a year of self-cringing
happy first birthday to Paraphrasing 🎂
Happy first birthday Paraphrasing ✨
I started this newsletter just over a year ago with the intentions of sticking to a publishing schedule, putting writing out into the world that was not perfect but “good enough”, and sharing my life & art with the world outside of large social media platforms. By those metrics, I can stand here a year later feeling successful, energized, and excited for what comes next.
I don’t know why, but writing this anniversary post felt especially stressful. Even as someone who loves goal setting & reflections and well…writing, the Midwesterner in me loathes calling any amount of attention to myself, and also, why would anyone care? But I am forcing myself to sit down and do this, damn it, because:
I want to live in a world where we all make silly beautiful art and talk about how cool it is; and
doing ANY-thing for a year is hard, and despite the deprecating title this week, I am proud of myself.
While I am not yet sure if a newsletter should have a birthday month or not, I wanted to take some time to 🎉/🪞/ 🔮(celebrate / reflect / look to the future).
first, thank you for being here
Seriously. Thank you. There are a lot of newsletters out there, and even more fun things to distract and engage on this net of inters; and I appreciate that you chose to give your time & attention here.
Thank you to the friends & family members who let me sign you up for this a year ago. Thank you to everyone who has reached out with kind words, liked, commented, and shared these posts in the last 12 months.
And a special thank you (and hello!) to the new subscribers that I have never met IRL. I am still shocked that you are interested in my unhinged missives, but I am grateful that you are here.
a look back
I wrote about a lot of different things this past year, mostly depending on what was on my mind at the time. Allowing myself the freedom to write something long or short, serious or silly, was crucial in sustaining a publishing schedule.
I wrote about how the baroness from Sound of Music deserved better.
I wrote about how I cried watching Maggie Rogers at Lollapalooza.
I wrote about shows I love and books I love and songs I love and the weather.
I wrote about the ridiculous cost of higher education.
I wrote about charming Seward, Alaska.
As the days got shorter, I wrote about depression.
Last issue, I tried something entirely new with short fiction.
To date, my most popular post is about singing lessons.
I think one of the reasons I was able to sustain this project is finding an enjoyable format. Other projects have withered on the vine because I was trying to force something that wasn’t authentic or interesting to me, personally. When I was short on time, I mixed it up with meme dumps & curated lists. Now, I have this space as an unexpected but cool scrapbook of my year.
Not one person told me what I was waiting to hear - that I was a bad writer, that my newsletter sucked, and that I should just focus on my day job. In fact, I got nothing but positive feedback, some so meaningful that I had to actively disassociate because I do not do well with compliments (I know, I know, I am working on it in therapy). Writing is inherently vulnerable and lonely, and I can’t think of a writer I know who isn’t occasionally riddled with self-doubt. For everyone who reached out just to say something resonated or made them think or laugh - thank you. It means more than you will ever know.
Numbers don’t lie, but they don’t always matter. Here’s the thing about perfectionists - the bar is set at 100%, and anything less is a failure. That is why I explicitly did not include any numerical goals in creating & sustaining this newsletter, because I knew it would prevent me from feeling successful.
However - one of the cool things about publishing on Substack is access to a wealth of analytics. Not wanting to waste this resource, I have spent the last year balancing diving into the numbers with blatantly ignoring them whenever the negative self-talk got too loud.
Even though there are other newsletters out there with far larger reach, I am genuinely proud of these stats, and want to celebrate them together - I could not have gotten here without you all:
Went from 0 to 57 subscribers 👏
1,500 unique viewers 👏
84% average 30-day open rate 👏
And I got published in a real lit magazine! A feat I could not have accomplished without the confidence & muscle I built in this space. Sometimes the work really is just showing up and seeing what happens.
so what now?
Volume 2 of Paraphrasing will contain much of the same elements of volume 1: musings, good things on the internet, what I’m reading, and a jam/song/bop every other Tuesday. I want to try and write more flash fiction, and perhaps publish a longer essay here and there. “Good enough” will still be the name of the game.
Paraphrasing will continue to be free, so please keep subscribing and telling all your friends (and maybe your favorite enemy, for good measure).
If I accomplish anything through this, I hope it inspires you to make time for your art, too. You deserve it. We all deserve it.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for being here, and here’s to another year of self-cringing & self-discovery, together.
good things on the internet
ismercuryinretrograde.com (it’s not)🪐
The Cut’s profile on Kacey Musgraves & her new album 🌲
currently reading
Throne of Glass series by Sarah J. Maas (again) because I am back on my bullshit of ignoring my massive TBR pile by re-reading this series less than 6 months after finishing it. No regrets.
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk: Re-reading for the first time in over a decade, and I feel like I can see so many more layers to the story than I could in my 20s. Worth a read if it’s your first time, and definitely worth a re-read if it’s been a while.
Max Read on Gemini & black popes: “In fact, at some point Google and OpenAI will have to face that the actual best uses for chatbots (summarizing chunks of text and some easy programming tasks, so far?) diverges from what many enthusiasts want the chatbots to be (computer demi-gods). If Gemini won’t tell you that Hitler is worse than Elon Musk, is it a failure of the chatbot that needs to be fixed, a failure of the user for prompting it to the wrong purpose, or a failure of the chatbot’s owners for trying to have their cake and eat it too? Is it a precise creative tool, a well-sourced search engine, an accurate encyclopedia, a magical scrying ball, a silly parlor trick?”
this week’s jam
Instead of a new jam, I made a playlist of all the songs featured in volume 1 of Paraphrasing.
photo of my cats
Haha happy cringaversary!