THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN'
AND SO IS THIS NEWSLETTER
HAPPY TUESDAY, F-WORDERS!
This week on THE F WORD:
Changes. New growth. And an announcement embedded in this essay.
Onwards!
When I was seventeen, my friend and I skipped the last period of the school day and headed down to the water in my Buick.
Growing up in a relatively small beach town, the ocean was a frequent player to our hijinks; a character that was ever-present in our desire to prove we were free, we were adult. Whenever we felt too expansive for our skin, which was pretty much all the time, to ocean we would go.
It was there, on that shore and in those waters, that I grew up. The ocean saw me do many things in service of this growing: beach days and boogie boards and boredom. It watched as I ate sushi on the beach after prom (an ironic way to return fish back to their home). It saw me run from the cops after pouring Kool-Aid and bubble bath in the town fountain. The ocean saw me naked: baring myself to the moon and my friends. It lapped at my toes while I sat crying on its sandy shores, feeling like a pariah because the boy I liked didn’t like me back.
On this particular day, my friend’s eighteenth birthday, the ocean was a bystander as we walked down the pier smoking cigars.
For what else are eighteenth birthdays for if not for legally-purchasing cigars and porn? We chose the cheapest cigars we could find at the smoke shop and walked to the pier bathroom to light them. As I was the expert (not from personal experience, but I had grown up watching my uncle smoke cigars in his driveway and therefore was the keeper of all cigar-knowledge), I was the designated lighter-er. We didn’t have a cigar cutter, so we bit off the ends. However crude this methodology, somehow, we eventually got them lit.
We fought back our coughs—for to cough would be a shameful mark of our juvenility—and we walked down the pier. I, who loved paradox, wore my tightest, most dainty little blue sundress, and enjoyed the derisive stares as I took part in something so masculine and adult as smoking a cigar.
When I look back on this seventeen-year-old version of myself, I’m very fond of her. She was dramatic, passionate, and had a penchant for healthy chaos. She was also incredibly uptight, a perfectionist, and would have a long way to go to heal the parts of her she didn’t even know needed healing.
We can all look back at our childhood selves with fondness and a slight sense of condescension, but what’s important to remember is that we are always embodying a past version of that Self. Not only are we walking, talking onions, layered with all of our Selves, but the skin we are in now and the choices we make while wearing it will someday be a layer to that same onion. We live in a present that will someday soon be the past.
For something so inevitable, it’s a wonder why we fear change.
We celebrate milestones like birthdays and hold ceremonies for graduations and passing seasons; but change is more constant than this. It is marked through wrinkles and the sloughing of skin cells. It is marked by loose strands of hair, chipped paint, door knobs worn down of their coating, wooden banisters smoothed by palms, shoe tread wearing thin, a frayed hole in a well-loved pair of jeans. Trees grow taller and trees rot and collapse: both are evidence of change.
For my part, the strokes on this keyboard I have made a million times over begin to show signs of wear. Those strokes eventually became and sustained this newsletter. They have brought me to you, and you to me, and have been a source of reflection, growth, and a reclaiming of the parts of myself I have tried to keep hidden.
The F Word was born from Shame: the Shame I had over Failing to publish the novel I had written. It was bred from the Failure to find someone to sponsor our visa to stay in London, the Failure to secure a publishing job, the Failure I felt at being isolated by the pandemic in a state that I hated, and all as a new mother, and all while in a relationship that was changing and cracking in ways I didn’t understand yet. Throughout the past seven years of my life, I have felt that feeling that I did so many times as a girl and as a young woman:
I am too expansive for my skin. To the ocean I go.
I am not that woman any more. I am not that writer. And it is time for this newsletter to change.
On a road trip this past weekend, I realized with a stark jolt that I have not Failed in a very long time. I have grown comfortable in this routine of every Tuesday, publishing a piece of writing I wrote mere hours before. I am comfortable with and love connecting with you every Tuesday, and knowing that you’re connecting with me, too, and sharing little ponderings and silly memes and quick thoughts. I have loved the community I have found here, and I hope that we will stay that way, even through this change.
Because now it is time to embark on something bigger: a sharpening of skills and pencils and observations. A quest of more depth than breadth. A bigger project, and hopefully, one on which you’ll still want to be along for the ride.
This will be a newsletter that publishes twice a month, but explores life and depth and the inherent connection between culture and experience; plumbing depths that a weekly deadline is too rigid for. I don’t have all the details yet, nor a concrete outline, but something new is growing in this space.
Still The F Word, but with expanded curiosity towards environmentalism, feminism, spirituality, and, of course, Failing.
It was the ocean that watched me grow; that held all the versions of me in her waters. She watched as I made mistakes, found joy, sadness, and explored all the parts of myself and the world around me.
If you feel that this new change suits you, too, can we be in that ocean together? Weathering the changes and newness?
You in?
Stay tuned,
Steph x
All in and buckled up!
I love to think that 17-year-old Meg was just a few miles down the beach, waiting to be your friend.