When you don't want to write your newsletter.

"Who are you writing your newsletter to?"

"To me. I write to myself."

I hadn't realized this truth until a crazy smart woman asked me a couple of years ago.

"And it is my favorite thing I write. It's a love letter. First to myself, then to my circle. It is fully my voice, my heart, my stories."

Every single week I don't want to write it. I talk myself out of it. I play games. I make up stories about how I have nothing left to say, I'm dry, barren in the word department.

Every single week I wait all day, all day, then I finally sit down during the kid's tech time (5-6pm every night, oh yes) and I pour a glass of wine and open my screen.

I pull up a blank newsletter. I sip. All day thoughts about what I will write have been dancing inside of me and they all suck. Because it isn't about the idea, it's about the voice of me, sitting down and talking to myself.

It is the texts from friends, my sanity. It is the run or the memory or the way I try to pretend I don't do that thing, that thing that makes me crazy.

Today it is the stories. The ones I create, based not in reality, if I even wanted to look at reality. It is the ones I create out of false safety based on only the pieces I choose to include and the ones I make up and the ones that have come before (most of those not even mine).

The stories that trap. The stories that hold the heart hostage. The stories that fuck up the path into vulnerability because vulnerability only speaks the language of full truth because of that place where you move through fear.

So I listen. I ask. I cut through the crap of my own exposition and rants and expectations so I can find the questions.

Then I feel my heart flutter like it will fly out of my chest.

I practice hearing the words that I receive without placing my own story on them. Holy shit, I don't have to create a fantasy?

I can just listen. Hear. Receive the words. Let them have their feelings and observe myself having mine and come clean about all the stories, all the stories that I hold onto because holding them means I don't have to let go.

I want you to be different. I want this to change. Here, I wrote the script, it's in my head, could you memorize it please? Could you play this character just a little bit longer so I don't have to evolve, let go, move on? Please, just one more line, one more pretend story in my head?

Just. One. More. Time.

The addiction of the story, the fantasy.

I don't want to write my newsletter. I don't want to hear my voice, which then I give to you.

It is only the promise that it will become your voice that allows the words to find their way to the page.

I sip. I hold. I let go. I hit save. And so it is.

.......

From Thursday morning love letters, dropped like feathers into your inbox before your coffee starts to brew.