Back in 2019, pre-pandemic, pre-me leaving the Milwaukee area, pre-finding out I wasn’t lactose intolerant anymore, I had a newsletter called earthly dispatches. It was published on substack.com and if you’re reading this in your email inbox, you subscribed to it (whether you remember or not).
I wrote about rat kings, fried brain sandwiches, and the differences between varieties of cinnamon. I shared my favorite songs and favorite articles by esteemed journalists, and organized it all neatly in short, clippy paragraphs. Those articles, I thought, would be the way I’d build my online “personality” — by being that girl with a memorable newsletter on weird science stuff and fun things from around the internet. You were all gonna love me!
Then, I stopped writing after three issues. Whoops!
This was in the early-ish days of Substack, and also in the early days of my professional journalism career. I was still on Twitter, and often struggling to keep track of everyone I should know about who was deemed “important” by a then-prestigious blue checkmark. I was trying to adapt to magazine writing at my first *real* job, as an editorial assistant for Discover magazine, which involved me fighting constant mental battles with my newspaper-trained brain to actually write articles that were fun and had voice. I didn’t know how to find the voice that I’d suppressed for four years of college in order to do newspaper journalism the “right” way (informational, authoritative, without bias, without too much flair). I didn’t even know if I had much of a voice at all anymore!
earthly dispatches was supposed to be a place where I could use my voice and my “fun” side as a writer to teach you all something new. I wanted to do weekly updates because I was learning so much about the world, since pretty much all you do as a science journalist (or any journalist in general) is learn things. But writing a newsletter about things I learned at work turned out to feel like, well, more work. And the last thing I wanted to do after staring at a screen for eight hours, ruminating on a topic over and over again until I could string together some coherent words about it in a Google Doc, was sit around and write about those same topics some more when I could be out frolicking or doing literally anything else.
Seems reasonable that in the past few years I discovered I care about a lot more than just journalism, even though I made it my entire personality for like, four-plus years. (If you knew me in college, I’m sorry. I was probably insufferable.) I don’t really care anymore if I win prizes or if people see me as some esteemed, wise reporter, or even just hate my guts. Those are great things (except for the last one), but what’s even greater is having a steady income and being able to go home at the end of the day and spend time with people that you love doing things that you love. My life is relatively boring now, if you can’t tell. I couldn’t be more thrilled.
That brings me to this — a new newsletter. I really haven’t been able to write outside of work, and I want to be able to do it here. There’s plenty of time for me to write, but that’s not the problem. Rather, I just don’t know where to start or what to write about or if it will even be “good” enough. I tried keeping a journal, but my last entry was sometime in January 2023. I just can’t get anything to stick because I act like I have to write my magnum opus every time I sit down with a pen or a keyboard. The younger version of myself that wrote purely for fun seems to have run off somewhere, and I really want to find her again.
Consider this my latest attempt at creating something for myself (and you, too, loyal reader … I hope you’ll stick around). There are no expectations here; I don’t even know what I’m going to write about until I sit down at my desk. Even the title of this newsletter doesn’t really mean anything, unless you want to ascribe meaning to it yourself. Engulfed in flames is a phrase on the front of the David Sedaris book I bought for $2.99 at Goodwill over the weekend. When you are engulfed in flames is the full title. I only bought the book because it has that Van Gogh painting with the skeleton smoking a cigarette, which is my second-favorite work by him (first is and will always be The Bedroom).
Plus, everyone’s always telling me I gotta read something by David Sedaris. I always nod and say “yeah! I’ll check him out,” and then proceed not to. That’s another thing I struggle with — reading books. I get one to three chapters into them and my brain is just like, nah, this is boring, let’s go do something else. I have finished a few light reads recently (mostly thrillers/suspense novels and manga/graphic novels), but it’s just really hard for me to focus on anything even a bit more dense. I’m trying to change that. My dopamine receptors are fried from years of deal-hunting on Poshmark and the dozens (hundreds?) of TikToks my partner and I watch together every day. Maybe some steady re-training via book-reading and casual newsletter writing will change that.
Or maybe I’ll just abandon this project like I have so many others. Stay tuned to find out!