This is a paid post for my (oh-so-modern) patrons but I have included a paragraph or two to help you get a feel for whether you would like to join my community (£4 month or £40 year - I don’t raise this or do offers) and hopefully still get some value for not hitting delete. These days I mainly write for my paid supporters with less frequent free posts. I aim to be a trusted source. I write weekly and cover writing guidance, reflective personal essays on creativity and creative living, prose sketchbook pieces and other miscellaneous fragments from my life as a therapist alongside rock, including runic readings, travel dispatches and brief contemplations. There is a large back-catalogue. I am inordinately grateful for your eyes, your attentiveness, and your support. If you don’t want to subscribe, but would like to support my writing please consider reading or gifting one of my books: Grounded (2021) and Weathering (2024). For the latter, there is a free-for-everyone slow read here. You can also leave a kind review.
A recent post for work inspiration: Radical Work Propositions
A recent post for deep reflection: Unfathomable things
Have you ever noticed the way a seemingly innocuous question can arrive in your life in relation to one thing, but then become a unifying thread through other deeper reflections too, taking up a sort of ‘Socratic’ residency within your life, for a brief time?
With my last post bringing me new paid subscribers, for the first time I found myself anxiously wondering how do I keep you here? Since I started writing on Substack I have adopted a consistent stance that I don’t fret over who comes and goes, and I don’t check. This is for you to exercise your freedom to come and go without fear of offending me, and it’s for me so that I won’t feel bruised or worried that I am doing something ‘wrong’ by writing what I write. I don’t want to write with the constraint of fear, or with the impossible task of pleasing everyone, or with a motivation to ‘deliver value’ (which is quite ineffable when it comes to my writing – I write to you from my heart with intuition, not with clickbait or strategic growth in mind). I have to trust that if you stay it’s because you find value, and if you go, it’s because you don’t, or for many other reasons that are none of my business. And so I took myself by surprise when I found myself considering ways, new readers, to keep you here. How could I try and prevent you from reading that post and then immediately cancelling your subscription? What would my next post need to be in order not to disappoint you?
I will spare you a breakdown of the following hours of my fruitless pondering and simply say I arrived where I began: My task is to be who I am. I cannot make you stay.