How It Started / How It's Going: AN EPICALLY LONG NEWSLETTER

A State of the Union, all things You Are Doing A Good Enough Job

Hi There!

Last week, this newsletter (“You Are Doing A Good Enough Job”) turned 3. (Its birthday is July 28, which makes it a Leo, which tracks.) So this week I’m doing something that I only do once a year, which is: I’m writing a State of the Union letter.

This newsletter is INCREDIBLY long — almost certainly the longest I’ve ever written — and it’s full of a lot of reader input, as well as stats and figures. I waffle a little about this because how could this possibly interest you? But when newsletters I read do this, I’m compelled; I like learning what it looks like under the hood. And also, I think of “YADAGEJ” as a collaborative endeavor, which means you’re a tremendous part of what makes it work, so you should have access to the same information I have. That said, if the mechanics of newsletter-writing and this newsletter in particular is not of interest to you, skip this! I’ll be back soon with your regularly-scheduled programming.

THIS EMAIL WILL ADDRESS

• What this newsletter is, and is not

• How things have changed

• Statistics

• Reader feedback and responses

• Changes moving forward

• Squirrel

Finally, the giveaway winners were selected using this randomizer, and they’ve been emailed! Congratulations to Sarah, Ngaire, Eve, Elaine, and D!

Onward.

WHAT THIS NEWSLETTER IS, AND IS NOT

For a time, I wrote the words “you are doing a good enough job” on lots of scraps of paper, pieces of cardboard, pages of books, etc. During the pandemic, I wrote them on 30 separate index cards and mailed the cards to my high school students, whom I would never meet in person. These struck me as the most important words. I was all the time walking around berating myself for failing, sucking, being bad, doing a bad job. The story I told myself was, “I could be doing better. I don’t know why I’m not doing better!” I knew lots of good ways to beat myself up. (And for those keeping track: I still do.)

When you’re young, you think there are probably not that many people privately beating themselves up, but actually, there are tons of us. We walk every kind of life path, united by the sheer brutality of our self-deprecation. The most confident-seeming people are often screaming at themselves inside their own heads! This might be you. Or maybe you’re a lobster. Lobsters are so zen. If you’re a lobster, this newsletter isn’t for you and it never was. (Although it would be cool to write a lobster Substack, for lobsters by lobsters. You can steal that.)

This newsletter ostensibly began as a project to write pep talks to the selves who are unconvinced of their own worth. It has expanded, and now it’s about a lot of things. Mostly, I think it’s about survival. How do we survive? And once we’ve started to trust that we can survive for at least a little while, how do we begin to stretch — how do we have fun, help others, facilitate change? Big questions. It is often actually about gardens, friends, and birds. 

For the past year, the breakdown of content has been:

• On Mondays, paid subscribers get an unfiltered email from me that has a bunch of extras in it: bird-painting video classes, a book club (we read a book a quarter and meet over Zoom), a Music League (v. fun game), writing prompts, group advice, and a photo dump of things from my life that no one else in the whole world gets to see. (Would they WANT to see? I don’t know? Today I cracked an egg and it had two yolks, so there’s a picture of THAT. Just to… whet you.) (Maybe I have convinced you to join this tier, and so here a link to do that.)

• On Wednesdays (or Thursdays), I send out an essay titled “A Note for You, If You’re Having A Bad Day.” Should I change this heading? I don’t think so. That’s still what I want these to be. They used to be VERY short – clearly pep talks. Over time, they got longer, and started to be about other things: friendship, violence, heartbreak, children. At some point, they got a little too long. More about that in the “reader feedback” section.

• On Fridays I send out three things that I’m liking and recommending. These range from the mundane (blueberries) to the thrilling (blueberry cobbler, with photo and recipe!). If you’re a paid subscriber, you’ll get seven additional things.

This newsletter is not super-predictable. It’s hard to know in advance exactly what kind of essay you’re getting. It’s not a culture newsletter, which is too bad, because those are my favorite types of newsletters – but I’m way too preoccupied with blueberries to effectively write anything about culture. I have made many actual friends because people sometimes write back. Maybe the “news” in the word “newsletter” is misleading. It’s a letter. It’s a letter from a person who feels comforted knowing that she can reach across the space of the internet to say something to you.

HOW THINGS HAVE CHANGED

A bullet-point list of the shifts and evolutions since July 28, 2021:

• To be honest, I started the newsletter to chronicle my pregnancy. Between you and me, I didn’t end up being pregnant all that long. I was pregnant for the requisite nine months a human is normally pregnant, and then after that, I wasn’t pregnant anymore.

• After I gave birth, I wanted to write about having a baby. I wrote about my specific baby, in a paragraph at the bottom of the newsletter I titled “Parenting Paragraph.” That’s gone now.

• The newsletter used to come out once a week and be a lot shorter.

• The original format included just one drawing / artwork, a to-do list, all my weekly recommendations (which were, in turn, short), and a segment for pregnancy / parenting. It was much more compartmentalized. 

• Here are some early newsletters, in case you’re interested in them:

  • 1: You Are Just One Animal

  • 2: Do Not Allow Yourself To Believe That Happiness Will Have To Wait

  • 3: You Did Enough With Your Summer

• I added the paid tier about six months in, and with it, some additional content. The community began to grow. For the first several months, I didn’t realize that there even was a comments section of the newsletter! So when people left comments, I had no idea. They rarely did. It felt a little like shouting into a void, which is how it felt to have a blog for most of my adult life. 

• I’ve started toying with collaboration, in particular with my friends Lindsay Pugh and Jess Thompson. I’m interested in more of that this year; if you read that sentence and felt excited about it, please email me! Let’s talk.

STATISTICS

One of the best way to see how things have changed is to look at some data.

Post snapshot:

Look! There’ve been 300 published posts! What a round number for this three-year-anniversary post. Typically, the INVITATION posts have the highest open rate — those are the ones that go to the paid subscribers, and they tend to be short and fun, and they come with a prompt. Most public posts get about 5,500 views, and few generate any new subscribers, but occasionally there’ll be a few.

My most popular post last year was this one:

I think it’s interesting to see what links people click on inside a post (for the most part, people don’t click on links at all!). This one generated some interest in Anera, and an episode of the afrika podcast about the cultural and social history of Palestine.

Subscribers:

Here’s the retention rate. This means that About three quarters of you stick around for a year after you subscribe.

People read this newsletter all over the world! But mostly in English-speaking countries, which makes sense.

Hotspots in the United States this year are major cities. It’s the first year New Orleans hasn’t been in the top five! I love every single publication that has audience overlap with this newsletter, so I’m leaving that up.

Here’s our all-time subscriber growth. I started with 166 readers three years ago. Those big jumps are the times that Emma Beddington has written about this newsletter in The Guardian. (Thank you, Emma. It has made a big difference, as you can see!)

Paid subscribers make up a mighty 324 of you. (Add to the ranks right now, if you dare!)

I’ve got more statistics, thanks to the readership survey I sent out a few weeks ago. A nice sample size of 220 people responded to the survey, providing the following demographic statistics:

Someone put their email address down as their gender, and I crossed it out to protect their identity. Which is not to say there is anything wrong with having an email address as a gender! That’s great!

So that’s who’s here! Let’s see what you had to say.

READER FEEDBACK AND RESPONSES

Your responses were really helpful and enlightening! I won’t get to all of them here, but I read every single one, and felt waves upon waves of gratitude. Thank you for being here. Thank you for sharing with me. A lot of this was quite surprising to me, and will help guide what I do moving forward!

Let’s start with this: you’re all fairly clear on what you like best, and your answer is gratifying:

There were also quite a few write-in responses: mostly people who wondered if it was helpful to check everything (IT WAS!), and people who liked photos and pictures.

Topping out the list of interests are “Finding joy” (the vast majority of you want to read about that, and it brings ME joy to know that), followed closely by “Friendship / non-romantic relationship structures” (which is VERY exciting because that is precisely what my next book is about!). Less interesting to you: polyamory and parenting. And those camps are split: people who wanted to hear about parenting tended not to want to hear about polyamory, while people who wanted to hear about polyamory tended no to want to hear about parenting! Interesting!

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Write-ins that appeared a few times:

• BIRDS. (The people who love birds really love them and write about them with GREAT ENTHUSIASM, lots of CAPS, and exclamation points. Which I LOVE.)

• Food

• Whatever I have time for / depends on when I receive the email and how busy I am

• “The Sophie of it all.” (Thank you.) (I love the you of it all, too.)

• Essays that incorporate comics / art

There is less that doesn’t interest you, though a good number of folks are not at all interested in parenting. As a person who used to not be a parent, I fully understand this. And not for nothing, there is a LOT of content about parenting out there already.

The write-ins for this one were overwhelmingly very kind notes about how you will read whatever I write, which actually deeply touched me and wasn’t something I expected. A few write-ins were people assuring me that while they don’t like, say, pigeons, it doesn’t mean I shouldn’t write about pigeons.

I appreciated that many of you find the newsletter a bit too long. (This particular post is definitely too long.) There are probably topics that could be split into more than one newsletter! Guess what? That makes my life easier! So thank you for this feedback!

Content you suggested:

This was a helpful series of comments, and I am not going to post all of them here. Instead, I’ve grouped the most common ones into categories and am excerpting a few specific notes that spoke to the group.

To those of you who are just here because it’s here, and it’s become what it’s become (I cannot take full credit for this): thank you. I have heard you, I am humbled.

• MENTAL HEALTH:

  • How to deal with fear of trying new things (like a career change, picking up new hobbies), how to un-learn the "protestant work ethic" and feeling like every waking hour has to be productive

  • Feeling of isolation; Age gaps and how older-younger women relate to each other (I’m an old fart can you tell? Hahah)

  • I love your thoughts on creating a joyful engaged life, and forgiving yourself for what you can't do. I'm always interested in how you navigate the complexities of multiple relationships including your child.

• PARENTING:

  • I love the parenting stuff and would like to know more about how it's changed you as a person and your relationships

  • I always want to see more parenting content but that’s just me and my stage in life… my kid is the same age as T!

  • I'd personally be curious for more info about how you're navigating poly and parenthood, but that is also very very personal and I'd hate to ask you to share if you didn't want to.

  • As someone who's considering being a parent the parenting stuff is super interesting to me but again, I love it all

• PROCESS:

  • I would love to hear more about your process making art

  • One’s roiling relationship with creativity

  • It would be fun to get updates on what you’re up to professionally

  • I feel very much like I’m asking a working mom a cliche about “how you do it all?” but am curious how you balance relationships, teaching, this newsletter, plus you are vegan so that’s like a lot of meal planning right there.

  • I'd love to hear more about your life as a writer! How's that novel coming along? What's your writing routine been like lately? How do you balance parenting and writing? What does being a writer/artist mean to you? How do you handle "productivity" when it comes to writing and art making? How do you motivate yourself to write? Really any and all thoughts, musings, and/or advice on writerly stuff

  • Creativity, process, carving time, finding validity in the doing as much as the outcome

• WHAT YOU PROMISED US!

  • More content along the theme of "you are doing a good enough job" - like something more uplifting and encouraging, although I know platitudes can be frustrating and feel hollow. Maybe more concrete ideas on different ways of improving your life (e.g. I was very interested when you talked about your experiments with intermittent fasting and the like but they have only been tred on lightly!) That was what I originally subscribed for and though I enjoy what I am reading it would also be great to have that.

  • I first subscribed because I loved your message about doing a good enough job. It was so inspiring. At the time, I was a burned out workaholic and never felt like I was doing a good enough job. I love this kind of content where you honestly discuss the impacts of capitalism and productivity culture on us as people and mothers. It helped a lot during a very hard time.

• QUEERNESS / RELATIONSHIPS

  • I'd be interested to hear more about asexuality.

  • Absolutely would not complain if there was more about kinship/friendship/chosen family stuff.

  • I'd love to hear more about the polyamory experience, and how it's been navigating it.

  • more on romantic relationships that are non-traditional rg Asexual, A-romantic

  • how relationships and nontraditional kinship can fit into a career

• BIRDS:

  • Never too many birds :)

  • Dude I’m sorry I’m just here for birds

  • More of your bird art, if you don’t mind sharing :)

• OTHER

  • I really love when you write about teaching (since I am also an educator)

  • Food, always

  • International / travel

  • I love your recipes/tips! I’ve been making your peanut sauce (salad, too) weekly for months. And the tofu ricotta

  • I love the lists - it's nice to hear about things that people are passionate about or that are saving them right now. Big and little things.

  • Neurodivergence

  • One thing I really liked about Many Love is the way you wove drawings into the text, not just as illustrations, but as part of the narrative. If that’s still something you’re into, I’d happily enjoy that kind of content in both words and drawings in a newsletter as well!

A few comments I’d like to respond to:

To the person who wrote this comment: thank you so much. This was a gross oversight on my part, and your pointing it out was really helpful! I went back and changed that part of the last post because of what you’ve written here. Of course it hurts. What I initially wrote wasn’t even close to true, either! I appreciate when people problematize jokes / comedy, and help me better understand language. This is an invitation to all of you to feel free to respond to newsletters with language that bothered you for one reason or another. I’ve edited at least a dozen newsletters for this reason, and the main thing I feel about this feedback is GRATITUDE. Truly!

And yes. MORE QUEER STUFF IN GENERAL. Heard.

Thank you. Over time, I have been learning about authenticity and how it interacts with writing and art. I actually think its an area where I’ve improved in the past ten years or so.

In terms of “making it for yourself”: I think this will turn into a longer post about what it means to make art for oneself, but this newsletter is special to me because it is collaborative. It started out as one thing, which was entirely for me, honestly, and it was fine; it felt similar to other writing projects I’ve done in my life. But as it became this other thing, because of those of you who read it and interact with it, I fell so much more deeply in love with it. I appreciate that this work can be in conversation with you.

Asking how something is landing feels really authentic to me! I do change — not just what I write or how I write it, but how I live and feel — based on what I hear from and with other people.

(I started writing this response and realized how much more I have to say about it, so I guess stay tuned. :) )

What’s working:

This prompt is the one that made me cry hardest when I read your responses; I had to step away several times. Your comments feel kind of private to me; special kindnesses that I want to keep close to my own heart. That said, here are a few general themes that stood out:

• Honesty / truthfulness / authenticity

• The community

• Humor

• Art / drawings

• The feeling that the writing has come from a friend

• Personal essay / anecdotes

• Writing style / point of view

• Recommendations / 10 things

• “Good luck out there, bravely facing all that breaks your heart.”

Room for improvement:

Thank you for writing to this prompt. I heard quite a few iterations on this theme:

Isn’t it interesting how difficult it is to be gentle with oneself, even when it’s so obvious that other people should be gentle with themselves? Many of you said you wished that I wouldn’t talk about how I was letting you down, or taking weeks off. This hadn’t struck me before!

There were many people who said that the newsletter is a little too frequent. That’s great news for me; I’d like to publish a little less often! This is the main change I’m planning as we move into the next year of programming.

To this point:

Inability to pay should never prevent you from reading as much as you want to! As always, you can email me and ask me for a paid subscription, and I’m happy to comp one for you at any time, no questions asked.

This is good and helpful feedback, and if it’s pissing you off, it isn’t petty! I wish there was a good word for the kind of vegetarian that I am, but there may not be. I guess that “vegetarian” will have to do!

It would be irresponsible to not tell you that the bird people also asked for more bird content. There are some real bird SPAMmers in this group and I’m not mad about it.

Finally, these comments:

A NOTE:

Many of you wrote long comments that were really important and impactful to me, but the way the Google Forms gives me information made it hard to reach out to you individually and thank you. If there’s anything you wrote in a comment you’d like me to respond to, please email me and let me know. You can just write, “I wrote about you coming to paint birds on my house,” and I’ll find the comment and respond.

CHANGES MOVING FORWARD

Based on your feedback, I’m going to break up the newsletter so it comes out every other week! You’ll get the same three emails, but over a two-week span of time rather than a weekly span.

SQUIRRELS

I’m going to end with the question about the squirrel.

And now I am going to show you Every. Single. Write-in. Response. I want you to know that in real life I laughed out loud FOUR SEPARATE TIMES while constructing this list. I couldn’t help it; you were very funny. Many of you gave me nice compliments on my watercolor, and to these I say: THANK YOU. I appreciate the time you have taken to look at a watercolor and say something nice about it!

The main takeaway I have is that only AMERICANS say squirrel in a way that rhymes with girl. And also, a whole lot of people said that you should listen to a German person try to pronounce the word “squirrel.”

• I prefer a grey squirrel.

• Thank you for the squirrel!

• This is a good squirrel.

• I love that squirrel.

• I don’t like squirrels because they eat my garden but this is a nice painting of my nemesis.

• Cool art! How did you make it?

• good squirrel. squirrel is good.

• That is a wonderful squirrel, I like how it is smiling

• squirrel does not rhyme with girl in my accent!

• That squirrel slaps

• I love them on the one hand, on the other, please stop living in my roof, Squirrels!

• Thank you squirrel 🫶Y

• I really love the splooshy watercolor splotches

• I recently heard about someone whose father said they wanted to be reincarnated as either a bird or a carnivorous squirrel. Haha

• It makes me think of the video of Germans trying to pronounce “squirrel”Yes, that is a squirrel.

• Yes, that is a squirrel AND I think a LITTLE more than others I bet about how "squirrel" rhymes with "girl." (BUT NOT TOO MUCH)

• There's a line in a recent Ocean Vuong poem that reads, "That's how I found out I was a squirrel. That's how I lot my tail, the only thing I was great at." I love that line.

• My squirrels love the cheap peanuts from Costco that I set out for them.

• Also, "squirrel" is the hardest word in English for Germans to pronounce.

• My aunt had a “friend” whose name was squirrel.

• My dad is from Ireland and he pronounces it “s-KWER-ell”

• What a cute and gorgeous squirrel! Love the colors and the tail.

• I love how hard it is for some people (esp other languages like german) to pronounce squirrel.

• it's beautiful❤️

• I recently saw a squirrel climb down a long chord holding my bird feeder and then try to chew it so that it could get to the bird seed once it fell to the ground. I was so impressed.

• I really enjoy this particular squirrel It's a good squirrel.

• Love it!

• Your art makes me like wild animals more (esp birds which I used to have no interest in)

• It’s a really pretty squirrel.

• My kids like to scream at them and chase them so I generally see them in a more terrified state.

• Thank you! I love them! I have them in my garden. And owl younglings that keep us awake at night. And a possibly pregnant hedgehog. (Will that be a problem with the owls?)

• my dog is wild about squirrels and by association so am i

• This is a lovely squirrel.

• I want to like squirrels but I have complicated feelings as I saw one eat a magpie's eggs when I was a child and the mother bird cried outside my window for three days.

• Thank you for the squirrel! It has a full and flowing tail

• the way I say it - squirrel doesn't rhyme with girl - so this made me laugh

• Yay!

• For reasons unknown, my dad has called my three sisters and me his "squirrels" for as long as I can remember. We give each other squirrel-themed gifts regularly for this reason. My parents have slowly introduced squirrel decor to their house. Squirrel content is very nostalgic.

• A CUTE squirrel.

• I have to look out for squirrels because my dog goes crazy chasing after them and it's not good for her back. But they're lovely creatures.

• I LOVE squirrels and I love watercolor—you get me (and you don’t even know me)

• Well this is making me reeeally want to paint, and I haven't picked up a brush in maybe two years. So props! The squirrel is delightful.

• That’s a pretty cool looking squirrel!

• Squirrels hung out in my deck box over the winter and now I’m afraid of opening it.

• LOVE THE SQYIRREL!

• I love him! He’s so cute

• I love squirrels a lot

• I love learning the word squirrel in other languages because it's usually a very strange group of letters and sounds (including in English). Did you know that the Dutch word for squirrel is "eekhoorn" which sounds like "acorn" in English?

• I love to watch squirrels. I just wish they were a bit less possessive of my back deck and chairs! They do live to eat the tulips and fig inthe potted plants.

• Great squirrel!

• Thst is a lovely painting of a squirrel.

• Amy has this print in her home

• I *love* the squirrel!

• Just keep it out of my attic and we’re good.

• Oh god thank you so much for that squirrel I literally said that out loud when I saw it

• I love it

• Squirrel doesn’t rhyme with girl in the uk. Hence whenever I hear someone’s accent where it does, I say it out loud “squerl”. I absolutely love it. It’s right up there with mirror “Merrr”. Also that’s a fine squerl

• Haha, I wondered what original questions you might ask, before I clicked on the survey. This is the type of thing I wanted, but didn't know i wanted. In British English, they don't sound quite the same. Squirrel rhymes with seagull, the way I say it, and I'm from the Midlands.

• I think we have very different accents!

• Ah, the squirrel is beautiful.

• It's wonderful!

• Beautiful squirrel

• I love her.

• What do you mean "squirrel" rhymes with "girl"?! English is crazy

• i love this squirrel!!!!

• I love how you used the splashes of color to show the depth of the squirrels fir! Beautiful! I want to give it a nut or an acorn or a kazoogorgeous!

• I love to think about how squirrels in Holland, Michigan have black fur! I’ve only ever seen them in that specific location!

• This squirrel looks hopeful. Like the one in Sword in the Stone before she learns Arthur is a boy.

• That is a great squirrel bc of the fizzy energy of it! I find squirrels frustratingly destructive (ONE bite out of that fruit, really?) but my best friend’s brother growing up used to be actively scared of them and would yell “AHH SQUIHWAH” so now my brain does that every time I see one.

• love squirrel tails in general and this drawing’s in particular

• WHO IS MID ON SQUIRRELS?! They are majestic

• I think squirrels are very funny, and my little brother used to pretend to be a squirrel at recess when he was younger. He and his friends had names like grandpa squirrel and mommy squirrel. The boys were the squirrels and the girls were the puppies and they had a rivalry. I think it's a great story but he's embarrassed by it now.

• My dog , Mia does not care about squirrels

• It doesn't rhyme with girl if you're English!!

• I love the way you SEE! Such a lovely squirrel.

• we have a squirrel that comes and eats from our bird feeder and one of my former roommates named him Snarmff

• i want to also be able to paint like this!

• So pretty!

• Do you speak French? Saying "squirrel" in French is a great way to wiggle out of a bleak mood.

• Look, the squirrel is even smiling a little bit. A shy smile, but it is a smile. You look cute, little one! Yes you do!

• This made me think of the pet squirrel I had growing up. His name was Chipper. Big fan of this squirrel.

• I had a squirrel chew through my walls into my house once and torment me for 3 days before I caught it and released it, and still I like squirrels.

• Every time I order a swirl ice cream cone, my husband says, “A squirrel cone?!” and laughs at himself

• Charli xcx remix 2 “squirrel, so confusing”

• I'd like to know how the squirrel spends its days. And how it smells after autumn days ruffling through leaves and sitting in late sunshine.

• I love the squirrel and also have you ever listening to native German speakers try to say squirrel in English?

• i love squirrels, and chipmunks. they are my favorite animals actually. i wish i could have a squirrel as a pet.

• A squirrel ran into my bike when I was in college once. I hope he was okay.