"You’re humble and chaotic enough to know when to switch it up or pivot and reflect"

Hello from the other side of the mountain of homework I crawled my way out from under this week!!! I had so many things due it was basically midterms, except for the fact that it was 2/3 of the way through the semester. Yesterday we went out on Lake Minnetonka for our friend’s birthday and all the photos I took are absolutely terrible.

I am still making my way through the 122(!) responses to my reader survey from last week. Thank you so much to everyone who shared your honest thoughts, even the ones that made me want to do the Obsession frown ❤️‍🔥🫶🏻 After I press send on this issue, I’m going to send everyone who gave me their email address a free month of a paid subscription, then close the survey to additional responses.

Reading through your feedback is both humbling and weird. For every 10 reviews that make me feel like I’m floating on a marshmallow cloud of optimism and support, there’s one that makes my stomach twist in recognition of a less flattering truth. Some made me laugh out loud and want to keep doing this forever. Some made me want to delete half of everything I’ve ever written and disappear into the ether. Such is the experience of being a person who writes about themselves on the internet! Mostly I feel energized, though. I’ve always been a person who thrives on future possibilities.

So many of your thoughts directly contradict each other (such is life lol) and my brain is already spinning with a few new ideas. Nothing too concrete yet, but I’ll report back on anything that sticks :)

This week I was strangely comforted by an interview clip in which Charli xcx was asked about whether she has an urge to “destroy” her past work and reinvent herself with every new album release. It made me think more deeply about my own creative work and how I literally had a funeral for THE OPT OUT because I felt an uncontrollable urge to burn it down. Maybe I’m wired more like a musician than a newsletter writer in the sense that I seem to gravitate towards writing through different, distinct “eras” (Curious Times, THE OPT OUT, Little Freak) which kind of mirrors how pop stars release albums if you squint really hard. (Is this what draws me to writing novels?) This way of creating is completely instinctual and does not always work for everyone reading—just like how everyone who discovered Charli in the BRAT era may not respond to Music, Fashion, Film in the same way, even if Charli created both projects. I think that’s very normal.

One thing that was abundantly clear from the survey is that most of you are here because you think I have a unique and distinct voice that I use to write very honestly/authentically. (THANK YOU! 🥲) The problem is that I’m either too all over the place, or too rigidly sticking to a “theme,” depending on who you ask. My favorite compliment is whoever wrote “You’re humble and chaotic enough to know when to switch it up or pivot and reflect,” which feels accurate for the entire experience that has been my 30s. I find that I am driven to write because I am constantly trying to figure myself out. The honesty and authenticity and humor stays the same, but what I feel drawn to write about changes. Sometimes this feels fresh and exciting for both the readers and myself, and other times it manifests in people feeling less invested in this space, which has created the problem I’m trying to fix.

I actually have so much more to say about this that I need more time to formulate my thoughts (shocker! 🙂‍↔️) but what I want to say before I go is that a vast majority of you read this newsletter because you like my personal essays, but there seems to be a very love/hate relationship with my album reviews, hehe. I love how many of you were not at all shy to tell me that you more or less hate pop music.

I feel like I have done all of us a massive disservice by calling what I’m writing “album reviews” at all because that’s not really what they are!!!!! I mean they are in the sense that they are obsessively researched and I do assign a score, but also I could never actually write for Pitchfork because I talk way, way, way too much about myself. Some are far more personal than others, but most of my album reviews are actually personal essays about my past (like the time I got dumped by a wannabe music producer or a retrospective on what my life was like during Covid after ending my engagement) or essays about life and the way we live it (including millennial angst, not giving up on your creative dreams, how much life changes in your 30s, etc. etc.) just using a new album as a contextual frame.

I’ll explain this much more coherently in a future essay (I AM NOT GIVING UP ON THIS; THIS IS A HILL I WILL DIE ON!) but the next time I write about new music, I promise to go a little less track-by-track and lean harder into exactly why I felt an empathetic gut punch reading all the semi-scathing reviews of Daughter From Hell this weekend. (What I’m saying is that I truly don’t think you need to even listen to the albums to enjoy the essays. Obviously it just enhances the experience if you do!)

Anyway, here’s everything I enjoyed this week in-between all the papers I was writing for class, including:

• A+ birthday gifts from my mom and sister

• Some thoughts on Obsession

• My favorite album of the summer (so far)

• A YouTube channel that genuinely has me questioning what I want to specialize in as a therapist

See you next week! x

1. This mesh top from Reformation. My sister bought this for me for my birthday and I realized that all my favorite tops right now are some kind of blue floral? If it ain’t broke…

2. Obsession on Amazon Prime. I really do not do horror movies I swear, but when they’re such a big part of the cultural conversation I have to make an exception!!!!! This movie is about personal autonomy. This movie is about rape and consent. This movie is about women, and how we feel like we are all losing our goddamn fucking minds all the time.