I’ve put together a newsletter on Substack summarizing my July work, and this month I decided to make it feel a little more handmade.
I wrote out my notes by hand, scanned them, and included them in the newsletter. I was also excited to create the cover illustration. It captures how it feels to be balancing on top of this enormous project I’m building, Realmscapes, while knowing there’s nothing beneath me to catch me if I fall.
Not fail. Fall.
I don’t think losing sight of a self-declared purpose in life is failure. It’s more of a setback. A pause. Possibly an opportunity to look around and ask, “All right, where did the floor go?”
When I was working in the corporate world, I’d accumulated files and files of finished projects, proof that my days had been filled with a variety of tasks and challenges. But after I retired, I didn’t have drawers of stuff that proved “I did that”. In my head, the days melded together, seemingly filled with the same routine seven days a week. Every day was Groundhog Day, and I was Bill Murray, watching the hours melt into one another until I couldn’t stand it anymore. Did I even exist? Or was I just a fantastical idea in somebody else’s mind, like something from the Twilight Zone?
I had to do something. I bought a small book called A Line a Day and began recording something that happened every day, whenever I remembered. Eventually, it became one of those things I had to do before going to bed. Each book holds five years of daily entries, and I’m now about thirty days away from starting Book Three. It was a good start.
But it was just a line, and it often became something like “We had really yummy hamburgers for lunch.” Meaningless, really. Would Future Me care what I ate ten years ago for lunch? So the second thing I did was start a morning journal. Some artists call this “morning pages,” a term from a well-known book about creativity. Again, it took a few months before it became a real habit. Now, when I look back at the years I’ve spent writing this way, I wish I had started much younger.
My old journals remind me of things I tried, things I accomplished, places I’ve been, and all the daily ups and downs of being human. They’re where I sort through the many things floating around in my head. I can rant there without fear of reprisal, then go back later and laugh at what I wrote.
After that, it wasn’t long before I began blogging. I wrote more about that in this post. Blogging became a place where I could be the person I imagined myself to be. The kind of person I’d like to be friends with. After a couple of years of writing posts, I began posting the drawings and paintings I made. Now I love looking back at the artwork I’ve posted over the years. Realmscapes has evolved into my online museum, where I can drop off my little darlings and give them a forever home.
Forever, in this case, means as long as the internet allows. I really should formally archive everything on my own hard drive, too. Note to self.
By putting my work out into the world, I can examine it more objectively from a distance. I can see what I want to change, what I’ve learned, and how I’d like to make the next thing better.
And now there’s the newsletter.
Honestly, I’ve been threatening to make a regular newsletter for about two years. The problem was that traditional online newsletters used to be rather complicated. You needed an email service, a subscriber list, a way to market it yourself, and a real address to publish in every email (aka a post office box, because who wants to publish their real address for all those nut cases to find?). All of that costs money. It might be worth it if you have something to sell, but for me, it just wasn’t the right choice.
Then Substack came along. Perfect. It’s great for newsletters. It isn’t as useful for displaying artwork or building a portfolio, but it works beautifully for sending occasional notices directly to people who are interested in what I’m doing. People who might want to read about the things I’ve been making, thinking about, and attempting. People who may be looking for solutions to problems of their own.
Or to nobody. And it doesn’t matter. Bonus: I don’t have to get involved at all. I don’t have to sell myself, justify my writing, or explain my art. Just do what I do anyway, which is write and draw and paint.
So now I not only have the blogs on my website, I have a monthly newsletter. I feel as if I can check off the box called “I’m Real” on life’s existential Bingo card.
The newsletter gives me another way to look back at what I’ve done, which helps me decide what I want to do next. It’s another little record of a life that can otherwise feel as if it’s disappearing into the fog.
If you’re retired and the days are beginning to melt into one another, you might try journaling, blogging, making a newsletter, or some combination of all three. You may be surprised by how much you’re actually doing, especially when so many of those things seem to disappear as soon as the day is over.
Sometimes it helps to leave yourself a trail of breadcrumbs.
P.s. You can download your own copy of the August newsletter here.
