paraphrasing 2: here we go again

happy second birthday bb 🎂

Happy second birthday paraphrasing ✨

I feel quite different from the person I was two years ago, nervously sending out my first edition to friends and family who graciously let me sign them up for what is, in all intents and purposes, a direct-email blog. Sure, I have done a good job of sticking to my original goals: consistent publishing, good enough not perfect.

But something shifted in volume 2.

Last year’s anniversary was titled “a year of self-cringing”, an apt title for a time where sharing my writing felt akin to baring my neck to a starving 17-but-actually-117 year old vampire.

But this year, somehow, I stopped cringing. At some point, without consciously realizing it, I began to take myself seriously without pretension or embarrassment. I mean, even if everything I wrote last year sucked (and I now possess enough self-love to know that’s not true!), I have more than two years, and 50+ editions, of newsletters under my belt. Even my near-constant imposter syndrome struggles to argue against or minimize that.

The events of the last 12 months, both personally and globally, have transformed me in ways I expect to be unpacking for years to come. If the first year of paraphrasing was about building something new, this second year was about consistency and acceptance under stress. Good work doesn’t only happen when life is good - maybe it never does - but that’s not an excuse to stop trying, to stop sitting with one’s self and struggling to articulate and clarify. As a recovering perfectionist who berated herself for never doing enough, for being too selfish with her time and energy, I failed to understand until recently that the ostensibly “dumb” forms of creative expression only grow more important during times of struggle, not less. Showing up (to be crass, fucking around and finding out) is the work.

More than ever, I want to live in a world where we all make silly beautiful art and talk about how cool it is.

So once again, I want to take some time to 🎉/🪞/ 🔮(celebrate / reflect / look to the future).

first, thank you for being here you beautiful tropical fish

I can’t tell you how grateful I am for your attention and time, especially now. So many people reached out to me about things I wrote this year, and every message and comment and heart makes my heart (and stomach) leap. In all sincerity, thank you for being here.

a look back

As my creative energy was channeled into bigger projects (more on those later) and my confidence grew, I started to pull from the archives and take more risks in what I shared:

• I shared poems about blooming where I'm planted and standing on balconies and making people feel and harm reduction

• I wrote 3 spooky Halloween book reports as I read through my first Stephen King books: Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, and Misery (these were SO fun)

• I wrote a mini-essay about manifesting, capitalism, and frequent interactions with related material enforcing a belief about one’s self

• I dabbled in photo essays about my favorite neighborhood informal placemaking and the 4th anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic

• I wrote about my favorite seasonal past-time winter bingo and how to plan a big trip

• In the electoral aftermath, I wrote about doom-spending and what small actions I am doing right now to feel like a person

• My most-read post of the year featured hazy phantoms and Ibibio Sound Machine

I cared even less about numbers and metrics this year (growth!), but as a data nerd I am obligated to share some statistics:

• Grew from 57 to 65 subscribers 👏

• 3936 views (up from 1,500 last year) 👏

• 76% average 30-day open rate 👏

a look around

The cadence and commitment to the newsletter enabled and emboldened other work - most notably (ahh so nervous to share this): a novel. I don’t want to say much more about it now, other than it is by FAR the longest piece I have ever written, and I really wasn’t sure I could do it until it was almost complete. If anything happens with this work, you all will be the first to know ♥️.

It has also helped clarify what topics I want to write about, what stories I want to tell, and how I want to tell them. I am excited to see how these wispy ideas coalesce and solidify.

a look ahead

Volume 3 of Paraphrasing will contain much of the same elements of volumes 1 & 2: musings, good things on the internet, what I’m reading, and a jam/song/bop every other Tuesday.

Thank you again for being here.

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good things on the internet

• Franz Ferdinand covers Good Luck Babe 🎶

• Garrett Bucks’s 30 “lonely but beautiful” actions to take right now ✊

• All We Can Save’s resources to nourish climate engagement 🌍

currently reading

• The Reformatory by Tananrive Due: Two black siblings become entangled with a horrific boys’ reform school in 1948 deep south Florida, where the haints are frightening but the men in charge are far, far worse. Racism and Jim Crow laws suck y’all! This historical horror tale has been on my to-read pile since it’s release, and I am so glad I finally got to it.

• Health and Safety, A Breakdown by Emily Witt: A memoir of a journalist who found escape in late 2010s psychedelic dance culture that carries readers through the pandemic and protest coverage in 2020. Highly recommend if you need an engrossing true story. TW: heavy drug use and domestic violence.

• Trump’s Reign of Terror on Schools—and How We Fight Back by Eve Ewing:

“It’s not enough to be afraid of the laws and rules we don’t want to see in schools. We have to clarify our visions of what, how, where and with whom we want our beloveds to learn. What are we fighting for? Who are the young people you love most, and what do you dream for them? What are the values you hold dear that you want desperately for them to understand, to inherit? What are the histories, the legacies, the ancestors you need them to know? Where can you and the people you trust build collective power to make space for that teaching, for that learning?”

this week’s jam

I had so much fun compiling songs last year, I wanted to do it again. Et voila, every weekly jam from paraphrasing v2, a vibe capsule of my world for the past 365ish days.

photo of my cats

Image description: Muir (left) and Kerouac bask in the sun on our old apartment balcony. Muir has his tongue out as he licks his nose, and his front left paw is touching Kerouac’s white back paw.