Hi friends,
This is my last missive of the year. I’m taking the rest of the year off from putting out any (new) work because I need to rest and because we ALL need a rest. We do have another episode of So, Life Wants You Dead coming out on Tuesday, so please look out for that, listen, tell your friends, shout it from the rooftops etc. !!!
Our episode that came out this week is with poet and mental health advocate Tonya Ingram. Please check out the episode—it is such a beautiful ode to rest, figuring out how to survive even in and amongst the grief. It is a treatise on deciding to bloom, despite the soil conditions, as Tonya might say.
I want to end the year here on Serenity Never with some gratitude. I am so grateful that I made my way to Substack this summer. I have been sending a newsletter for over four years, and there is something about the move to Substack that helped me take myself more seriously as a writer. It has made me feel like less of a marketer, which is a massive sigh of relief. In our current world, if you choose to flex your creative muscles (which I believe we all have in spades if given the time and space to flex them) and to be an artist, you have to figure out how to market yourself. It’s just the name of the game in 2022 (same as it ever was??). But on other platforms, I felt like I had to always be selling something. I’d often write something and then think, “Oh god, what do I have to sell with this?” And I’d come up with something to sell alongside my words. Which made absolutely no sense. Substack gives me licence to write about what I want to write about, and that’s that. Do I want readers to upgrade to paid? Of course I do! I want to be paid for what I do. But I will always write, and I have always written even when no one is reading.
The second piece is the immense gratitude I feel for those subscribers who have paid for a subscription. I don’t know how to put into words the monumental skip my heart takes when someone signs up for paid. My inner child, who always wanted so badly to be an artist, a performer, a writer of some sort — well, she does a little dance and pinches herself at her good fortune. That people are, somehow, affected enough by my words, or something touches them enough to want to pull out their wallets and give me their hard-earned funds. Damn, it feels good. It does not go unnoticed—in fact, it really keeps me going. I thank you for it.
Next, I'm incredibly thankful for those who reply or comment on something I’ve written and engage with my work. When you put out words in a consistent manner, and for whatever reason, you feel moved to share them with the world, it’s hard to know how it lands. Or if it lands. Or if you’re just a crazy person who has a compulsion to share their thoughts with the world. Whenever one of you replies with your thoughts on the work or how you relate it to your own life, it is the best feeling. I can’t describe it! It just feels really good.
Finally, I want to thank my best friend, who gave me the name for this newsletter. I love the name Serenity Never so much because it perfectly encapsulates everything I want to discuss here. And she just dropped the gem in my lap one day in early June like a little Santerina. Christmas come early. She always replies with encouraging words like “banger” and “best newsletter in the biz”, which also make me feel like I’m not the crazy person with the compulsion (though I may be in other ways). And so much gratitude to all my many friends and extended fam for consistently encouraging me to make things and dealing with my mountain of neuroses and fear surrounding my creative process. May the neuroses continue to ease as life continues but stay just enough to keep me and everyone else on their toes.
I have not had such an easy year with my mental health, which is true for many of us. I’ve been open about this here. My body is tired, and I need rest. With the news of Stephen “tWitch” Boss’s passing this week, who died by suicide, we are thinking collectively (at least in the US) about mental health more than usual. This life can feel so heavy, and we can become so bogged down by it. At least for me, when I turn towards gratitude, it can help ease some of the weight on me. Gratitude is certainly not a cure for my mental health struggles, but it does help me take stock of my life and see it in a way that I can’t when I feel like the walls are coming in on me and darkness creeps in.
I saw an article last week that talked about how little we acknowledge how much the pandemic took from us. I, too, feel that the pandemic continues to take a lot from us. It’s hard to look at but it’s true. I hope that in 2023 we can find ways to turn towards what we can rebuild from the rubble. We have all already been doing this for a long while now. It is not a straightforward process; attempting to heal from destruction can feel impossible when chaos still abounds. May we all keep showing up in the ways we can, when we can.
I hope you all find ways to rest and take good care of yourselves in these final weeks of the year. I hope you can look around your life, as I will also do in these final weeks of the year and notice how much there is to be thankful for.
With gratitude,
Nora x