Hello to the many new subscribers that have turned up here in the past few weeks. There’s a few reasons I write here on substack, the main one being that after 15 years of writing regularly online, mostly for free, I can now earn a living from my weekly newsletters. I call it a game-changer because there’s no other way to describe how significant it’s been for me both personally and professionally. This letter is delivered to your inbox each Sunday evening but you can also read it in the substack app (it’s a nice way to scroll and consume long-form content that you’ve actually signed up for).
A reminder that paid subscribers receive four letters a month (and the occasional extra) and free subscribers receive two a month. If you read and enjoy my posts you’ll know that I consciously create a sustainable life for myself. This means that there will be weeks when I don’t send a newsletter (because, life) and I’m planning a month off over summer where I intend to be mostly offline. I do this every year and it’s a really powerful reset; I highly recommend it!
Thank you for being here, for leaving the comments that you do and for sharing my letters with like-minded people in your life.
Perhaps you don’t know my story so I’ll give you the neat summary that doesn’t, in any way, capture the enormous heart-wrenching upheaval of fear, doubt and undeniable faith that propelled me forward in the spring of 2017.
I birthed my fourth baby and within minutes of scooping her vernix-covered body onto my chest I experienced the most profound sense of completion. I knew in that moment that I wouldn’t have any more; she would always be the littlest one, my baby. My postpartum was punctured - as it always is, at one stage or another - when I stood in the kitchen and cursed the weetbix that had fused to the rim of the three bowls I hadn’t rinsed. And I realised that I didn’t believe in how we were living; it wasn’t sustainable for me as a woman and a mother and it wasn’t sustainable for my family, either. I was exhausted and defeated and I knew something had to change. I also knew I had to drive that change.
Was I one to make spontaneous, 180-degree changes and figure out the details later? Absolutely not. Did I do it anyway? Yes, yes I did. How? Unrelenting determination, especially when I was doubting (which was often).