New Leafbyjana Chapter

Bye-bye mailchimp, hello Substack

After spending thirty minutes attempting to load a photograph into mailchimp and getting nothing, I decided to just go and export my small batch of subscribers and head straight over to substack, something I’ve been considering doing for a while. If you’re not interested in moving with me into this new medium, I get it, feel free hit unsubscribe and no hard feelings.

I’m always reluctant to make moves like this, jumping on a new platform. I truly wish that everyone was still on Xanga, honestly, because what really has changed between then and now? The UI is easier to manage? Less full of cheesy background music and dancing hamsters and visibly bad code and hacks for “designing” your page? We’re still just one person sending a Kathleen Kelly message out into the void…only without the dial-up modem soundtrack.

For being part of the generation that bridged the distance between literal handwritten letters to friends from camp and youth group conferences to funny mass email chains and updates, to MySpace, Xanga, Blogspot, Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Wordpress, and (finally, where my current site resides) Squarespace (www.leafbyjana.com). Changing content systems is usually frustrating and always time-consuming.

I came to Mailchimp and the newsletter trend with skepticism. Why don’t people just read the blog posts? Do they really WANT more email? Strategy is not one of my giftings; in my experience, the insights gained from newsletter statistics only serve to fuel my self-doubt and dips into cynicism and anxiety. Why did that person unsubscribe? Why did they add to their report that they never subscribed? They did! Just because I haven’t written a newsletter in 4.5 years and they don’t remember ever subscribing to my newsletter, much less meeting me that one time! (If you don’t remember subscribing, it’s ok. You can still leave, just don’t hit my account with the “I never knew the girl” jazz.)

It’s really my friend Jen Zug who slowly broke down my resistance to moving to a yet another medium. I have followed Jen since we were introduced by a mutual friend over Twitter a decade or more ago. She, too, had a blog, a youtube channel, and more, and just this last year has been writing regularly at substack. I hadn’t seen Jen in a couple of years, and I ran into her about a month ago at a baby shower for the same mutual friend who introduced us originally.

We were chatting about the baby, the party, life updates, and I was telling her how much I was enjoying her recent posts. This was small talk with subtext. I don’t see Jen often, but there are big moments in my life associated with Jen and her husband Bryan—like a beautiful night talking about musical moments and being introverts on their rooftop patio shortly after I moved to Seattle. Also, completely falling apart on their sofa the night after the day I got laid off from my dream job about a year after that. There is no small talk with some people. There are just stepping stones of words floating above the canyon of personhood and lived experience and connection.

Floating beneath the surface our small talk a month ago, for example, were the spectres of cancer, unemployment and job-searching, broken dreams, day jobs, mortgages, debt, medical bills, kids growing up, friendships and migraines and anxiety and depression and and and….

Little did we know (as the story goes) that a week later our community of friends would be rocked by another deep and haunting loss. Instead of welcoming a new baby into the world as we planned to do at that shower, those who celebrated our friend’s joyful hope that day found ourselves with whiplash and walking through the Valley of the Shadow with our friend and her husband as their daughter Beatrix was stillborn at 37 weeks, just a week after we anticipated her arrival at the baby shower. (For the full story, https://gofund.me/31aab256)

In the wake of tragedy, certain things become very clear—like the advantages of not currently working full-time. Yes, I am 43 years old, living in my parents’ basement. I have no regular income, medical insurance, or retirement at present. I need dental work, new contacts and glasses, and definitely some more therapy, but I CAN drive to Seattle at the drop of a hat to sit in the hospital room with my heavily medicated friend, sleep on the tiny sofa in a dream-waking state as nurses come and go to check vitals, draw blood, administer meds. I can watch “Wakanda Forever” on her small laptop screen and bring her ice chips and takeout food. I can give her a ride home in my nearly 20-year-old compact car that is short a hubcap and needs new brakes and pick up her prescriptions at a pharmacy and tangle with the pharmacist about the prescriptions being sent to the wrong pharmacy and how I’m not about to drive to South Lake Union at 4pm on a Friday afternoon because my friend needs her next dose of oxy in an hour.

I may not be able to book a dental appointment or make a feasible plan to eventually replace my old (but still delightful and functional) car with any certainty, but I can show up with unstinting time.

“America doesn’t have a great value for availability,” observed another friend of mine recently, when I showed up at her place to fill in for her nanny’s vacation for a week. “It’s one of the things I noticed when I lived in overseas. People can and do show up when there’s need—their schedules aren’t packed with meetings and due dates and classes and non-negotiable obligations.”

Of course, I wasn’t the only one showing up for our friends in the wake of loss. A whole team of people jumped in to help, many of whom do have obligations and jobs and kids and schools and packed schedules. The week I am there, a neighbor comes regularly to feed the cats, clean the litterbox, and gradually clear weeds from the garden, a handful at a time. She comes over several times a week after her full-time job.

Other friends with jobs and kids got the emergency text and showed up to scrub the house from top to bottom as an act of grief anger and prayer during the hours of the emergency C-section at the hospital. Some showed up to run errands, clean out the fridge and freezer, bring food, offer rides to medical appointments, help with FMLA paperwork and navigating the financial and medical follow-up paperwork. One mutual friend from long ago showed up to help one day when I was there and we just washed both of their cars, the smell of car wash soap reminding us of our youth fund-raising days.

So even though I don’t know exactly why I am here or what I have to tell you yet, there is still this sense that showing up—presence—matters.

Some of you are here for the artwork. Some of you are here for the stories. I honestly don’t know why some of you are here other than that, but I appreciate you for signing up after that one art show that one time 4.5 or 9 years ago, who knows? (but you DID. you DID sign up.)

Your presence matters to me. Infrequency of updates aside, consider this newsletter a symbol of that mattering.

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Here’s what you can expect on occasion here on the Substack:

-Art and writing about art. I am a multidisciplinary visual artist, and work frequently in between my jobs catering, helping people move, and searching for full-time work.

-Speaking of searching for full-time work, I’ve got some words to write about WORK, vocation, and the pitfalls, failures, doubts, and dreams deferred. Gig work, service industry, my exodus out of the Seattle tech and startup world, and more.

-Auntie-hood. Speaking of vocation, the one that brings me most joy these days is being Auntie to many, including a few of my own family members.

-Faith. I’m still a person of deep faith and hope, a Christian against the odds. It is as natural and wholistic for me to speak from a faith perspective as it is to wrestle with doubt and fear, so you will certainly find much of that wrestling shown in the conversation here.

I hope you join me in exploring Substack (and maybe making it a bit of a throwback to the brief and heady days of Xanga community).