Greetings From Bageltown

Hello!!

My lovelies! I know it’s been forever, again. And this will probably be a partial update, and not the glorious fount of wit and wisdom I hope to eventually pour forth. It has not been extensively proofread. But the short of it is:

Things are kind of the same, but also different. I’m in New York, but will be back in Berlin on Friday. I’ve been taking poetry workshops for the first time since college, and it’s been awesome. I’m thinking about what’s next after Berlin, because the time is approaching for me to transition out of this chapter of my life, for a lot of reasons. However moving is a longer-term objective, because I have more immediate problems to tackle. The main one is that freelancing has been shit - I strongly dislike about 80% of the work I do, and the last year has been incredibly gnarly on the money front. It’s been making me feel very trapped, and paralyzed regarding any kind of future-thinking and planning.

To that end, I’ve been working with an amazing career coach in the last few months to reconceive my unsustainable pile of Freelance Mess so that it functions more like a business, and to figure out what I actually want that business to be and how I want it to grow. So that I can be something other than incredibly bored and perpetually anxious, so that I have the money to move someplace I actually want to live in my 40s, so that my paid work and my creative practice can feel symbiotic and not like they’re constantly at war with each other.

This has been both very inspiring and very confronting - at times it’s been less like career coaching, and more like a very targeted form of therapy. It’s also been expensive, so I’m going to take a moment to acknowledge that my parents loaned me the money. I could write an entire essay about the amount of useless bullshit neurosis that got triggered by accepting a freely-offered business loan from my parents, but suffice it to say that my very tangled relationship with money is one of the things I’ve been exploring with my coach! Apparently a lot of it is actually just cover for other, much deeper anxieties and insecurities. Who woulda thunk it.

Anyway, as I’ve mentioned previously, this newsletter is going to undergo some sort of metamorphosis, and quite possibly migrate to another platform. At some point I considered starting an entirely different newsletter just for professional purposes, but I don’t actually think that’s the best course. If I’m going to run a creative business based on my creative expertise, I want my clients to want to work with *me.* However one newsletter means that, unless it eventually makes sense to segment my mailing list, you might get served some stuff that’s more “content strategy”-ish along with my more freeform rambles.

I know, it’s gross. I am very much one those people who feels gross about self-promotion and marketing, but that’s more anxiety-and-insecurity shit, and it has to end. I want to build things, which means I must embrace The Grift, in whatever way feels reasonably authentic to me. If my Grift eventually proves distasteful to you, you can unsubscribe.

Meanwhile, as housekeeping, I have finally cancelled auto-renew on the few monthly subscriptions I had, because I don’t want you all paying for a newsletter that I haven’t been writing regularly and may not write regularly for a bit. Also, because I may migrate, it doesn’t really make sense to build a paid subscriber list via Substack. For the time being, if you want to pay for my writing, either through one-off “tipping” or by setting up a monthly contribution (i.e. a subscription), you can do so at Buy Me A Coffee. Right now I’d recommend the one-off tipping option, since I’m guessing it’ll take some time for me to get into a rhythm again. But doing so is part of The Plan for the next six months, so it’ll happen.