Starting Here

I’ve started and stopped countless projects over the last 10 years. Sometimes the stopping came about because the project had run its course but most often stopping was the solution I reached for when I lost my nerve. As hard as starting can be for me, sticking by is even harder. 

Writing has been steady through it all in that I’ve had to make money to live (lol!) and it was an easy skill to lean on to bring in a paycheck. And yet. Writing for marketing and publicity purposes for the past nearly 9 years has worn the fabric of my soul thin. Listen, it can be a numbing thing to use words to market and sell and angle and position every day! Returning to the personal page became almost a compulsion in those moments when the weariness got especially thick—almost as if I didn’t write in the opposite direction toward reflection and art and beauty, I’d simply crawl out of my skin. 

Now I get that an argument could be made that all of writing is an act in selling. Even if I’m not selling a product, service, or personality, I could be seen as selling an idea, political view, or even myself to get eyeballs on the personal page. But… the soul says there has to be a difference between writing ad copy and writing a poem. Surely! And yet there are brilliant poets like Anis Mojgani making poems for AT&T commercials—which I respect—so who knows anymore. Welcome to my brain!

Perhaps what I’m really trying to say is that my soul fabric has become worn through using my words for everyone else’s projects but my own. 

Which brings us here, finally, to this Substack. 

Taking my own stories and essays public is one of those projects that I started and stopped an exhausting amount of times. I blame it on the critic choir—a collection of voices hanging out in my head, pushing their opinions and commentary over every decision I make. When it comes to my writing, the critic choir always insists on softening the story, filing away the “unsafe” ones for later, and floating back to me all the potential backlash my truth could bring. Scary stuff! So I tend to listen. Only earlier this year, I got a warning of sorts, a vivid picture of what I’d look like and be like and sound like in another 10 years if I kept letting the critic choir sway every writing decision. It was like seeing the ghost of Angelina future except this one brought no good tidings, just a lot of ache and angst, a lot of hemming and hawing over “but what will they think?” and “what will they say?” Also very scary! 

I was sitting in a meeting, listening to a mid-40s woman unload all the same fears as me, all the same badly ending what-ifs, while death gripping at the status quo because she was terrified her friends and family would turn away if she really started doing the thing that was calling to her. Even with a wildly successful business and national influence in her back pocket, she was letting the fear stop her from following the soul call every single time. 

I didn’t realize until I met her how much I was counting on good ole time helping me out. I thought I’d just outgrow the critic choir one day and then I’d get started with my life. Hilarious! And also a little heartbreaking. I saw and heard the warning—that nothing would change in another 10 years if I kept on expecting time or an arbitrary measure of success to give me the boost I needed to start and then stick out my own writing.

So here I am, leaning into the cringe of taking my reflections and stories online. Candidly, I have very loose plans for what will show up here on a week-to-week basis so I make no guarantees. Perhaps some exploration of my Amish upbringing to poke at what makes us (and seeing if I can pull others into that exploration). Likely a kitchen series to untangle the varied and complicated and changing relationships we have to feeding ourselves and others. Definitely lots of reflection, baking, and maybe even some poetry. Who knows! Everything is a possibility. 

Until next time— 
Angelina Danae