dear friends, a letter
A digital letter from me to you about things I’m thinking about, ideas I want to share, questions I may have, and updates I want to give.
“...what a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, even rarer, thing that might be worth saying” - Gilles Deleuze in Negotiations
There’s something you should know about me. I HATE meaningless emails.
Another thing you should know about me: I LOVE connecting with people.
For a long time, I’ve wanted to connect more with the people who resonate with my work and with me. But how? Like I said, I hate emails. I don’t care about 10% off or gimmicks where I’ll only get something if i hand over my email. It all feels so sales-y. And while I do have a store where I sell things, “sales-y” is not in my core.
And yet, I still want to connect with you. We’ve opened our inboxes so widely that it has stopped feeling special or intimate. Dear Friends is a change — a hope — to bring intimacy back.
In short, Dear Friends is a letter from me to you via your inbox. You will never hear me call it a “newsletter” beyond this moment. Instead, I’m calling it a letter. A digital letter if I have to, but I do have hopes to send them via snail mail once in awhile. You can unsubscribe at any time, and I won’t add a guilt-trippy “sad to see you go” message when you do. I’ll trust that our time together was meaningful and well spent.
Included in this letter are things I’m thinking about, ideas I want to share, questions I have. If you ever respond to these letters, there will be no one but me on the other side. In the age of mass emails and bots, to know who is on the other side of the screen — I think — is pretty special.
I can’t tell you how often I will send them, because they don’t have a set schedule. Every marketing person will tell me THIS IS A BAD IDEA because consistency and content are king in our online world. But here’s the thing: sometimes I have nothing to say. But then other times, I really have something to say and I really want to say it. Dear Friends is for moments like that. Because wouldn’t you rather me say those things I really want to tell you, rather than make up things to say for the sake of consistency or “content”? That clogs up your inbox and my brain, so I’d rather avoid that all together.
I may include upcoming events, podcasts I’m on, speaking I do, but they will always be at the bottom of the letter, should you want to go there.
I want to bring intimacy back to your inbox. Kind of like in You’ve Got Mail where Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks get to know each other through the written word. There’s no discount codes or splashy ~content~ between them. Just two people getting to know each other. Sound fun? Cool. Can I be Tom?