#1 Being All Of It (and Welcome!)

Weekend Newsletter

I’ve tried to write this newsletter for the past six months. For much of that time, those attempts were fruitless because I could not string sentences together at all. Everything sounded like a journal entry or an incoherent note to self from the middle of the night; like I was trying too hard to remember what my own voice sounded like. And while this past month I’ve gotten closer to an actual piece I could potentially share with real people, the writing was consistently missing something, like the right to exist at all. A lot of it felt like an apology for taking up space in your inbox.

A few weeks ago I sent one of those many scrapped drafts to a writer friend and asked him what he thought of it. He said it was too polished, not dark enough, something about my confidence. Then he took a red pen to it and left edits in all caps, which made me absolutely hateful. It also made me realize I needed to stop asking other people for permission and just fucking write already. Write anything a…