April Curmudgeon Chat!

Happy Saturday, Curmudgeon readers! As of this morning, there are 998 of you here, and not to belabor the obvious, but 998 is so, so close to 1000.

When I started The Curmudgeon’s Guide to College Admissions two years ago with a post called If You’re Reading This, Take a Breath, I had zero subscribers and the Substack had a different name. But the idea behind it was the same: I wanted to create a community where parents could talk honestly about the challenges of raising teens and young adults and where success is defined in broader, more generous, more imaginative ways than “went to a top school” or its equivalent. I wanted to encourage parents to focus on who they were before helping their child become successful and happy became their full-time job in addition to their actual full-time job. This will come as no surprise to anyone who is a parent or parent-adjacent, but parenting young people is hard and confusing and occasionally crazy-making, and I believe with all my heart that the only way we survive is by sharing stories about ourselves and figuring out how we got to be the way we are.

If you’re part of this community, thank you so much for being here. If you’re a paying subscriber, I truly appreciate your support. Writing on Substack is a significantly less remunerative enterprise than being a private college counselor, which is what I did for a living before I became a full-time writer, but it feels so much truer and more generous and freer than what I did before. I love meeting so many of you in person at our monthly Curmudgeon Chats—and if you’re new here and not sure what a Curmudgeon Chat is, it’s a monthly Zoom meeting for paid subscribers organized around a topic of interest to parents of teens and young adults—both the nitty gritty, like letters of recommendation and summer programs, as well as big-picture stuff like generational expectations, mental health, and finding a broader, more generous vision of success.

I hope you’ll consider upgrading your subscription, which will give you access to the full archives, the paid subscriber chat, and the monthly live Zoom meetings, including tomorrow’s if you sign up now! And I’m delighted that tomorrow, I’ll be joined by my long-time friend and former colleague Laurie Filipelli. In addition to being a smart and compassionate college counselor, Laurie is also an award-winning poet with a new poetry collection, My Heart Is a Museum, coming this fall from Broken Sleep Books. Laurie’s presentation—titled “I’m Nobody! Who Are You?”—will help parents understand how they can help their students shore up an “authentic sense of self in the midst of strategic branding bullshit culture” (as a poet, Laurie understands better than most people the power of a judiciously deployed curse word). You’ll enjoy a few poems, access your own creativity, and leave feeling more grounded.