So Here’s the Deal

Happy New Year, everyone!

Yes, I know it’s been a while, but I can explain, I promise!

My plan was to make this post (the one when I revealed the truth about my marriage) the last one on Suburban Turmoil, and then debut Something Totally Different a couple of weeks later. Although I wanted to continue writing about my divorce and the abuse that preceded it, I didn’t want to do it here, because this website is about celebrating our next chapter and creating a space where we can all be excited about midlife and having more time to evolve and pursue our dreams. With this in mind, I created a separate Substack newsletter called Something Totally Divorce-Related, which I could devote exclusively to my posts about abuse and divorce and healing from trauma.

Within a few weeks, the newsletter jumped to more than 1,000 subscribers and I started receiving dozens of messages from women who were experiencing the same things I had. And suddenly, this blog had to go on the backburner for a bit, as I devoted all my writing time to getting the newsletter up and running, so that all these unexpected subscribers would have access to a range of posts both on the various types of abuse I experienced and resources they could access for more information or help.

This turned the last few months into an odyssey I hadn’t planned or prepared for. In the interest of accuracy, I read through all my journals and texts and emails from my marriage and listened to many, many audio recordings I made over the years to reassure myself that I wasn’t crazy and that what I thought had happened had actually happened. I’d never really let myself look at or listen to any of these things before, but as I wrote the posts, they were so helpful in allowing me to piece together what had really and truly occurred, from the actual moments in which they had taken place. And to my surprise and great sorrow, I discovered that things were actually far worse than I had even allowed myself to remember or believe. I’ve cried many tears over the last few months as I finally confronted this mountain in my life, and I’ve experienced an incredible amount of healing. And being able to take so many people on that journey with me in real time, while scary, was also deeply liberating. It truly felt like I finally was able to take the shame and secrecy that had been a central part of my life for so many years and bundle it up and banish it forever, and I love that you were able to be witnesses to that.

The result was that by the end of 2024, I felt more empowered than I ever have before, because I did this big, scary thing and it didn’t kill me! I wasn’t cast out of society! I didn’t lose all my friends! All of the fears that had been placed on me by someone else turned out to be lies. And I’m sharing this with you now because I suspect many of you have also allowed your lives to be defined by certain irrational fears, and I hope my experience encourages you to think about them, name them, confront them, and do what it takes to eliminate them. I found that when I shared the secrets fear had made me keep, I was met with so much compassion and understanding and support, both from friends and from total strangers — and now that I’ve conquered that fear, I’m stronger, I’m more self-aware, and I’m ready to confront even more of the things that are holding me back.

And that brings me back to this blog. I’ve had so many ideas on how I want to use this space that it’s hard to know how to even begin. For weeks, I’ve been trying to work out exactly what kinds of stories I want to tell here and I was having a lot of trouble narrowing it down. Then one day, I passed the church next door to my house and noticed that its message board said simply, ‘START BY STARTING.’ Eureka.

“I’ve been saying the same thing to you for months,” my um, man friend, said when I excitedly told him about it later.

“I know, but now it’s on a church message board and it feels different,” I replied. Heh.

Anyway, it occurred to me that a big part of why Suburban Turmoil succeeded was because I never limited myself there – I wrote about whatever I was thinking about or excited about or inspired by at the time, and it seemed to work for (almost) everyone involved, probably because I never felt pigeonholed and writing never became a chore. Why shouldn’t I do the same thing here on Something Totally Different? And why not simply start by… starting?

And then I thought of something even more exciting – If I could confront my greatest fear and conquer it in 2024, then perhaps I should spend 2025 confronting another fear that’s been holding me back. I’ve danced around the idea of devoting a more significant amount of time to writing and working on my own creative projects. I’ve always known that the more frequently I publish work I’m excited about online, the more good things happen for me, career-wise — I don’t know how or why this works, I just know that it does. But now that I’m on my own, fear has me in its clutches. Fear tells me I need to spend my time looking for more ‘real’ freelance jobs or a really good full-time one to ensure I can continue to pay my bills. Fear tells me I’m old and washed up now, and my creative ideas will fail and people will laugh at me, or pity me, or ignore me. Fear tells me I need to make the safe choice instead of the brave one.

But if I learned anything in 2024, it’s that fear lies.

Right now, I have both the income and the bandwidth to devote a significant amount of time to pursuing my creative dreams. And so I thought, why not devote 2025 to doing just that? Why not spend a full year really working on my writing and video and book ideas and then see where I am at the end of it? Then, if I get to December and I don’t feel I’m solidly headed in the direction of being able to support myself with my creative projects, I can look for a ‘real’ job for 2026 and at least have the satisfaction of knowing that I gave my longtime career dream my best effort… and I didn’t let fear hold me back.

I’m putting this out there now to hold myself accountable as I launch this plan, plus I want you to know what’s going on if and when you notice me trying new things here and on my social media accounts. I’m fully aware that some of my ideas will work and some won’t, and I don’t want to worry about what people are thinking of me for giving them all a shot. This blog will probably be a bit of a hodgepodge for the next several months, because the first thing I need to do is get back in the habit of writing and posting regularly and not worrying about whether I’m publishing something that fits this blog’s ‘aesthetic.’ So here goes nothing.

I’m trying something totally different in 2025 and I’m so glad you’re here for it. I can’t wait to see what happens next…