Hero... or zero?

This is the place to start.

My husband is a saint.

Welcome to my hero post. I’m pinning this to my publication so our new friends know where to start and what’s likely to come.

If you read someone’s essays long enough, little bits of them leak out like watercolors until, eventually, you have a mostly recognizable picture of who they are.

That doesn’t help much if you’re new around here.

I’d love you to read every word I’ve ever written, but why should you work so hard? I’ve written a crapton. That’s an engineering term.

It might already be obvious that I’m not an engineer.

It’ll also become obvious in less than a minute that I don’t really know what I am with 100% certainty. I’m a polymath, which is a term in desperate need of a rebrand. It basically means I have a lot of interests, heaps of curiosity, and very little ability to pick just one lane.

I’ve been writing since my olive-green first-grade diary with the tiny lock, where my literary contributions consisted mostly of “Andera wuz heer” followed by the date. I also documented that my brother was a jerk on multiple occasions because, as history has shown, little brothers usually are.

I graduated to prettier diaries, some of which were read by people who should’ve minded their own business. Then, sometime in high school, my lifelong best friend introduced me to journals, and I fell hopelessly in love in the aisle of the now-defunct Borders bookstore.

To this day, I have an unreasonable affection for journals.

The ones that look like spell books.
The ones that look like little black books.
The ones that look like they belonged to a Victorian mariner or were hand-bound in the sixteenth century.

How could I resist this constellation journal?

My attic is full of half-finished journals because I guess I enjoy buying them slightly more than finishing them. My sister has strict instructions to burn every single one without reading them if I die first. We have a deal.

I simply don’t know how to process the world without writing about it.

Despite every attempt by a post-college staffing agency to turn me into a corporate secretary, I somehow sidestepped the sexist typing tests my male friends never had to take and found my way into jobs where creativity was actually useful.

Even inside the field of finance, I discovered the little corner where I got paid to untangle complicated ideas, make them human, and play with words. Admittedly, if I never have to write “fiduciary responsibility” again, I won’t shed a tear.

Fast-forward through two decades of conceptual corporate copywriting, two daughters who somehow became 16 and 20 while I was looking for the remote, and more than enough life experience to fill those unfinished journals, and here we are.

Now I’m in my early fifties, feeling just old enough to wax nostalgic about life before Google and just young enough to ask ChatGPT what on earth someone like me is supposed to do with the second half of her career.

Its suggestions gave me hives.

After two decades working from my home office, the thought of commuting back into Manhattan feels like wearing two sets of neck-to-ankle Spanx in August. My husband does it every day, but he’s far less of an olfactory-sensitive drama queen than I am. Besides, my old dog has never known a workday where I wasn’t sitting behind the desk she can see from her couch.

Now, I split my time between writing for companies that pay the bills and writing essays that remind me why I fell in love with words in the first place. I’m also working on a novel (it’s a slow go) and have some children’s books on Amazon that are pretty great if I do say so myself. Not to mention the ebooks I sell on Gumroad.

See…polymath.

I also tend to snap photos of things other people walk right by, attempt increasingly ambitious high-fiber baking projects, dabble in art, navigate the strange transition from mother to friend, and dream aloud about escaping northern New Jersey before the property taxes finish us off.

Mostly, though, I pay attention.

I like finding the extraordinary hiding inside ordinary Tuesdays.

A missed flight that becomes an essay about hidden heroes.

A pickleball game that turns into a lesson about remembering fun.

A song lyric that unlocks a long-dormant memory.

The funny stories are rarely just funny. The embarrassing ones are usually about something bigger. And the ordinary days—the ones we think we’ll forget—sometimes turn out to be the ones that show us who we are.

I write with levity because life gives us enough reasons to be serious. I lean into self-deprecation because I grew up with a wickedly witty brother and had to learn to beat him to the punch. I mostly avoid politics because I think we already spend enough time shouting past one another—we have far more in common than we’ve been led to believe, and I’ll die on that hill.

This is the little corner of the internet where I attempt to make sense of the world by paying closer attention to it.

Sometimes you’ll see yourself in my stories.

Sometimes you’ll see someone completely different from yourself and, hopefully, recognize that their experience is just as real as your own.

Either way, if you’re interested in the ramblings of a middle-aged Gen X mom who writes, wonders, notices, and has no shame in sharing the humorous, humiliating, and unexpectedly meaningful moments of her life...

Pull up a chair.

You might start noticing things, too.

xo

P.S. I’d like to note that, just for giggles, I ran this piece through Substack’s new (and wildly misguided) partnership with Pangram and it said it’s 73% AI, which is 100% bullshit, and has completely validated all the reasons I am irate that Substack put this feature onto our platform. Gross. Shame on them. (Oh, and thanks for thinking my punctuation and sentence structures are so good they must be fake. 😂 )