Hello, bonjour, coucou

The joy of doing nothing about something, sometimes

I created this Substack in 2020 and haven’t written a single post until today.

The truth is I have been writing a lot, but I haven’t published anything online in a long time and until recently I had no idea why.

I often do important things in my life, maybe the most important, before I can articulate why. Only in writing do I figure it out. I write entirely to know what I’m thinking as Joan Didion said.

In hindsight, this doing before knowing (and then writing) is a pattern: transferring high schools, deciding what to do after college, navigating career decisions, starting/ending relationships, jumping into projects, leaving jobs, moving…lots and lots of moving. It’s partially intuitive and partially impulsive. It’s not for the faint of heart, but it’s very me. In writing, I’m able to make sense of these life leaps. Sometimes I learn things I want to know, and other times I excavate Things I Don’t Want To Know à la Deborah Levy.

In either case, I write to know.

But when it came to this buzzy corner of the internet, every time I sat down to write something, I would physically freeze up and find a million other things to do. Finally, I just leaned into that feeling of protest and let it go. I stopped trying to figure out why I was blocked. I did nothing instead.

You know the saying that sometimes the only way through something is through? Well, I’ve now realized that sometimes the only way through something is to do absolutely nothing. Sometimes life will continue on like a river and flow around you while you stay put like a rock. 

I haven’t always been that rock. I have been publishing some form of a newsletter for over twenty years. I wrote a blog obsessively through high school and college, in addition to writing for school publications. I launched a newsletter called Mend 11 years ago and was the sole writer for the first 5 years, often churning out two issues per week. In addition to researching and writing that newsletter, I was a contributor to Huffington Post, publishing on Medium, providing interview content for sites like Refinery 29 and developing original content for every facet of Mend. Copious “content.”

All of that is to say I published often and almost always with a deadline and specific objective in mind. Though Mend started as a very intimate writing project about heartbreak, it ended up being much more than that - a website, a blog, an app, a global community, a venture-backed tech company, two podcasts, events, a TV show, international retreats and a source of joy and stress in equal measure.

Growing an audience turned into growing a business. I hired a Head of Content in 2018 and stepped away from regularly headlining the Mend newsletter to focus on other aspects of company-building I liked a lot less, like fundraising. I had a brief newsletter comeback during the pandemic, which helped ground me during that disorienting time, and then I published sporadically till I officially handed over the CEO reigns in early 2022.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had a season of your life where you just don’t feel like putting anything out into the ether, but that’s exactly how I felt when I left Mend. I needed a reset. My gas tank was empty.

In stark contrast, my personal life was overflowing. In a span of 6 years I met my husband, moved to Paris, got married, became a stepmom, learned French, traveled all over Europe, moved again, became a mom. I took so many life leaps I lost count. I wrote through it all, maybe more than I ever have, but I wrote for myself. In the past few years the only thing I have “shared” is a submission of one poem to a publication. I am still waiting to hear back.

Recently one of my best friends texted me a photo of a double rainbow outside her house, and I texted her a photo of my treetop view in exchange. We’ve both traded in city life for wide views of nature at its best - rolling green hills, trees scraping the sky, a chorus of flora. She complimented my lavender and I corrected her that it was actually Mexican sage. “I’m still trying to ID those orange flowers,” I said. We both had a laugh. I’m pretty sure flower identification, like bird identification, is one of the many signs of getting older.

It feels good to get older. To grow into myself. To not be in such a rush to do everything. To sit things out once in a while. To identify flowers instead.

To do nothing about something, sometimes.

Truthfully I thought I might never publish a newsletter again. It’s kind of like how I felt about pants when I came home from the hospital after giving birth. I made a point to tell anyone who would listen that I would never, ever wear pants again. No way. Not in a million years. No crotch seam for me, thank you. And yet here I am, writing this letter in pants. And not just any pants. Jeans.

Feelings change. Life evolves. Bodies heal. Thank goodness. 

For so long I was trying to figure out What This Substack Should Be About and What This Substack Should Be Called, and that’s exactly what kept me from publishing. It turns out I have no answer to either of those questions and that’s precisely what I find motivating. Most of the Substacks I love and read religiously are about Something (food, culture, business or literature.) Mine will not be. I don’t even know what to do about paid subscriptions, so for now I will take my own advice and do nothing.

What I do know is this: I needed the past few years to reclaim my own voice without an editorial calendar in mind or a company to represent. Now I just want to write. I want to write because it’s my favorite thing to do. It always has been. Writing makes me happy. It’s really that simple.

There’s more I want to share, but there’s time to get to it all. There’s no rush. I just wanted to thank you for being on the receiving end of this thing. I feel a bit like Joe Fox in You’ve Got Mail, writing to Kathleen Kelly about a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils. I don’t know who you are (I can’t bring myself to look at the subscriber emails or I might never press send) or why you signed up for this untitled and subjectless newsletter with no banner design, but I’m guessing it’s because you read my writing at some point and wanted to keep in touch. Hello again.

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