I'm waiting til this is perfect before I post it..

But in the meantime, I'm done with waiting.

Today is my birthday.

Yesterday was my birthday.

It was my birthday last week.

I had set out to do something big to celebrate myself. Not big in an outward way - like a party or a fancy restaurant or a weekend away, but big in an internal way. This birthday wouldn’t just be a shift in my age and another year passing. But a shift in my identity as I moved past some long held beliefs (that come with some rather rude commentary);

I do not have what it takes to be a writer.

I have no place being a writer.

Mean girl: *Scoff* You? A writer?? Please. Writers have to, um, WRITE! All you’ve ever done is NOT write. (huge eye roll)

So, my BIG celebration would be…My. Very. First. Post. on Substack, a platform for writers! 

Softened mean girl after 15+ years of working on myself: You can do it Hun! All it takes to be a writer is to write. And if you just write, word after word after word - and not give up like you’ve always done (Dammit, sorry!) then you’re automatically a writer, right?

I had set up my profile in November. I had a beautiful first post all, mostly, sort of, ready to go. I just needed to make some final tweaks but then, you know, Christmas. So January would of course be the perfect moment to - ‘Ta daaa, Here I am writing, on a writers platform nonetheless!’

However, I was unaware that in 2024 the month after January switched to May. (I wasn’t notified ahead of time. Were you?).

So yeah, I just needed to quickly finish up those tweaks (Too bad that post was all about the death and decay of November and May is about….Hmm, yeah, definitely gotta make some tweaks).

And then of course I needed to figure out exactly how I was going to use this space and exactly what I was going to write about (being a proud new writer and all). All the experts and seasoned writers say you definitely need to have that dialed in so that you can clearly articulate to your readers what you’re all about and what they can expect - especially if you have any expectation of turning those readers into paid subscribers.

But all that tweaking a few things led to trashing everything. 

Figuring out what I was going to write about, led to not writing about anything.

Figuring out exactly how I was going to use this space led to not using it at all.

And now, it’s the future, and my zero subscribers have nothing to read. 

It was waiting to be clear that made me more confused. 

It was waiting to figure it out ahead of time that made me waste time.

It was waiting to get it just right that got me nowhere.

So here I am, the week after my birthday. 7 months after I created my account. 16 years after I started (and stopped) my first blog. 25 years after I wrote the words, “I just want to write, take pictures, create art and ponder life” in the pages of one of my countless journals. 35 years after I called myself a poet because I had just written a poem (a charming ditty about sunsets and fall colours) and at 9 years old, that was all the validation and permission I needed to feel like one. 

Here I am, the moment after I decided I am done with waiting. The moment after the pain of not being a writer became too unbearable. The moment after I pushed and pushed myself to get to the end of this piece. The moment after my finger nervously hovered above ‘Publish’ as I hesitated for the very last time. 

So here I am. And if the above doesn’t give you enough clues as to what I’m all about and what you can expect, let me try to paint a clearer picture. (Surprisingly, now that I’m done with all that waiting to get clear I’m starting to feel a lot more clear. Interesting.)

I am about so many things. But mostly, I am about constantly excavating the mine of our human experience where all those many things meet and melt and merge into each other to become just one thing; Wholeness.

To be human, a whole human, is to embrace and explore and accept, despite not wanting to, that you are all of the things. You are lovely and amazing and beautiful, but you are also unpleasant and awful and brutal sometimes. Sometimes, a lot of the time. You are magnificent and glorious and extraordinary. But you are also ordinary and dull and boring. You are brilliant and capable of so much. And yet you often sell yourself short and you hold yourself back and you say dumb things and you don’t do what you say you’re going to do. Even though you really really want to. You are raw and wild and imperfect.

You are all of it and I am here for it.

And through my writing and images and storytelling and meditations and musings, I will hold a gentle, tender and still space for us to try and make sense of all of it together.

And we won’t wait. We’ll do it now. So get comfortable, take a nice deep breath and let’s begin.

Your whole and true and wild self is waiting for you.

xo