Sacred Rage starts again

A little note for 2025.

I’ll be honest, I started a completely different post for today, got about halfway through, and then trashed it and wrote this. I did this for a few reasons — the post was getting a bit too vulnerable, it was getting too long, and it was something I wanted to do justice, which to me does not mean beginning and ending writing the piece in a single three-hour period the day before publication.

The last few weeks while I’ve been on break from this very new space have helped me re-form it in my mind, to see it a bit more clearly for what I want it to be. And a lot of those things I want it to be are eerily aligned with what I want for my life in 2025.

I want to lean into my confidence. I want to think less about every decision I make, and think more about how I want to show up in the world. I want to act like I believe I am worthy of love and good things. I want to be a good person, whatever that means.

This doesn’t mean not thinking about anything — I wouldn’t have started a newsletter if that were the case — but in my experience, overthinking something leads me to doubt myself, to convince myself not to do the thing in the first place, or to wonder why I ever thought something essentially neutral would be a good idea.

I think I first realized this it was September of last year, and I was sitting at my friend’s kitchen table. One of the cool things about growing up is getting to have serious conversations at your own kitchen table — why is that cool to me? — and in this case, it’s her house, which she bought on her own. To me, single woman house-ownership adds a level of cool to this story, but ymmv.

We talked about me wanting to start this very newsletter. We talked about being kinda bored. We talked about wanting more out of our relatively incredibly comfortable, privileged, safe lives. For the last six years, we’d done a lot of hustling and hard work side-by-side and somehow it felt hollow.

For her, it was about having more hard conversations. Being less afraid.

I don’t like to think of myself as afraid. But I am.

I’m terrified of making the wrong decision. I’m terrified of what will happen if I’m too publicly myself, including here, in this space I created for myself. I’m utterly afraid of damaging the immaculate vibes I’ve spent the past decade dutifully building — because those are built on a version of myself I worked so hard to build, and am afraid of never moving past.

For me, I wanted to be honest. I wanted to talk more, to write more. I wanted to be in community with the people I love — which of course means being inconvenienced for the safety of kinship, it means having hard conversations and making decisions and being brave enough to show someone else that you do, in fact, love them. Or that you do, in fact, need them to change. But it also means holding boundaries.

I know. I’ve seen the word all over the fucking internet, too, and I’m sick of it. Therapy speak is toxic and we can’t bear to lose the shared meaning of words in this economy. But I have learned in the past five years that boundaries are important.

Starting this newsletter made me proud of myself. I saved my own money and invested in a friend to help me design my logo.

I thought a lot about this after I did it — I was putting the cart before the horse, why invest money in something that has no guaranteed return? Why start a newsletter online when I was hoping to kind of spend less time online in general after the election?

I went through with the logo, I tried not to think about what my mother would think about how I’d used my money. It’s my money. I’m an adult. And I would never regret entrusting my friend with this project or supporting any artist’s work I loved.

This could just be a hobby I spent money on — it didn’t need to be a Newsletter :tm:, like all of the ones my favorite writers have started after leaving their legacy media jobs. I didn’t need to make money off of this if I just wanted to do it for fun. I could just do this for me.

But I was still scared of the “wrong people” learning about this. Who are those people? I could tell you, but then they would know. And the thing is, I don’t want them to know.

I sat with this feeling while I worked with my friend on logo iterations and started writing. I sat through it for three more posts until I saw that a microinfluencer I’ve followed for a long time (Lyndsey, @asmallcloset on IG) recently started her own Substack.

In some of her stories about the announcement, which have since expired, I think she mentioned using paid subscriptions as a way to monitor who reads her more vulnerable content and ensure that the people who she doesn’t want to see it, can’t.

I did not think of this solution. Not in all of my overthinking. Not in any of my sitting with it.

Here’s an example of how overthinking doesn’t work! Because I wasn’t thinking, I was shaming myself. We can talk about how, maybe, this is because I’m afraid of valuing my own work in any way. We can talk about how this is another example of me not realizing I can put a boundary in place if I need one to protect myself.

I don’t know Lyndsey, but the things she’s written about her life have previously helped me feel less alone about my own situation with a mother who doesn’t care about anyone but herself. I felt less like an abject idiot when I started to see her share these things.

And so seeing her take this step, which I’d also taken, and enact a boundary around her space, was seemingly cosmically aligned.

Just kidding. But I literally was like, “oh, wow. duh. that’s a great reason to do that.” And yes, I called myself an idiot after that too, but I’m trying to be kinder to myself in the self-edit.

So, I think this year, as a practice and in honor of setting fucking boundaries for myself, this is something I’ll implement, too. If my self-criticism is already so high that I’m stopping publication on things before they even make it out of my head out of fear, I don’t think I need the risk of my mother seeing it on top of that.

This is, hopefully obviously, NOT me telling you the paywall means I’m going to be a completely different person there vs. here in public. But I haven’t given space for my mom’s criticism in my life for almost a year. It’s been a decision I’ve yet to regret — which doesn’t mean it hasn’t been hard and sad and left me full of rage and grief. But I need to keep it.

If you’re on the paid list, thanks. Stay there. It’s not that I don’t want you there, it’s that I don’t want this to be searchable, necessarily. I don’t want my most vulnerable thoughts — which are valid and worth sharing because I’ve learned this countless times, reading countless essays and memoirs and blogs — to be used against me. It’s there to serve as a boundary.

If you’re someone close to me/we know each other in real life, and can’t pay the $5/month but want to be included, send me a message. I’ll see you in two weeks.