The Pivot Nobody Saw Coming

I started this Substack in May 2024 when I was in a very different phase of life. Back then, I was working on a memoir about leaving the Mormon church, and so that subject was always at the top of my mind. I also loved putting together fun outfits and thought I may as well combine the topics and write about how growing up in the Mormon church and then leaving the Mormon church influenced the way I felt about my body, my choices, and my thoughts around fashion.

I had a lot of fun experimenting with these topics, seeing what I could mine out of years of complicated thoughts about my existence. But over time, I started thinking less and less about Mormonism, and more and more about what life could look like without it looming over everything I do.

Now, I’m in a new phase of life: motherhood. I gave birth to my daughter in February 2026, and my life turned upside down in good ways and in stressful ways. Not only was I handling a steep learning curve in raising a tiny human, but I also unexpectedly lost most of my freelance work. Because my work is in creative fields, the loss of job also felt like a loss of identity. Mixed with the new identity of motherhood—an identity I’d never wanted to rule my being—I felt untethered.

I never really expected to write about motherhood before I experienced it. Back then, I was a fool, thinking that I could somehow separate my creative life from my lived experience. (As a nonfiction writer…? Someone slap me.) One of my favorite writing mentors, Jennifer Sinor, always advised that I should write about what keeps me up at night. It used to be Mormonism, and now it’s motherhood. When I started to write about it for this newsletter, I felt surprisingly energized by the topic. I had thought, jadedly, that everything to be said about motherhood had already been said. It’s true that a lot has been explored when it comes to motherhood, but not everything, and certainly not my experience.

I also want to push back against the idea that motherhood is a tired topic—something I used to believe. So really, I’m pushing back against myself. Again, I was jaded after growing up in a society that told me motherhood was all I was good for. The pendulum swung hard for me. I resented the role of mother, and pictured the experience as monotonous, exasperating work that somehow all boiled down into conversations about sleep schedules and debates on feeding methods. I think now that we lean on discussions like sleep schedules and feeding methods because we have a hard time putting words to an experience so vast, complicated, life-affirming, and overwhelming. I want to write in the shadows of that hard-to-reach place.

Motherhood is the bare bones of humanhood, and yet moms are relegated to the margins. I talked in this post about how I felt like the woman in The Yellow Wallpaper, walking the same lines in my apartment day in and day out because of the ways I’ve internalized my mothering presence as a nuisance to others. We’re the loneliest creatures because of the ways Western society has isolated us, and that isolation will be our undoing.

To be fair to my old self, part of the way I viewed motherhood as monotonous and exasperating was because I knew mothers are generally isolated. I never wanted that life. I swore I would rise above it in my own motherhood. So far, I’ve had a lot of panic attacks, overthought my place in my friendships, and stayed home most of the time to ensure my daughter sleeps and eats. But as we’re rounding the corner on month four, having made it through the sleep regression (I think), it’s time to breathe deep and start building.

That said, it may come as no surprise that this newsletter is going to change a bit. Going forward, I plan to write about mothering in a burning world.

Stick with me here: one of my top reasons to not have a child, back in the day when I was writing pros and cons lists, was climate change. As somewhat of a climate communicator (strong words! I’ve dabbled, hoping to pivot my career to environmental storytelling), I know that humanity’s situation is somewhat dire, but I’m working on choosing to believe in the projections that give me hope. I want to focus on that hope, to write about conservation and environmentalism through a mothering lens, as my daughter discovers and hopefully loves the natural world as much as I do. I also interpret the “burning world” as our general loss of community. I have a few plans for my real-world life to foster the consistent village I’ve been dreaming of, and I hope to document that experience here.

I love personal narrative and I don’t know why I ever strayed from it. Well, that’s not totally true. I do know why I strayed. Today, there are so many voices everywhere, telling us what to do, how to optimize, how to become a product that sells. I tried out their advice with this Substack, and I tried out their advice with motherhood. While I was writing about subjects that I was interested in on Substack, I didn’t feel like I was creating the type of art that I’m interested in, and that stems from a long while of not trusting my own voice. And when it comes to motherhood, the less I listen to other people, the better I feel and perform.

So, I’m going back to my roots, back to the type of storytelling that makes me feel alive. For reference, these three posts are the narrative style I’m talking about. This pivot is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, and then the affirmation on my most recent post solidified that decision. I’m leaving my own theme of mothering in a burning world up for even wider interpretation than I’ve specified here, and I hope you’ll stick around to see what that becomes. It means the world to me that you were ever here in the first place.