#15 Last Year of my Thirties

A favorite thing from each year of my 30s. Also: a way to free yourself from the exhaustion of smartphone addiction, last minute local shopping, and a trick for making boots fit.

⭕️ See the Light Pour Through: How Art Can Free Us From the Exhaustion of Smartphone Addiction “Art reminds us to look up from the tiny world we’ve made on the black mirror that lives in our pocket. It helps us to understand our place in the universe, and look out to the expanse, rather than into our filtered selves through tech.” ¹

⭕️ Nancy Cross’s Molasses Chews I’m visiting with my friend Tricia in San Francisco this weekend for my birthday, and we made her nana’s recipe for these cookies yesterday. They are perfectly spiced, soft, and chewy. See her shared recipe in the footnotes!²

⭕️ Online Print & Ceramics Shop

Karen Pride

recently opened an online shop for her ceramics and art prints. The mugs are going fast, but if you live in town, you can use the code PORTLAND for local pick-up!³

⭕️ Cedar Boot Shaper & Bickmore Leather Stretcher Spray I had two pairs of boots that needed stretching in the calf shaft and was delighted that these cedar shapers and stretching spray did the trick!⁴

Tomorrow is my Birthday

And so I’d like to take advantage of the occasion to make some birthday asks.

1. Would you please take this short 5-question survey to help me in my thinking and dreaming for this space in 2025? I love the practice I’ve created of writing Some Sundays to send to you each week, but I’d also love a moment of dialogue, to hear your thoughts and preferences in response to what I share.
   
   

   
   

2. Would you share Some Sundays with someone you think would enjoy it? This post about future tripping and the posts about journaling (especially the one on digital planners) really seemed to resonate, but the whole backlog of sends can be found here.
   
   

   
   

3. Would you consider becoming a paid subscriber? Starting in the new year, most new Some Sundays posts will be behind a paywall. Subscriptions are available at $5/month, $50/year, or $125 as a Sunday Friend (founding member):

   
   ⭕️ Paid Monthly Subscribers ($5) get all posts delivered directly to your inbox each Sunday! Thank you for supporting this project.
   

   ⭕️ Paid Annual Subscribers ($50) get all posts delivered directly to your inbox each Sunday, at a discount! Thank you for investing in this project.
   

   ⭕️ Sunday Friends (~$125) get all posts delivered to your inbox each Sunday, as well as some treats sent by post, to you from me. And all my love and gratitude. 🫶
   
   

Because it’s my birthday and I love giving gifts, I’ll be sending a little something by post to the first 15 people who choose an annual subscription to Some Sundays (I’ll reach out for your mailing address this week). 😊

If $5/month isn’t doable for you right now (trust me, I know how the little things add up and make an impact), but you’d still like to receive all Some Sundays emails, just let me know. I can do comps.

And if you’re not interested in becoming a paid subscriber (no hard feelings!), you’ll still receive one email from me each month (the Someone Else feature — one of my favorites to share with you), and occasional posts I write for all subscribers.

All subscribers of this Substack have my deepest gratitude. It makes the biggest difference in my commitment to having a writing practice to have people I’m writing to and for. It’s not nice to admit, but I’m very much motivated by deadlines and the fear of letting others down.

Favorite Thing About Yourself…

In last month’s Someone Else feature, I asked Britt Appleton to share a favorite thing about herself at different eras of her life. I think it’s a good, hard question to consider!

We think about what we learned or what we remember from any given year, but it’s much less comfortable to think in terms of what we liked about ourselves.

With that challenge in mind, here’s one favorite thing about myself for each year of my 30’s. This year will be the last one. ♥️

30: Sebastian and I separated about a month before I turned 30, and I was terrified of becoming bitter. I literally sat with the pain when the waves of it came on hard, listened to chakra-tuning binaural beats on YouTube, carried rose quartz in my pocket, thumbing it throughout the day to keep my heart soft. It took a long time for it to hurt less, but I did manage to hold onto joy, to keep my heart open.

31: I took some big, scary career leaps this year — almost entirely because a handful of friends believed in me and Sebastian was willing to support me while I found my footing (we were still separated). I had to let go of old ideas about who I was and what my professional life would look like (a writer who would teach at university), and I did.

32: I experienced a sudden, unexpected job loss and in the past this would have sent me spiraling into a very bad place. But I managed to resist becoming fear-filled, put one foot in front of the other, and keep my mind open about what could come next. I’m still really proud of how I handled this time.

33: Sebastian and I got back together at the end of 2018, and when I was 33 we finally started to learn how to talk to each other about the hard stuff. It took most of the year, honestly, during which I kept pushing things down because I was terrified that he would leave again. We still had a lot of practicing to do, but we made a good start.

34: I worked 15-18 hours a day for the first seven months of the pandemic. I’m not proud of this — it led to deep burnout — but I am proud of the result of this work, which was to co-create a high functioning distance learning program that helped keep our Waldorf school afloat for the 2020-2021 school year.

35: I finally confronted one of my biggest blocks: personal finance. I set up automated monthly contributions to a high yield savings account and Roth IRA, and worked really hard to shift my mindset around money and lack. This was internal work, and, honestly, also a result of finally having the means to do so with the “windfall” of the early pandemic (child tax credits and stimulus and unemployment checks — which were much larger than what Sebastian typically brought home from his work in the service industry).

36: After a long search, I found a new job that almost doubled my income and was a balm to the frustration and burnout I’d been experiencing. The first year of it had a big learning curve (new industry, new team to manage, new website to launch), but I’d also never felt more valued at work.

37: For no clear reason, this was a very hard year. Things were still going well at work, my kids were thriving, Sebastian and I were deepening our practice of really seeing each other and saying the things that needed to be said. But. My mental health took a deep dive into depression at the start of the year and I didn’t start to find my way out of it until autumn. When I did, I also finally took care of a lot of things I’d been putting off: finding a primary care physician, figuring out what was going on with my heavy painful periods (and the resulting fatigue and mood swings), understanding how my insurance coverage really works. I also accepted that I needed medication, and my quality of life has been so much better for it.

38: I finally, finally developed a consistent writing practice. This is something I have never in my life had. When I started writing in college, I did it all the night before a submission was due. And it worked okay? I did the same in grad school, although that was more a result of circumstance (heavy reading load, caring for two toddlers). It worked less well when I was trying to sustain a longer project. And since then, I just never developed a habit where I showed up regularly to work at it, whatever it was.

Earlier this year, when I was recovering from surgery, I decided I wanted to use this Substack as a vehicle for building a consistent writing practice. 38 years in, I know myself and I knew I needed the external pressure — and deadline — of writing for an audience to follow through with my goal of writing regularly.

Some weeks it takes every single morning to get to the final draft of Sunday’s email. Some weeks it’s a lot of twiddling around until it comes bursting out on the page on Sunday morning. But the point is the practice. The point is showing up for it every single day.

I called this project Some Sundays so that I wouldn’t feel bad if I didn’t always show up.

Over the past few months, I’ve showed up every single Sunday, for 15 of them in a row. And that feels great.

1. I found this article by way of

Pandora Sykes

, who also recently wrote about awe and reciprocity.

2. Ginger Molasses Chews
By Nancy Cross (Tricia’s Nana 😊)

3/4 c butter
1 c sugar
1/4 c molasses
1 egg
2 tsp baking soda
2 c flour
1/2 tsp ground clove
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp salt

Melt butter and let cool. Add sugar, molasses, and egg and beat well. Add dry ingredients and incorporate.

Chill until dough is firm enough to work into balls (but not too firm, or it will be hard to scoop and roll!).

Form into 1” balls and roll in granulated sugar.

Bake at 375 for 8-10 minutes.

These are even better on the second day!

3. Karen is a local legend: as a former restaurateur, she created Harlow, as well as Yoga Pearl in the Pearl District. Now she makes art primarily as a photographer and ceramicist, and writes an excellent Substack called

Between Us.

4. The tall boots I ordered off Poshmark were made for someone with longer calves than I! I needed this pair of See by Chloe boots to go over my knee, and two rounds of spray & stretching over the course of a couple of days got them up and over.