I'm celebrating! Because even though it took me twice as long as I had planned, I am finally completing this goal of publishing 25 newsletters! 🙌
I’ve needed to flex many different muscles to get this done - my compassion muscle, my self-inquiry muscle, my personal accountability muscle, my done-is-better-than-perfect muscle, my late-is-better-than-never muscle. Dude, I am SO buff now.
Delighting in the Detours and Dead-ends
This process was not a straight line for me. In fact, it was squiggly as hell.
There are people in life who just know where they’re going and beeline to the finish line. I am not that kind of person.
I only know where I want to go when I can see it in my head. Which means I often prefer to to work with guide who has been where I want to go. Then with the safety and certainty of being led down a well-worn trail, I can feel more comfortable chasing my delights down side paths and going at my own pace.
Of course, sometimes I freak out because I’ve wandered too far into the woods and I can no longer see my guide, my crew, or the main road. But that’s why I learned a loud whistle.
Besides, many a good Black Trumpet and Porcini mushroom has been found just an arms length away from the beaten path.
Finding Your Way Home Through Writing
Each step down this path represents something I’ve tested from someone else’s tried and true experience. Borrowing so many directions may look like erratic patchwork footwork to some, but without it, I would not have discovered the steps to my “Maymie March.”
It follows the “Quit early. Quit often.” idea by Professor Deepak Mahotra.
This personal experiment is what allows people like us (the free spirits, polymaths, creators, and entrepreneurs) find and create our authentic paths (even though it stresses the hell out of our partners and parents🤣).
However, experimenting also means that you’ve got to be okay with getting lost, backtracking, dead-ends, and last minute pivots.
As it turns out, after 25 newsletters of pinballing around, I’m back to where I started when I first introduced my writing on substack: “I’ll settle for writing on what I’ve learned about being healthy and happy, as well as the growing pains on my way to “becoming” whole.”
To end, I’ll share one of my favorite quotes of all time:
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”- T.S. Eliot
That place Eliot is talking about? It’s where you’ll be when you follow the sound of your own drumbeat, all the way home. 🌟
SHOWING-MY-WORK: Here how my squiggly process looked.
I first started publishing weekly, as many suggested. But, that soon became biweekly, then monthly, and eventually “approximately every month”. About a month is how long I need to let an idea marinate. I have a lot of passionate ideas, but that doesn’t necessarily lead to good content. Time and conversation helps soften the passion, so that I can dig in to my ideas with a cool head.
I initially though that I would be writing a ~1000 word essay each week, but that turned out to be too ambitious. I then tested out shorter formats like three 100 word observations, or bullet points with interesting links, and 250-500 word pieces. I like the cohesive feeling of a longer newsletter ~250-500 words with resources if relevant.
I tested out different “types” of writing pieces using the Ship 30 for 30’s Endless Idea Generator. This is similar to Write of Passage’s POP (Personal, Observational, Playful) writing concept, except applied to an entire piece. To keep the piece coherent, Ship30 recommends for us to stick to one “type” of writing per piece. Here are writing samples from each approach and what I thought when writing with them:
Actionable: How to, Tips, Hacks (aka here’s how)
➡️ This is so boring for me 😴. However, I like adding actionable steps within a piece as a call to action.
Analytical: Stats, Trends, Reasons (aka here are the numbers)
➡️ Lovely to read, but 😴 for me to write a whole piece on that. Details are mind-numbing, but I find adding them help to support my stance.
Anthropological: Fears, Failures, Lies (aka here’s why)
➡️ My inner philosopher loves this, but it’s tricky to keep the arguments tight unless I incorporate the analytical.
Aspirational: Habits, Lessons, Mistakes (aka yes, you can)
➡️ When written in first person, this style flows out of me the most. It’s also funnest and most personal to write.
I like publishing on Substack (it’s easy), but most of my editing still gets done on Google docs compared to Evernote, Substack, and email for how easy it is to share and get comments.
I thought I would be mostly writing about the how-to side of health, but much more enjoy the philosophical side of it and how it relates to life and the human experience. That’s led me to articles about poop karma and stacking rocks.
Why twenty-five newsletters? It’s somewhat arbitary, but it’s what I chose after some good arguments in these articles by Roxine Kee and Khy He.