Newsletter Archive

A sample of my favorite issues, this is not the full archive

“I don’t know how to thank you. You’ve given me permission to embrace my chaos instead of trying to clean it up for someone else. That’s a gift I didn’t know I needed.”

Wrecking Balls of Stillness: If your motion isn’t actually inspired, and your patience isn’t actually wise, you don't achieve resolution. In fact, you don’t move forward at all. At some point, you'll realize you're still at the same starting point, holding the same questions, the same tension, the same unnamed desires and goals. Except now you’re more confused, because you spent time doing something (or doing nothing) in a way that you defined as “the right thing to do,” but nothing has changed. And now you’re more annoyed. Because you can feel you’re looping. (Read the full issue)

The Roche Limit: The price we pay for building structures where we actively ignore our bodies and our feelings screaming at us that something is very wrong, that the call is coming from inside the house, is way too steep. When we build our emotional houses on fault lines, it doesn’t matter if we use all the right materials, get the best contractors, and have everything we need to make a beautiful structurally sound home. If you've built yours on a fault line, when that earthquake hits, you’re done. Game over. (Read the full issue)

Beliefs vs. Reality: Beliefs give us hope and definition. They are internal rules we use to decide what’s safe, what’s right, what matters, and how we should show up. Most of them are earned. They are born of tradition, values, and life lessons learned (both the good and the brutal) that shouldn’t be casually dismissed. But when we hold a belief too tightly, when it hardens into righteousness, our beliefs stop guiding us and start blocking us. (Read the full issue)

Truth Is a Love Letter: Sure, the truth will set me free (in theory), but will giving oxygen to whatever is in my heart only serve to break it further? Will the truth become a wedge, the mechanism by which I push away those closest to me? Or will the truth show me I wasn’t as close to someone as I thought? When I don't know how to answer those questions, I do nothing. (Read the full issue)

The Godfather & Orpheus: We like believing great things arrive fully formed, guided by genius, protected by foresight. It makes success feel orderly and failure feel deserved. But that’s not how any of this actually works. When you zoom out, what you see isn’t inevitability. You see persistence inside disorder. You see people staying in rooms they’re unwelcome in, defending ideas no one else can yet picture, absorbing interference long enough for something to come together. (Read the full issue)

Hope & the Impossible: Hope is my way of surviving. And yes, sometimes that hope makes me feel foolish. I’m also aware this makes me look like someone who doesn’t read the room and know when call it quits. Like I missed the memo that I was supposed to bow out gracefully and call it wisdom. Instead, I keep getting back up after the kind of hit most people would use as a sign to stop. I guess I’ve never been good at walking away from something that still feels alive. (Read the full issue)

The Golden Record: The Golden Record was shot into space in 1977 toward the gas giants in our solar system and beyond. Etched on its surface, a hydrogen atom diagram, a pulsar map showing earth’s location, playback instructions, and more. It was encoded with greetings recorded in 55 different languages, the sounds of earth (ocean waves, thunderstorms, volcanos, etc.), as well as 23 different musical tracks, ranging from Senegalese percussion and Mozart, to Louis Armstrong and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.” It also included the audio of the brainwaves and heartbeat of Ann Druyan, the love of Carl Sagan’s life. Why would we do this? (Read the full issue)

Joy: Yes, our pasts may never be quite done with us. But it doesn’t have the final say in how we live our lives. We do. Pain is a deceptive and persuasive force that can trick us into believing that joy is rare and temporary. That love does not come without cost or deceit. That success is only achievable through significant personal sacrifice. Love and joy are just as real and far more abundant than our fears and internal scars would have us believe. Choosing love and joy doesn’t prevent pain, but neither will find us if we decide to stay behind our well-fortified walls of “life lessons” and more “measured” approaches to avoid loss. (Read the full issue)

Apples, Part I: From a very early age, we’re taught big outputs require big inputs. To transform our lives, our careers, our relationships, we have to go all in—massive effort, massive risk. “If you want a life that’s easy, do hard things,” yadda yadda yadda. But you're already shaping your life in ways you don’t even realize. The only question now is whether you’re doing it on purpose. Every small action you commit to—every delay, every risk, every word left unsaid—is a radical act of creation. (Read the full issue)

Your move: It’s so easy to get sucked into the process of examining your own beliefs, ideals, temptations, and desires under the shiny mantle of personal growth. Don’t get me wrong, looking inward is a powerful way to uncover deeper meanings and truths. (I'm a big fan of meditation for this reason.) But all too easily, that purposeful introspection can slip into pointless, cowardly navel-gazing — seeking within what you can only find without. (Read the full issue)

Fate: Each of us will experience moments in our lives where kismet, the universe, fate, destiny, a higher power, or pure chance will knock on our door and present us with a choice. But what happens next is up to you. (Read the full issue)

5-year plans suck: Whenever someone asked me to visualize my “dream life” of the future, I couldn’t do it. Whenever someone suggested I write a letter from my future self to me now, I couldn’t think of a damn thing to write other than, “If your glasses are missing, they’re either on your head or in the freezer. You’re welcome.” (Read the full issue)

Opposites: Magnets have two poles (north and south). Only opposite poles attract each other; like poles repel each other. If you want to prevent magnets of opposing poles from connecting with each other as they are designed to do, you have to exert enough force to keep them apart. And the closer you bring those attracting magnets to each other, the more effort it will require to keep them separated. (Read the full issue)

Choose death: Look, I know I’m being a bit melodramatic in this issue. Death. Fiery, suicidal birds. Homicidal Sumerian goddess sisters in desperate need of mediated family counseling. Or maybe just some Xanax. These are not exactly one-to-one comparisons to anything we experience in our own lives as mere mortals. But that doesn’t mean we are exempt from those moments when we must be courageous, as we surrender to the discomfort of a fire we light for ourselves. (Read the full issue)

Darkness: We mistakenly believe that to be moral, one must be free of complexity or contradiction. We assume that the presence of shadows on the edges of our light indicates an irredeemable character flaw or a fracture in the foundation of the values we hold dear. We believe we are fraudulent, broken. However, we enter dangerous territory when we improperly moralize the rich contradictions and dualities that exist within ourselves. (Read the full issue)

Endings: We need to stop believing that something must be a catastrophically broken, toxic, or otherwise destructive force in our lives in order to consider it not right for us. Yes, there is a fine line between “This is not right for me,” and “I’m a pathologically avoidant escape artist who is convinced the grass is greener in every other yard that borders my own.” But I’m not talking to you “grass is greener” folks. I’m talking to the rest of you. (Read the full issue)

Wants: You’ll always lack the insatiable hunger, relentless drive, and visionary problem-solving skills to do and achieve anything because you didn't do the work to define a belief, an idea, or a person worth fighting for. You already have those capabilities within you, but you only unlock them when you fully own up to what it is you really, really fucking want. (Read the full issue)

Honesty: The truth is the most powerful love letter you can ever write to another person. The truth communicates how much you trust the person across from you to catch you on the other side — to see that incredible, squishy, whole version of yourself you likely rarely share with others ... and then allow them the space and ability to love you more for it. (Read the full issue)