Every Thursday, I'm setting the table for your weekend…a little collection of reads, recipes, fun things, and whatever else caught my eye this week. It's the moment before the chaos when you get to decide what kind of experience you want. NOT a to-do list…just really sweet possibilities.
It’s finally September! I freakin’ love this time of year and the turning of the seasons…and well, most importantly, it’s my birthday month.
If you’ve known me for more than two minutes, you know how I am about this month. I treat my birthday as my new year, so I feel everything everyone else feels at the end of December: equal parts reflection, letting go, anxiety about what’s coming, release of the old ways that don’t work anymore, and genuine excitement to dig deeper for the new things, the better things, to fill up my mind space and body time with.
This year, though? Virgo season started a few weeks ago and instead of the usual energized, inspired, LFG-mentality, I have felt SO FREAKING TIRED. Literally. I got a crick in the left side of my neck the weekend of the Catskills pop-up and that thing has not released. I’ve gone to the chiropractor, I’ve gotten massages, I even did a lymphatic drainage massage this week to try to evict the beast…but you guys…she’s NOT budging. Which, if I’m being honest, it’s is a very real and very physical expression of the tension just in my neck but that I feel in every single area of my life right now. My mind is too exhausted to be reflective…I can’t EVEN with setting goals or doing any forward-facing thinking without falling asleep mid-thought.
I’m trying to get out of this funk. Last night I went to this workshop in Soho called the Analog Antidote: a small group, maybe six of us in the room, doing somatic movement and breathwork, a meditation, and then a watercolor exercise where we wrote down everything our inner critic was saying. Then we circled the words that actually felt okay or good, and we painted florals over all the rest…it was a really beautiful and freeing exercise. Listing out all the things my inner critic says out loud on paper? You guys, that hoe is a C-U-Next-Tuesday…Regina George level…and, I know she’s trying to protect me from getting hurt…but DAMN.
This week in therapy, I was describing this epic-level exhaustion and I realized something: I need to let go of the ultra-high expectations I put on myself (and others) to “make my birthday special.” Every year I pile on expectations to make each birthday so meaningful, so productive, so inspiring, so freeing…and then I spend the whole month puppet-mastering my way, full-grip status, to a carefree and freeing birthday. Ironic, right?
Oh yeah…and I also have to go for a boobie biopsy today.
I’ve only told about three people in my family and friend circle (and now the ‘stack-a-verse!) I’m doing what I always do: positive’ing the shit out of it. Nothing to worry about until there is…they just want to rule out anything serious…tt’s probably fine.
But in the back of my head…she’s there. The small little girl who watched her Aunt Debbie die from breast cancer when she was only 40. That little me (counting down until she turns 43 in a couple weeks) is scared shitless, feeling as if she’s on borrowed time, and just needs someone to hold her and tell her it’s okay to be scared. She KNOWS cancer doesn’t discriminate…and if for some reason this “routine” thing turns into a diagnosis of whatever, I hope it will be okay. I will find ways to be okay…and we will deal with it…together.
I did NOT have boobie biopsy on my September birthday bingo card…but here we are. So with that truth bomb, let’s go set the damn table. These are the things distracting me and keeping me above water today…pull up a chair, friends.
THE GRAZING PLATE
(quick bites, short reads, things to nibble on)
The Thrift Store Is a Portal
Alexa started the year craving joy after grief and found it in the bins and racks of secondhand stores in Paris, solo Saturdays with the company of every version of herself she’d ever been: the 10-year-old who didn’t know if she wanted to be Hilary Duff or date her, the glitter-covered 16-year-old, the 18-year-old in a sundress. She deconstructs her twenties-era rejection of all of it (a middle finger to the male gaze) and then what happened when the deconstruction stopped sparking joy. Hitting thrift stores this weekend with Millie and my own inner child, hand-in-hand.Dear Substack, You’re Kind of the Worst
Jenny transferred her 16-year Wordpress blog to Substack and walked into Notes expecting a platform and found what is essentially Twitter with a writerly costume on. I resonated SO hard with this…She catalogues the three recurring note-types she can’t escape: the sycophantic opener (1.5k likes, 800 new subscribers), the “show me your people” post (nobody’s REALLY looking at the other respondents, everyone’s fishing), and the spin-the-negative-into-positive note (which self-deprecates about having 12 subscribers). She puts into words the ick I’ve been feeling lately about Substack but refusing to admit, I came here to escape the exact ick I felt on Instagram and Facebook. (And I still genuinely do not understand Notes.)
THIS AND…Substack! Who’s a girl gotta sleep with around here to get a nice solid, even 200 subscribers? I’m irrationally bothered by the odd number I’m stuck at…is that negative-spun-into-a-positive enough?Everything Eventually Becomes a Crab
Carcinisation is the biological tendency for unrelated species to independently evolve into crabs, because the shape keeps proving itself under pressure. Annie applies this to social media (put enough creators into the same attention economy and they all start to look alike): the fitness influencer becomes a fitness-channel growth coach, the relationship writer teaches other people how to become relationship writers, the beautiful Substack becomes a place for Substack growth tips. “If we’re all teaching each other how to be successful writers, then who’s doing the writing?” She argues we can resist it, that we are writers first and writers don’t become crabs. This is what I’ve been watching happen in my own feeds lately. Let’s resist!!! Let’s WRITE.
THE UTENSILS
(tools, recipes or things that help you do the work)
Creativity Is Not Healing
Maryanne draws a sharp line between two words we reach for interchangeably: healing and reclamation. Healing suggests something was broken…and reclamation names a prior wrong: something was taken. She moves through bell hooks, Maggie Nelson, Audre Lorde, and her own experience picking up a paintbrush in the middle of a perimenopausal storm, and argues that returning to creative practice isn’t therapy, it’s retrieval. “Losing touch with your creative capacity is not a personal failing or a consequence of being busy. It is what subjugation looks like when it has done its work properly.” I picked up The Artist’s Way this week, the one I bought years ago and never actually read. I’m reading it now…reclamation, not healing.Mutually Beneficial
At the North Carolina Arboretum, Nedra saw a sign about butterflies: they get nectar from plants, plants get pollen carried from one to the next. A mutually beneficial relationship, the sign said. And she started wondering how much of that exists in her own relationships. She asks the uncomfortable questions: when did you last invite them somewhere? Call them without being prompted? Cook dinner instead of waiting? “We do want to have some sort of reciprocity in our relationships.” I think about this all the time with friends and family, asking myself some uncomfortable questions this week.
THE VESSELS
(what holds us, what gives our chaos shape and space)
What Is Left Is Home
Selah spent a week back in the Pacific Northwest hometown she’d left after years marked by a church-cult, fractured relationships, and people who had effectively disowned her. Walking into the state fair, she expected her body to tighten the way it always had in this place. Instead she found herself hugging the people she’d needed to stop hating, looking into their eyes, and seeing just…people. “Perhaps they aren’t required to be villains in my story any longer.” No dramatic breakthrough, no closure scene…just the quiet realization that what’s left, once the whole story burns away, feels like it was always there. My own childhood villains have been knocking around in my head this year…maybe they don’t need that title anymore either.The Disappearing Act
Sahar is a therapist who also does the disappearing act, retreating into invisibility when the overwhelm hits a certain level. She traces it from 17, through her mom’s cancer diagnosis at 21, through motherhood and a career built around helping others, into this year: The Great Disappearance of 2026. What finally pulled her back wasn’t an epiphany…it was the people who kept calling…the ones who held the duality she couldn’t hold herself…that she wasn’t okay AND that the disappearance was hard to receive. “I know that I have disappointed people I love deeply.” Have I, too, been disappearing this year? I have.The Life You Didn’t Order
Andrea sat at breakfast after an exhausting weekend and looked at her friend and asked, out of nowhere: “Are you happy?” And that question sent her spiraling through six years of thinking about what happiness actually is, and whether it’s the right goal at all. She makes the case for contentment over happiness…and the particular suffering that comes from insisting life conform to the picture you had for it, “like showing up to a restaurant with your own menu.” Maybe it’s time to surrender the picture and let what’s waiting come through. Yes yes yes to every word of this.
THE GLASSWARE
(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)
The Luxury of Not Telling Everyone Everything
Harriet has been thinking about Dolly since she died, specifically about Carl Dean, who mowed the lawn while Dolly became one of the most recognizable women on earth and wanted nothing to do with any of it. Almost 60 years of marriage that nobody got full access to. The relationship that stayed private on purpose. “Privacy isn’t secrecy. Secrecy says, I’m hiding this from you. Privacy says: You don’t need access to this for it to be real.” A gentle, sturdy essay about keeping something for yourself: a dream, a person, a night so good the internet doesn’t get to live it with you. I published my closet piece last week, and there were lines in it about memories and dresses from my single-dating-years, and Yas was hurt, not by what I said but by how I said it. Then this article appeared from the universe like a wink…maybe not every feeling I have needs to be for public consumption. That doesn’t make me fake or a liar. It just means some things stay private…and that’s okay.On Sobbing Over a Tomato Salad
Richard walked into Heirloom Cafe in San Francisco’s Mission District and felt immediately, profoundly at home: the simple prix fixe, the guys in the open kitchen, the late-summer menu of tomato and corn and local fish. It was the restaurant he’d spent his twenties working in and loved and had to leave to do something more urgent during the AIDS crisis. Sitting at that bar with his Maine Root beer, he started sobbing. “One might have thought I had stumbled across an old lover for whom I was still carrying a torch, and I saw her out with her much more attractive and well-off new boyfriend. That is exactly how it felt.” Grief for a life you lived fully and had to walk away from anyway. I met Richard at the Substack event last week when he read his other work. He is a delight, and so is this piece.
THE NAPKIN
(for wiping away the week’s mess, the reset)
When Abandonment Moves Within Us
Lyna writes about the fear of abandonment as a two-part thing: there’s being left, and then there’s what being left seems to say about you, that you are unlovable, not good enough to be kept. She traces how that external event becomes an internal conviction, slowly, silently, until twenty years later it looks like needing constant reassurance, reading too much into distance, tolerating too much because at least they haven’t left. “In trying so hard to avoid another abandonment, we begin to abandon ourselves.” I’ve had this one on repeat. It’s not a fear of being alone, it’s a fear of being unlovable, of being abandoned, of being left…it’s what I’ve been carrying since I was little.Is It Your Trauma, or Do You Just Fucking Hate What’s Happening?
Yas writes for survivors of abuse who have become so good at self-examination that they’ve started pathologizing their own limits. You feel tense in a connection and immediately ask what’s wrong with you, instead of asking whether the connection itself is wrong. She draws the line: “just because we feel activated doesn’t mean it’s because of our trauma specifically; it can just be behaviors or situations we do not want to tolerate anymore. And we shouldn’t have to.” I have gratitude for all the trauma work I’ve been through this past year, AND yet, I don’t want to be ruled by it.
THE DESSERT PLATE
(the sweet stuff, pure joy, no justification needed)
Goodbye Summer, Hello Autumn
Jo…relieved to let August go, the uncertainty and not-quite-settled feeling the month carried. Grateful for autumn's exhale: the first coolness in the morning air, candles lit earlier, the world given permission to slow down. "Autumn asks for nothing. It simply arrives, softens the light, cools the air, and reminds us that change can be beautiful too." She's serving up 20 September poetry prompts that I am absolutely going to join in on.Last Friday, after a full week of work and after-work events and zero rest, I ended up on my bedroom floor with my entire closet and every drawer emptied onto the bed. Birthday month prep, but also an accounting. If you’ve lived a few lives, your closet is a personal archive, a museum, a time capsule where every hanger holds a different version of you: the wife clothes, the marketing-director-silently-drowning-in-infertility clothes, the workout-clothes-mom survival strategy, and eventually the liberation clothes, the strappy little things I bought when I was newly free and figuring out exactly how much of myself I wanted to show the world.
“There’s a difference between dressing like you’re free and being so free you no longer have to announce it or prove it.” Three hours and two full donation bags later, what’s hanging in a closet that finally has some breathing room is just...me. The me turning 43 in a couple weeks.♥
Happy Thursday, turkeys!
More of this next week <3
xo, Jess
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I resonate so hard with the birthday thing! I was so afraid of being disappointed with landmark birthdays (like turning 30) that I celebrated overseas instead. Less pressure! Escapism!
I love the watercolor exercise. I need to try that. My inner critic has a LOT to say.
Thank you for sharing my piece!!
Thanks so much for reading and sharing my piece! I enjoyed getting to nibble on some of the other articles you shared as well.