an order of indulgence; we embrace pleasure, live by the seasons, and sleep through all morning routines.

In less poetic terms: this is a newsletter where I write about disability and capitalism, covering the politics of mental health, the history of popular psychology, and the philosophies of living outside the norm.

Sometimes themes emerge at Slug HQ and become a series, like this 3-part exploration of Adderall, drug user solidarity, and medication autonomy:

The Real Difference Between Adderall and Meth

Who Gets to Medicate Me?

It's Not "ADHD Fakers" Taking All the Adderall

Currently, I can’t stop thinking about dopamine — I’ve been exploring the moral and political implications of what I call ‘the dopamine mythos’:

Dopamine: The Self-Improvement Mythos Of Our Age

The Myth-Making of Dopamine Nation

However, Sluggish is not constrained by the medium of pure text. Here you will also find podcast episodes and video essays, like this one on dopaminergic puritanism:

No Fap Nation

And an interview series featuring other writers, thinkers, and creatives:

Art vs The DSM with Micha Frazer-Carroll

What else should I read?

What’s the deal with the paywall?

I’m a disabled person who has found creating content on the internet to be a bit of a saving grace. It’s important to me that at least half of what I make is free for everyone to read, but generous patrons of the slug arts are my main source of income.

Subscribing here for $6/month gets you access to deeper dives, a peek into my research with reading and media recommendations, creative experiments I’m still workshopping, and access to all comment sections. Plus we also have a discord and everyone in there is very nice!!!

Who makes all this?

My name is Jess (or Jesse Meadows if you’re printing something official), I studied art and used to work as a documentary photographer, a bartender, and a local news journalist. Five years ago I was a lonely queer having a mental breakdown, so I started making memes online about my experiences with psychiatry and the struggle of coming out late in life, and a lot of people seemed to like them. Meme captions became essays became a public obsession with critical disability studies and autistic politics, and now here we are.

For professional inquiries, casual introductions, or just to tell me about some cool stuff, you can email me at welcome2slugtown@gmail.com