Why I write this newsletter

A reminder to myself

Lately I’ve been thinking about how and why I write this newsletter, and I’ve gotten some questions about it too. Here are the basics: I usually write a draft on Fridays, then lightly edit on Sundays before I send it out. Ideally I have a few possible topics knocking around in my head throughout the week, but often I don’t decide what I’m going to write about until I sit down to write it. I don’t worry about newsworthiness, images, word counts, SEO, open rates, or subscribers lost or gained. I rarely share anything about the newsletter on social media. I write what I feel like writing, and then a couple of days later I send it. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

Those of you who are also professional writers may know that this process runs counter to every piece of advice you get about newsletters.¹ Make it about a single, definable topic! Become the expert on a niche interest people have a professional reason to keep up with (and thus pay for)! Flog it on Twitter! Ask people with bigger audiences to recommend you! I don’t do any of those things. I have no ramp to profitability, no strategy for growing my audience. On the surface, this newsletter is the dreaded freelance demon: Unpaid work. If I’m being perfectly honest, with around 280 subscribers, it doesn’t even pay in exposure.

So why do I do it? Because it’s fun.

At this point in my career and my relationship to writing, having fun is more valuable than anything else this newsletter could theoretically do for me. Before I started it, writing hadn’t felt fun for a very long time (maybe…middle school?), and it’s still often the only place where writing feels fun. This newsletter is where I protect and nurture the idea that writing can be easy and joyful. When it stops feeling fun, I take a break for a while. (Hello again!) This is the space where I can trust that the fun will return, if I can first trust myself to meet my own needs.

For me, the key to fun lies in a word I slipped in the above paragraph, a word that even now I’m afraid of fully embracing: Easy. Fun writing is easy, easy writing is fun. When the writing is easy, it means I’m using my most authentic voice. It means the piece is becoming its best self. It often even means it will be fun to read! The truth I cultivate with this newsletter, that I need to prove to myself over and over again, is that my writing is better when I have a good time doing it. It sounds so obvious, except that it runs counter to everything my culture, education, and career has taught me to think. We learn to equate ease with laziness—capitalism’s original sin—and thus reject its power as nothing more than the temptation of a siren’s song. When in reality, ease is the clearest path to where we’re supposed to be.

As I work on the most ambitious creative project of my life in the midst of local and global circumstances that every day threaten to make progress not only impossible but existentially meaningless, I return often to this quote from the meditation teacher Sebene Selassie in her book You Belong: “Ease is not the destination. Ease is the way.”² This newsletter is the place I practice that, and where I teach myself to believe it.

1. For those interested in some more pragmatic newsletter advice, I found this piece illuminating.

2. Selassie says she’s riffing on a Martin Luther King, Jr. quote here: “Peace is not the destination. Peace is the way.” In true MLK-quote fashion, I can’t find confirmation he said that. The closest I’ve managed from a reliable source (the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford) is, “They [world leaders, specifically President Johnson in the context of the Vietnam War] are talking about peace as a distant goal, as an end we seek, but one day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal.”