This is an introduction post, so I will begin with some credentials: I am the owner of a newly minted Masterās degree in Pharmaceutical Chemistry! I spent the last two years learning about pharmacokinetic profiles of different drugs and writing more paragraphs about grapefruit juice inhibiting liver enzymes than I care to count. Graduate degrees, especially the one I just finished while also working from home for the past two years, are perfunctory. Everyone is familiar with the oldest sister archetype at this point, but suffice to say, letting go of grades and writing really shitty homework assignments with questionable sentence structure was new but necessary. To some extent, good writing is not actually a requirement if you work in a STEM profession. While I was engaged with the material I was learning, I found that the regurgitative writing I was doing for the degree was not satisfying or something I was proud of at all, which is disappointing for someone who enjoys the creative process.
I am a fundamentally anxious person. I would rather die than give a presentation. Whether itās journaling or analyses of books or films for school, writing has always been where I have felt most confident about expressing myself. Maybe I should have thought about that when picking a profession. Two degrees and the paychecks coming in say that itās spilled milk ā I didnāt know myself then like I know myself now, and how wonderful that in and of itself is! Over the last few months, I have had a few fully formed ideas for articles, and mentally sketched outlines and arguments as an antidote to my uninspiring homework assignments. I havenāt committed them anywhere though, for several reasons that people point out when they are being self-deprecating on the internet. The internet doesnāt need more content, more people putting in their two cents, and anyone who does is actively contributing to the endless waste of other peopleās time on their screens and distracting them from their ārealā lives. To that I say again ā spilled milk. We are already here! One Substack, Instagram account, or TikTok is hardly going to push us over the edge.
I decided that if I wanted to do this, to have the confidence to be perceived by strangers and even worse, people I know in real life, then it had to be worth it for me. Itās not a change in career path, itās maybe not even permanent or something that will serve me forever. I donāt have several years of working in journalism under my belt where a paywalled newsletter is the next logical step for my career (oh that I had been born about 10 years earlier, gone to school for journalism, moved to New York, and gone to work for Leandra Cohen). But I sat down two days ago to commit the idea I have had for months to words and it was the most engaged and fulfilled I have felt about any work for a long time. Verbal tics and overused em dashes be damned, this is my page now! My lack of confidence has been an issue that I have actively been working on in my life for the past year. I have realized how much itās been holding me back. Maybe itās unsurprising, then, that I feel most comfortable in a medium where everything can be rearranged, edited, spoken just so, but I do, and for now thatās valuable to me.
At this point I havenāt said anything that would help someone decide whether or not this is a newsletter they would actually be interested in reading. Thereās only so many of these things one can be reasonably expected to keep up with, so I will give more of an introduction and some possible topics Iām thinking about. Iām 25, and I live in northern Arizona with my husband and two cats, Freddie and Beanie. The separation anxiety I feel when we travel without them is probably clinical. I work from home full time in drug development, which is a huge privilege as I have been chronically ill for the last 11 years. When Iām not actively experiencing some kind of flare up or new symptoms, I donāt dwell on being sick all that much. It does mean however that in order to minimize those flareups, I am home and sedentary most of the time. My husband is wonderful at taking care of me and I am grateful every day to have someone who knows what I need and does more than his share of household tasks! It makes my quality of life SO much better. As a major part of my life for 11 years, I naturally have some thoughts about my experience which I will probably tease out in a concrete way at some point.
If you follow me on Instagram, you probably think I donāt have a real job and spend most of my day doing crafts (being a homebody of circumstance and not choice definitely helps with that, but also sue me for being good at time management). I have been crocheting since I was 6, knitting since I was 8, and sewing on a machine since I was 12. Iāve had two jobs where I was employed to sew, and have been interested in fashion since I started making clothes for my American Girl dolls. Fashion discourse is fun and I will be contributing!! In fact, the article I was speaking about above that has been living in my headspace for months is about trend cycles, so look forward to that. At this point, as I am unwilling to go into credit card debt, the only designer item I own is a nylon Prada clutch that my ex-boyfriendās mom gave to me in high school for Christmas. Therefore, when I say āfashion discourseā please donāt expect any lists of shopping recommendations from Loewe or Sandy Liang in this newsletter, as fun as those are and as much as I myself enjoy reading them. I very much went to the school of āI want a thing and so I will figure out from Google and YouTube how to make it.ā If that kind of thing interests you, I plan to do some blog format posts where I document some project that I was already wanting to do anyway and let you know how it turns out. Lastly, I like to think that I am a fundamentally unserious person ā purgatory for me will be an endless after work dinner and drinks where the only topic of conversation is still just work. So you can expect some range of serious thoughts from someone who secretly loves it when she makes her therapist laugh (if you donāt then youāre lying). I also just want to be nice. We all need to be reminded that the world is nicer than it seems, and some positive reinforcement doesnāt hurt.
The intro post is out of the way now. If youāre interested, please consider subscribing!
xoxo, Lili