Evolving in public, and an in-person event this Sunday!

Hi, friends, and happy End of the Year.

Yesterday I hosted an IRL meetup in Portland, OR (where I live) for paid subscribers — we were a group of locals, plus two who happened to be in town from Vermont and Ireland(!) It was so fun to meet folks in person, and we laughed and cried and shared recommendations for menopause care providers and great Irish programming (Bad Sisters on Apple TV!) and raged about the medical gaslighting of women and the general state of various things. Several of us overcame the introvert voice that said “yikes, strangers, and it’s raining, and isn’t your own couch nice?” and showed up anyway, and one person brought homemade brownies, and this kind of actual human connection is what I’m leaning into now in both work and life.

More on that in a bit, but first, speaking of in-person connection:

Event this Sunday, 12/15, in Los Angeles:

LA-area folks! This Sunday, December 15th, from 11am-1pm at Riverbank LA, my luminous friend Cathy Heller and I will be hosting a morning of connection and creativity in honor of Cathy’s new book Abundant Ever After. Please join us for discussion, meditation, journaling, and general feel-good-ness. Spots are limited; to reserve yours, you can either purchase a copy of Abundant Ever After and submit your order number here, or buy a ticket for $26 here. I’d love to see you there!

I shared the below with paid subscribers a couple of weeks ago, and I wanted to share it with the other 98% of you now.

After nine years of gnarly perimenopause, I finally hit menopause¹ in April, and with each passing day, I feel more like a new, emergent version of myself.

My perimenopausal decade felt like sitting (thrashing, flailing) in a pot boiling on a stove, and now, this is clear: the boiling was boiling down — a concentration process, cooking off what wasn’t necessary, leaving me as my essence. I feel strong and potent. I stick to the back of a spoon.

Since my mother has been physically gone, since June, I hear from her more than I ever did when she was alive.

The anxiety, fear, and trauma my mom held in her body made it difficult for her to fully enjoy her life. I can hear her, from wherever she is now, begging me to enjoy mine.

Menopause and my mom’s death, taken together, have felt like an initiation; stepping through a portal into a life that has very little tolerance for misalignment.

Until this year, my career and public identity have centered around connecting broadly and parasocially with an “audience” through writing, art, making products, podcasting, social media— basically, broadcasting my work to lots of people, 99.9 percent of whom I don’t know.

If you count my 9 years at ad agencies (I do), I also spent over two decades making a living off my creative output, which on one hand was an absolute privilege, and on the other, really screwed up my ability to make anything for fun, or to allow myself to create without first considering the capitalist question of “will this resonate with enough people?”

The kind of work that feels most resonant, aligned, and impactful to me, now, is about connecting more deeply and personally with a smaller number of people. Holding and building a community; relationships over subscriber numbers—and helping to connect people to one another, not just to me. One intention with this newsletter next year is to add community-driven offerings for paid subscribers, but I haven’t yet determined what this will look like, so all paid subscriptions are paused for now while I think on it. (If you try to upgrade and can’t, that’s why.)

I’ll keep writing free essays, and sharing announcements and invitations, but it also feels important to me to officially divorce the “creative output” part of this newsletter from the “income generation” part of it. Even if that’s more about semantics than anything else, since very little of what I write is paywalled, and most of you are free subscribers (which is totally fine! I’m grateful for each one of you!).

I remain committed, as ever, to public evolution, even when it risks me looking flaky or unfocused — because like so many of us, I’m totally over the aspirational bullshit of personal brand. The tiny baby steps, false starts, and periods of staring off into space being totally fucking unproductive aren’t just something to endure: they’re the things that add up, eventually, to how we change our lives.

Over the last few years, the definition of this season as “the holidays” has begun to feel secondary to something else: a time of reflection and composting. I’m dutifully buying the Uggs slippers on my stepson’s Christmas list (the official shoe of American teenagers???), and I’ll for sure eat the Reese’s trees, but all the holiday stuff feels more and more like a side to the main event of letting go.

This year, I have more for the fire than ever before. When it’s time for the burn, I will wrap my younger selves in soft blankets and carry them like nesting dolls to witness the flames together, the waterlogged leaves of old hurts and scars disintegrating under my boots as we shuffle towards the light. Thank you, I release you, I release us.

If you missed my piece about this last year, it’s here (with an unrelated photo of Bryan):

A project to share:

I don’t do much illustration work anymore,² but when my longtime pal

Chris Guillebeau

asked me to contribute the interior art for his upcoming book Time Anxiety: The Illusion of Urgency and a Better Way to Live, I knew it would be a fun one. And it was! This book is for anyone who struggles with the feeling of being perpetually “behind” or unable to get enough done (so, all of us), and is filled with actual, practical strategies for dealing.

Time Anxiety is available for preorder now and will be released on April 15th, 2025. Preorders are super important for authors because they signal to bookstores and to the publisher that yes people want this book, which makes the publisher more likely to put effort into marketing and distributing it, and bookstores more likely to carry it. Preorder and learn more about the book here.

A coupla podcasts:

This fall, I was honored to be a guest on Good Work with Barrett Brooks. Barrett is an exceptional human being who hosts an exceptional podcast, and this is one of my favorite interviews I’ve ever done—and it was really a conversation—about what happened to both of us inside of and after career burnout, experiences of navigating identity loss, and much more.

In this clip I’m talking about the concept of Jacques Derrida’s “absolute future,” and I’m sharing it because I love this idea even more than I hate the fact that I showed up without a light, without makeup, and with my messy office on full display, because I spaced we were recording with video. SORRY AGAIN BARRETT!

And finally, last but not least, I was also honored to be on Life’s Accessories with

Rachel Levy Lesser

, where Rachel interviews guests about their most meaningful accessory or clothing item and the story behind it. When she reached out to me, I knew IMMEDIATELY what I wanted to talk about: a wildly-over-my-budget $200 scarf I bought at ABC Carpet & Home in New York City in 2013. Rachel also recently published this Substack post inspired by our conversation— thank you, Rachel!

Not So Quietly Quitting

Thanks to all of you for reading, and for being here. More to come on burning and letting go.

1. Menopause technically begins after 12 months without a period or any bleeding (yes, spotting counts!)

2. My income these days comes mostly from consulting/coaching with product biz folks, and expanding beyond this niche in 2025—watch this space for further info. :)