This Is The Best I Can Do Right Now

It's pretty good.

I was really struggling to think of a topic for this Weds newsletter. I’ve been so busy and very productive recently, and I love doing this all so much I want to do MORE MORE MORE and then this week I could feel my brain, like, throwing up its hands. I’ve got nothing. So I was feeling stuck, and hadn’t really moved on from what I wrote about last week - meeting the various versions of me, and where I am now. And while that was a Thanksgiving gratitude essay, this one is kind of a year-end wrap up (though of course, this isn’t the last time you’ll hear from me this year…or even this week….I have a very fun Saturday Snack coming).

I was thinking about the shiny pants, which are The Row and are on sale (and I am obsessed with them), with the soft matte-ness of this bright red Madewell hoodie. It’s kind of giving Mrs Claus if she had liked attention, but I’m also kind of into it. The bag is one that I was gifted from the Chanel team ages and ages ago and I love it with every cell in my body. It’s gold and black art deco sequins. Meanwhile, these mules are the ones I’m just crazy about from Ann Mashburn. I can’t stop wearing them, and they’re velvet, so it’s one more fun texture in the mix.

This was a very big year for me - it’s my first full calendar year being truly, and successfully, freelance. I’ve had periods where I wasn’t working for a magazine, when I was “freelance” but I never really had the guts to pursue that passionately enough to be successful. I always felt like I needed the validation of a “real job”. I’ve only just gotten comfortable with ~this~ being my job, and like I said last week, my work and writing is intensely personal, it both requires and allows for a lot of self reflection.

And I’m doing some macro reflection - looking back on myself in my twenties and thirties, honestly, up until this spring sort of. I felt so much doubt and shame, god, SHAME. I felt mountains of shame, I was suffocated by it. I never could have imagined how great it would be, in my late thirties, to shed that. This was (and this is the really big thing) the year I got sober.