#14 Your new life

Weekend edition

Hi everybody. This is a week late (maybe you didn’t notice! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). I have now written multiple essays that turned into big productions of trying to say a very simple thing which is “things are not working and I’m going to change them.” So that’s what this is: a simple announcement.

In summary: I’m going to kill weekly long form essays, and switch to weekly short form essays combined with links that normally go into Recovery Roundup (meaning, a shorter essay + Recovery Roundup in one email sent weekly). That’s going to remain free and will be sent over the weekend (#15 will come out Saturday). Premium content will include archived content from this newsletter, previously unpublished essays, and Hip Sobriety; plus one new monthly long form essay (Dear Recovering, book review, etc., whatever feels interesting and most helpful). There may be more but I am not promising more; I’d rather promise less and thrill you with more.

I started this newsletter as an experiment. What I’ve been doing hasn’t been working on this end. I am in that old pattern of feeling like I have to provide endless value, or that I have to churn churn churn, or that I have to scoop my insides out to keep your attention. That isn’t tenable for me or for you. I’d rather have fun and send a weekly thing that feels joyful to make, and a monthly thing that feels that way as well.

I also know as a consumer of newsletters and writing what I like: things I have time to read. I don’t want to read all the content in the world and I actually get exhausted by the amount some creators put out; I want things I savor and look forward to. I want that for this too. I want it to be worth it, I want it to be slow and sustainable, I want to put quality before quantity.

When I say “things are not working and I’m going to change them,” I’m not just talking about this newsletter. I’m talking about everything. There’s a longer story to unwind that I’ve tried to write but can’t yet. Let me say this: I have spent the last few years in absolute terror of losing the life I have, and that life I’m holding onto so tightly quite frankly feels miserable a lot of the time. I have resisted letting go of things I don’t even want for myself anymore because I cannot fathom who I am without them. We do this though; we all do. Hang on to toxic things or things that we’ve outgrown because we’re so terrified of who we might be without them, or that nothing will come after, or that we’ll just get swallowed up into some kind of void in the process.

I’m tired of being scared. I’m tired of working harder at things I’ve outgrown because they used to work. Brianna Wiest recently wrote: Your new life is going to cost you your old one. I haven’t had the courage to pay the actual price of admission for my new life yet. This is a start.

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