Reentry Is Always The Hardest Part

Back to life, back to reality. Plus new book blurbs!

The weekend before last, I had the absolute pleasure and privilege of attending a dreamy writing retreat in Wisconsin. It wasn’t exactly in my non-existent budget, but because it was hosted by two women I’d known online for years and had never met in the flesh, I felt like it was meant to be. Or at least I decided it was going to be… even though my husband already had travel planned for the same dates. And I would need to spend Friday and Monday driving and I was out of vacation time. And arranging childcare plus pet care was a A Whole Thing. But with the help of my in-laws, we just barely made it work, and I’m so grateful we did. 

I needed that retreat more than I knew. As I mentioned in my inaugural post, it’s where I finally had the breathing room to start writing this newsletter. More importantly, the whole experience reminded me that I used to be a creative person, and not just a fulfiller of needs and deadlines.

One of the many gorgeous common areas at Red Clover Ranch.

Instead of care-taking, I was being taken care of. Three times a day, I was fed a nourishing, locally-sourced meal that I didn't have to prepare or clean up after, and I actually liked every single thing we ate. In between meals, I attended generative writing workshops led by

Amy Shearn

and

Sarah McColl

, those online friends I was finally able to meet. Following each session, I could just… sit there and keep writing. I relaxed in a sauna twice, saw Saturn’s rings through a fancy telescope, tasted a bunch of amaros I’d never heard of, and made new friends (and of course one of them was named Emily because that’s practically unavoidable when you gather more than ten white women of a certain age in the same room). To top it all off, I slept eight hours every night—and all three mornings, I woke up naturally at 7:45 and managed to shit, shower, and put on a full face of makeup before arriving more or less on time to breakfast. 

Some of my new friends gathered in the orchard.

Then I came home. To a husband who was frustrated by the fact that we hadn’t truly connected in nearly two weeks. To clingy kids and an emotionally needy dog. To a house we’d left pretty trashed when we hastily departed for our various destinations. To germs and stress and overdue bills and unidentifiable sticky stuff on the dining room table. To 48 hours of Amazon Prime Day, Part Deux. (It’s worth noting here that most days I love my job, but the sudden shift from writing whatever the hell I wanted in the middle of an apple orchard to repeatedly SEO optimizing the same air fryer story was a particularly rude awakening.) I didn’t change out of my clothes for three days and I bet you can guess how many showers I took in that period. 

And all of my petty complaints about my amazing, privileged life pale in comparison to the news cycle I came home to. 

But here I am anyway, because once you start writing a newsletter you’re not supposed to stop or else people will stop opening it and then what was even the point of starting it in the first place? Plus, the part of me that reemerged in that brief utopia still wants to write about how I’m itching to move to a big old house outside of a small old town in a breathtakingly beautiful part of the country—except do I? Because all I can think is that any place like that (within my financial reach, anyway) will be a disappointing cesspool of ignorance and intolerance.

I also want to raise hell about my failed attempt to expose Big Baking Soda’s decades-long scam, to send you links to my favorite neon red lipstick, and to spend 500 words detailing the mountains of dirty laundry that used to line my basement just so I can tell you about a life-changing service I recently discovered.

I still plan to do all of that—with the same cognitive dissonance I’ve relied on since 2016, but probably a lot longer if I’m being honest. Maybe it’s not all bullshit either, because when I don’t even have the bandwidth to take a shower, how am I ever going to be of use to any movement?

Look, I know I keep promising I’ll go back to being fun. Except I haven’t even started getting fun on this particular medium, so just you wait. In the meantime, I appreciate you continuing to not unsubscribe while I somewhat publicly process my complicated feelings around reentering a redux of Ye Olde Personal Blogosphere. As I told

Amy Shearn

while we were in Wisconsin, it feels overly self-involved this time around—perhaps because I’m not just hitting “publish,” I’m inserting my internal monologue into people's inboxes.

As she so wisely pointed out, nobody would think that about a man doing it. I assume this is where a man would also drop the really wonderful blurb Amy wrote for his upcoming essay collection, so I’ll go ahead and do the same for mine.

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