This is my conversation with
. It was such a good conversation that it could have easily gone another hour. Her Substack, is wonderful and I look forward to reading her entries every Sunday. Please, make sure to check out and subscribe to her publication.We talked a lot and even though this is a long interview that I’m sharing with you, our actual conversation was even longer and we covered a few more topics. Maybe a podcast is in store for the future for Constantly Curious? Perhaps. We’ll stick to text for now. Please, enjoy.
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One word that comes to mind when I read your work is, ‘clarity.’ Do you feel that when you write or do you discover things as you write?
“I think it's both. And it just depends on the day and the time and the topic. And I think it ultimately depends on what I'm writing about and how the idea came to me. Because sometimes it's like the clarity arrives first, and then I build the framework around it. Sometimes a perfect sentence will just arrive out of nowhere, and I'm like, thank you, perfect sentence. And I write it down in the notes app, in my phone, or in my little notebook, but I have no idea what else it's connected to. And so in that case, I feel like I dig around and find the framework around it. But then other times, in my notebook, I have lists of all these topics that I want to write about. And I think in those cases, the writing is to find the clarity. And oftentimes, and it's the most magical thing, when it happens, I will start off writing something really thinking I'm saying one thing, and by the time I'm done, it ends up in a totally different direction.”
What has been on your mind lately?
“I recently had lunch with a friend of mine whose birthday is a few days after mine and we were talking about turning 40 and how we felt about that. And we decided that we feel pretty good about it. I think we had a hard time with turning 30. Thirty felt big and scary, and 40, to me, does not. It's just a number.
I think, for me, 30 was a time when I looked up and said, oh, my gosh, I thought everything would look so different by now. And I was really hard on myself about certain milestones I hadn't hit or certain things I hadn't done or certain things that hadn't worked out for me in my life the way I would have wanted them to. And I think at this point, I just look at all of time as a gift. I’m just glad to be here.”
What made you decide to start your own Substack?
“It was a long time coming. Before my Substack, I had been writing full time since maybe 2016. And so I was already doing it, but all of my writing was always in service to other people, which there's nothing wrong with that at all. But I've done a lot of ghost writing books, mainly for celebrities and a lot of freelance editing books. I was an editor at a really popular women's website for a number of years and I did write personal essays there under my own name, but it was always sort of under the banner of someone else's name or brand.
And so when I started a Substack it was after coming out of this year that was extremely intense. I wrote three books that year, all for other people, and had a four day a week job working at this website. I was burned out. And so I said to myself, well, ‘I'm just going to make this newsletter because I want a space to exercise my voice in a totally creative and unstructured way.’” And I thought that no one would read it, so I will just do whatever I want on this strange little newsletter and I won't worry about it. And I decided to also make tarot a part of it.”
Tell me about your interest in tarot. What’s the origin story of that?
“I remember the day I bought my first deck. I was at a local bookstore. I think it was a Barnes and noble, but I'm not sure. I know it was a bookstore, and I remember that it was at the mall, and I was with my mom. I was 10 years old browsing the kids’ section and I remember that the New Age section was just two feet away. And so, it was very easy for me to just wander over to that. And that was fascinating. It became a section that I always wanted to look in. There were horoscopes and love spells and that was all very intriguing for my 10-year-old brain. There was just a little box of tarot cards there, and I was fascinated by it. It was the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot.
So my mom bought me the tarot cards and I had no idea what to do with them. I think for a lot of my time as a kid, I was more sort of playing with them and trying to make sense of it, and I would just look up the keywords in the little booklet, and it didn't totally gel for many years. I know that there’s this long and rich occult tradition, but for me, I also see it as, literature, as art, and certainly as psychology, and symbolism. So, I’ve collected decks my entire life.
And I've started offering readings as well, which really is never a thing I thought I would do. Like, wow, so many surprises have come from the Substack. Every few months, we'll open up just a handful of appointments here and there. And so I only offer them so far to paid subscribers. At first, I was so apprehensive because I worried that offering this other thing, like the readings, but also just writing about tarot every week, that it would somehow shape or change my identity. Not my internal identity, but how other people see me as a writer. So, at first, I sat here being like, well,
isn't reading tarot cards, so I shouldn't do that. And it's really bullshit ultimately, because of course these things can go together, and of course, we all have the ability to do multiple things and have multiple interests. So, honestly, since that realization, it’s been lovely.”You recently wrote a powerful essay about your mom passing away and how complicated that relationship was. Do you mind if we talk about that?
Yeah, we can talk about it. So, she passed away at the end of November. I don’t know that I have processed everything yet, and I’m sure that five years from now, I’ll have more to say.
I’m sorry to hear that. That makes sense.
“Thank you. Yeah, she passed away on her birthday, which is apparently a thing I didn't really know about. Statistically, there’s a 13% chance of dying on your birthday. In Judaism there's a belief that if you die on your birthday, it means that you completed your mission that you came here to do. So, that’s a nice thought.
It has been a really difficult season, with my dog passing away, then a friend, and an aunt. And now, my mom. Grief is a universal experience because all of us experience it. And so I do think that it's really important to speak to it, but I also try to make it like a nice, soft landing place on Sundays when I write my newsletter. I don’t want to write about death all the time, even though I’ve been going through a lot of that lately.”
I think that post resonated so much with others because you didn’t shy away from the fact that the people we love can be…complicated.
“I love the word complicated. I think that word gave me a lot of peace because I don't like the word difficult or any of the other words that sometimes we use to apply to relationships. Because I think it's interesting, like when my mom was alive, I wouldn't have said we had a difficult relationship because I don't really think we did. I think if you had asked her, I don't think she thought anything about that was all that complicated. But I thought a lot of it was very complicated because a lot of it was very difficult for me. I go to therapy. I'm open about that fact, certainly in my writing. It's been very helpful for me. That word came up. My therapist called it a ‘complicated relationship.’ And I was like, ‘Thank you!’
Even in the best smooth sailing relationships everything is complicated because we're all carrying around our bag of experiences behind us and applying them to whatever we confront. It's odd when you first have that realization that parents are people and that everyone is people. It's freeing, but then also kind of disappointing at the same time because we can never fully know why someone did or didn't do something. Or we can never fully know why someone said or didn't say something, because we see it from our perspective, but from where they’re coming from, there’s a whole lot of baggage there.”
Did you ever get any clarity from your mom before she passed?
“It wasn’t like we had a lot of conflict. We never fought openly. There wasn't a lot of arguing. She just was critical of some of my personal choices. She certainly was not super jazzed about my writing, ever. But I think, you know, as in a lot of cases, I think it is a thing where generationally that mattered to her. And from where she came from, it wasn't a thing that I think she could fully understand.
I have done my best to understand her side.”
Okay, if you were able to go back in time and talk to your 10-year-old self, what would you tell her?
“I was a very awkward ten-year-old. Gosh, I was sad and lonely.
I want to go in two different directions with this. The first one is that at 10, the reason why I was drawn to tarot, and in addition to being, you know, beautiful and all that stuff, is because I was looking for some form of acceptance. I hoped that this magical deck of cards would allow me to have some kind of power that would make me cool and popular or would give me some kind of reassurance that I was looking for. I think the first thing I am drawn to tell my ten-year-old-self is to give her reassurance and be like, ‘Hey it's going to be okay.’
You know, whatever you're worried about, you won't remember in five years, and you are capable and you will figure it out and you will continue to figure it out and it's going to be okay. So, there's the reinsurance piece, but I think the other advice that I would tell myself at 10, and I would keep telling myself every year up until the present, and then probably even after this is, I would just want her to know that her voice matters and to not be afraid to use it. And that can be applied in so many ways, certainly not just with writing.
But just like all the times when I'm sure that I wanted to speak up and thought that what I had to say wouldn't be welcome or relevant or respected, or that I was afraid that what I said wouldn't be perfect or I wasn't an expert on something, so, like, I didn't belong in the room, whatever it was. I would want her to know that her voice was valid and to not be afraid to speak up or to write or to get in the conversation, because I think it took me a long time to learn that, and I think in some ways, I'm still learning that.”
Again, huge thanks to
for her time and her honesty.If you’re new here, please consider subscribing to this publication. Upgrading to a paid subscription if you’re able is also a great help to keep this newsletter going.