Photo note: The first two images in this week’s post are from my friend Lisa J’s Instagram feed. Some of her images are soothing mugs of tea for your eyeballs; others are tiny, strong shots of visual espresso. You should follow her.
This week. I don’t know. You know?
I want to say something about the idea of sanctuary — about the tear gas in sanctuary-seekers’ faces, in babies’ faces, at the border; about the explosion that just caused my cousin’s family to lose all of their possessions — but I’m at a loss.
What I do know is that several weeks ago a lovely reader told me she would welcome an installment in which I described my process for putting these emails together. I’ve been keeping that idea in my back pocket ever since for a week just like this one, hoping it isn’t too navel-gazey, and am cashing it in tonight. But first:
Just here for some links?
Ladies who launch: My high school friend and her sister just launched Sari Society and they’re selling some truly beautiful designs. And a powerhouse team of women at NPR just gifted us all the 2018 Book Concierge.
This interview is fun. I learned things!
Comfort in, dump out. How not to say the wrong thing when someone you love is going through something hard. It’s totally possible I’ve linked to this useful evergreen content in this newsletter before.
Are you at a crossroads? I like Tara Mohr’s point that:
There are more than two roads. The true definition of a “crossroads” is that place where two roads meet. But I don’t think that’s such a helpful image, because it reinforces the narrative that we are being forced to make a binary choice between roads that someone else has designed and paved. That is never the truth in life...If you right now brainstorm five more paths than you’ve thought of before, what shows up?
I want to be able to think this abundantly and expansively and creatively about the here, now, and future but I feel pretty depleted tonight. I do know that lately, doula/midwife/birth photographer would make my list. What comes to mind for you when you let yourself daydream? I’d love to hear.
Now, for those who find this sort of thing interesting…
How I write this thing
Even though I promised myself it wouldn’t be this way, I do almost all of the writing on Wednesday night right before I publish. In order to not melt down with writer’s block each week, I keep two sandbox-type spaces: a note on my phone where I dump links, phrases, or ideas throughout the week, and then a Word doc on my desktop for planning, free writes, and “compost” I’ve cut from previous drafts.
By Sunday or Monday, I’ve usually started opening the phone note more often and a couple of links might be obvious contenders for inclusion. On a really good week I’ll set aside time on Tuesday to open up the Word doc. On a great week, I do this at Loba.
I might start writing something new, but more often I scan old chunks of drafts. Recent half-drafted examples include:
My answers to these five questions
The self-conscious play-by-play of an encounter with a well-meaning former colleague who is asking me for free labor (status: the trip to DC last week gave me the perfect excuse to ghost his most recent email, which I feel gross about, but honestly it feels like too much work to diplomatically break down for him that he should just Google the answer to his own question, which I could have done in the time it took to write this bullet point)
Some things about perfectionism that I learned from SURJ and from Zumba
(Sometimes when I start really working and flowing, those seeds whisper that they need to grow in soil other than the newsletter, in another direction. In that case, especially if I have time and caffeine, I might open up another doc somewhere and work on it. For example, I started a passionate essay response to an awful Dear Abby column, then realized maybe that energy would be better channeled into an op-ed to one of the papers where her column runs. Now I have the beginnings of an op-ed saved on my laptop, the beginnings of a newsletter installment saved in my newsletter drafts, and some thoughts in Word that just feel too personal for either space. Plus, the person who alerted me to the column in the first place wrote his own incredible response, and I stalled a bit after that.)
MOST weeks, though, are like this one. On Tuesday I think: I should really get started. On Wednesday morning I think: I really have to get started. On Wednesday evening I feel dread and emptiness and think: Well, it was a good run. This is the week I’m going to have to phone it in.
We do dinner, bath time, and finally I settle onto the couch to pound something out. My husband heads to bed, a long day of teaching ahead of him. The baby monitor is my soundtrack. I write furiously, go browse photos or gifs when I start to stall, and hope the baby doesn’t cry, but am also grateful when she does. Feeding her forces me to get off the couch and stretch, and in the dark of her room I might look back at the note on my phone. If I’m really lucky, that’s when I have a eureka moment about how best to wrap up. Back on the couch, I am usually desperate for sleep; I send myself a test email, make edits through half-closed eyes, and let go.
Why, though?
I’ve always liked time-bound creative projects. Project 365 back in Flickr’s heyday. A collection of 28 interviews before my 29th birthday, all focused on the idea of Saturn’s return. The Artist’s Way, which I dutifully morning-paged my way through while pregnant last fall.
But all of those were pre-baby. So on April 3 of this year, when I decided on a whim to copy cool-kid Prerna and start #The100DayProject on Instagram that night, I really wasn’t sure I would follow through. My parental leave was about to end. Committing to anything besides “feed baby” and “drag myself to work” and “try to be a good domestic employer” felt very ambitious.
But it turned out that being accountable to a daily post that I could craft entirely on my phone — including during late night cluster feedings near the bassinet, or between those feedings, sitting on the bathroom floor in the dark — was doable when I didn’t overthink it. And I made my account private sometime around the baby’s birth, so I was mostly posting among real-world friends. Sometimes I just shared one photo I’d taken myself; other times it was a slideshow of things I’d found online that day that I thought were powerful or that complemented one another well.
One sunny summer day when the #MeToo headlines and hits just kept coming, and the cognitive dissonance was extreme at work, I put this picture in a slideshow with the poem below:
I still love that combo.
After posting to Instagram for 100 days, I took at least two solid weeks off the platform entirely. It felt really good. But after a while I found myself wishing for another project, so I began this one on my 35th birthday - with little more forethought than the last.
Same/different
I’m writing this late at night — to late at night to overthink the formatting, to make sure the images all align with the text perfectly. I can’t do this on the bathroom floor in the dark. I can’t do it with a baby eating on me. I have to prioritize it when I could be prioritizing time with my spouse or freelance projects or anything else.
I stockpile sparks of ideas in a similar way to #The100DaysProject, but with a weekly posting rhythm (and a goal to use some of these posts as writing samples), I have much more time to doubt and dampen them. If I want to pull disparate pieces together, I have a different vertical format to contend with. I have to think about whether the items I want to include will flow together from top to bottom as you read through it, or whether I care, and I have to think about what the consequences will be when I publish things that are more robust and personal. I wish I had it in me more often to do that.
Do you see why I love you for reading?
See you next week.
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Reminder: If you’re reading this, it’s either because you subscribed yourself or someone forwarded it to you (in which case you can subscribe at julia.substack.com). There will be 35 emails total; this is email #14.