I want this

Dear Team Joy,

Happy Thursday!

What a pleasure it is to be in your inbox.

I have been writing this newsletter for about two years!

Whether you’ve been reading since the beginning or you just got here, I’m grateful you keep showing up. :) I hear from many of you that this newsletter resonates, and I want to say how meaningful to me it is to contribute in this way. ??

The first day when I pressed publish, I basically didn’t sleep that night because my body felt doused in adrenaline. I lay awake with fearful thoughts ricocheting around my head:

“What if no one reads it? What if it’s terrible? What if this dream is actually naive and entirely embarrassing? How cringe.”

I am sure you’ve had similar thoughts when you’ve put your heart out into the world.

I wanted to skip to the part when I was already Glennon Doyle.

She is the first “adult” I looked at and sensed I want a career like hers.

Glennon is a memoirist: famous for putting words to emotions, capturing power structures with simple, pithy metaphors (I’m a goddamn cheetah, anyone?), and now a podcaster who has famous culture shapers on each week to talk about what they’ve learned about the human condition (think Brene Brown, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert). It’s called We Can Do Hard Things.

I came across Glennon’s work for the first time in early 2019. It was all about the courage of telling the truth in our lives, illuminated through her actually doing it. The collapse of her marriage, her struggle with an eating disorder, the moments when she felt like she grasped something divine, quickly forgot how she got there, only to pursue grasping it all over again. She wrote about the things most of us keep buried in shame. She didn’t put herself in the typical power dynamic we expect from authors: her as the expert and the reader as the novice. It wasn’t a how-to. It was something closer to a, how do we? As if her reflections and insights were a generous offering to our collective pursuit of human-ing.

I wanted to do that too. Needed to do it actually.

Reading her stories brought me new self-understanding. More peace and more fire. It clicked an inner knowing into place. This is what I am capable of doing, even if I have no idea how to do it yet. Even if my attempts right now feel cliche or mediocre.

Admitting the dream to myself scared the shit out of me. It’s less scary now, but admitting it aloud still makes me constrict a bit.

I want to have a big impact in my life.

I want to be paid to shape culture. To capture insights about our inner worlds, and bring them to the surface for more self-awareness and compassion. I want to bring consciousness to the aspects of our culture that point us in the wrong direction, and find more authentic ways of living as a result.

It’s not the content that scares me, it’s the audaciousness of dreaming big.

Saying it provokes internalized self-judgement:

Everyone and their mother wants to be like Glennon Doyle. How embarrassing. Why would you believe you’re talented enough for that? It’s sweet you’ve built this little blog.

I patronize myself. Keep myself small. I let the doubt erode my self-confidence in service of not facing the crushing disappointment of eventually finding out I might actually not be talented enough to find external success, even if I really, really tried.

When we don’t actually try we can tell ourselves it wouldn’t have worked anyways. But when we put forth our best efforts and they are not very good, or don’t get the outcomes we want, that’s humbling. With enough internalized self-judgement, its humiliating.

Yet, alongside the doubt and fear is a quiet persistence to keep trying.

I love this. I love the craft of sculpting words to fit an emotion just right. I love finding the metaphor that places the story in a digestable container. I love landing the phrase that makes my heart go thud. I love writing and finding out four paragraphs later, “Oh that’s the insight. That’s what I am trying to say.”

I don’t admit the dream often, yet I come back here week after week.

Sometimes I get caught up, believing this work is only worthwhile if it creates external results. I tell myself I need more followers, more attention, more bookings, more something: caught up in our collective misunderstanding of what makes something valuable.

But when I constrict this medium to be in service of external results, the blog gets worse, more constipated in a way. The process becomes exhausting. It puts the onus on the reader to validate this newsletter's existence through praise and interaction. It lacks confidence and a voice. Love me? It nervously asks.

When I pursue meaning and telling the truth, I find my voice. The process nourishes me. The reader gets to feel me, and in turn feel themselves. It doesn’t ask for love, it reminds you (the reader) that you already are.

Pursuing meaning allows for the purpose within me that drove me to create it, to merge with the purpose within you that shows up to read it: letting this be what it is supposed to be.

Glennon lit a torch for me. Lighting the way to a genre of art that makes me feel inspired and known. A stream of consciousness that I can bathe in. With enough courage, I could lay my own offering down too, lighting the way for others to be inspired to ask their own set of questions.

I may not have millions of followers. I may actually be cringe, yet I hear from many of you that reading this work has meant something to you. It’s helped you through job decisions and break-ups. It’s made you feel braver. Inspired. Less alone.

To do the things we sense we are meant to do in our limited time here is a radical act of self-love and understanding, regardless of its scale, or if it “changed the world.” It’s brave. It’s meaningful.

We’ll close this week from a quote from a sermon by the great Taylor Swift.

If you haven’t had the chance to watch Taylor Swift’s commencement speech at NYU, I highly recommend it. There is a section in the speech about what it means to try, which I have clipped for you here:

“And while we’re talking about things that make us squirm but really shouldn’t, I’d like to say that I’m a big advocate for not hiding your enthusiasm for things. It seems to me that there is a false stigma around eagerness in our culture of ‘unbothered ambivalence.’ This outlook perpetuates the idea that it’s not cool to ‘want it.’ That people who don’t try hard are fundamentally more chic than people who do. And I wouldn’t know because I have been a lot of things but I’ve never been an expert on ‘chic.’ But I’m the one who’s up here so you have to listen to me when I say this: Never be ashamed of trying. Effortlessness is a myth. The people who wanted it the least were the ones I wanted to date and be friends with in high school. The people who want it most are the people I now hire to work for my company.” (Taylor Swift, NYU Commencement, 2022)

I have always been a try-hard. Any attempt at being perceived as effortless has actually been extremely effortful.

I care. I am eager.

How embarrassing.

Eagerness makes us feel raw. It’s unbelievably uncool to want something badly…that is unless you eventually find success, and we collectively reframe that eagerness later as genius, confidence, or resilience.

But I’m still in the eager phase. I’m not cool. I haven’t scaled.

Yet I am impactful.

Yet this is meaningful to me.

Overtime, my writing gets better, my voice more refined. My confidence and ability to lead expands.

There’s no way to skip the cringey, eager phase. It’s guaranteed on our path toward fulfillment.

It’s not easy to be witnessed in our own mess, but the practice of letting ourselves be seen reminds us that our perfectionism was a seductive lie to keep us small. The mess is where the heart is, thats what lands.

I encourage you to share yours.

Much love,

Isabel