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 the first day of October and I’ve got to say...that might’ve just been the BEST birthday month in a really long while. It wasn’t all fun and games, but what it was was transformative with a capital T...Since I turned 40 a few years ago, burning down everything around me and starting a crazy, risky new chapter of life...getting divorced, moving out into my first ever solo apartment, navigating co-parenting and single motherhood AND running a NYC restaurant as Head Chef for the first time ever....yeah...it was a HUGE year to say the least. When that huge prescribed burn finally started to simmer and smolder and I was left to take inventory of what remained, it was a version of myself that I had only come to know in the deepest and darkest corners of my bones and my heart and my head...she was finally free....BUT, she still had remnants of the past...remnants and tattered clothes of her chronic people-pleasing, her living paralyzed by fear of the unknown, threads wrapped around her arms and legs....wrapped with the yarn of her childhood feeling completely invisible and misunderstood...and the twine and twigs of her early marriage where she tried to be what she thought he needed and wanted...the wrapped cords of her religion and beliefs that purity and submission and following “the rules” was the point vs. just living a life of love for her fellow human...these threads and tattered pieces of clothing had been singed and burned but weren’t quite gone just yet. So she did what she always does...she kept moving forward. Kept pressing ahead and tried to slough off the remnants. But they only started coming off slowly and as one would fall away, another wounded moment or time would surface and make its impact known.
And then last month...the last year....when I was reflecting on my 42 rotation around the sun, I realized....this year wasn’t just about existing and living with the remnants...no, this was the year I finally decided to do something about them...out of necessity or maybe even out of impatience of not wanting to stand with them one moment longer...the proverbial bruises were still there and this year...I pressed on them...hard. I pressed them to remember and figure out their origin story so that I could release them and begin to heal from them. You guys have followed along through this space here on Substack...You’ve witnessed just a fraction of the ones that have resurfaced...but this month and this year, those remnants have been shedding at a faster rate than the past 3 years and I’ve reemerged this month...not just as a 43 year old woman, but I am different...so much so...than I was just 30, 60, 90, 365 days ago...and for that I am in awe...I am filled with so much joy and gratitude.
Pull up a chair...it’s getting good this week ♥♥
THE GRAZING PLATE
(quick bites, short reads, things to nibble on)
Virginia Woolf's Writing Routine and a Lesson in Creative Discipline
Harry noticed the phrase "with the regularity of a stockbroker" and decided to try it: Woolf's actual schedule, for one full day. 9:30am to noon writing, then revising, a long walk, tea, diary, reading. He'd convinced himself he was a midnight writer because he had no structure, and midnight was when the fear of wasting the whole day finally pushed him to the desk. By noon on his Woolf day, he'd written thousands of words and the afternoon still stretched out ahead of him. Woolf herself, in her diary: "How great writers write at night, I don't know. It's an age since I tried, & I find my head full of pillow stuffing." This one is SO, so good…let’s do like Virginia did.
THE UTENSILS
(tools, recipes or things that help you do the work)
How to Find the Goldilocks Zone of Curiosity
Opening with a half-finished puzzle at a coffee shop: 80% done, one conspicuous gap, and despite being in a rush she sits down to finish it. Curiosity follows an inverted-U curve, and the productive zone is when the gap is visible enough to close. Mendeleev left intentional blanks in the periodic table because he knew what belonged there in theory, and scientists spent decades filling them. When something actually matters to you, the curve adjusts…you stay curious even when you know almost nothing.Productivity Should Be About Doing Less Work, Not More
Matilda interviews Frances Odera Matthews, Notion consultant, who built her business around one tool and one idea: a well-designed system is the difference between having a lunch break or not. Building in Notion is like building a house: foundations and wiring first, decorating last. And after burning out, she capped how many calls she takes per day in Calendly. For all my people out there trying to pivot, side-hustle or even just juggle multiple things…I’ve heard Notion is the way to go…I’m looking into it for myself, too.
THE VESSELS
(what holds us, what gives our chaos shape and space)
I Go All In. Then I Disappear.
Sasha sat for a 25-hour neuropsych test at 49 and got fifty pages back. One sentence stood out: “Sasha goes all in on things and then retreats after becoming overstimulated.” She read it to her husband, who’s known her since the fifth grade. He laughed. “I could have told you that.” The piece moves from that sentence to a childhood bookstore, a father who bought her The Metamorphosis when she wanted Sweet Valley High, a mother who stapled serious-looking covers over romance novels. “I really, really love you. I’m going to hide. Please don’t take it personally. I’m probably just relearning the stitch.”The Avoidant Bitch I Am
“I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.” Humiliation stays in the body longer than heartbreak does, and the fear of being unwanted runs deeper than loneliness ever could. The piece is about avoidance, the kind where you stand outside your own life with one hand always hovering over the emergency exit. She pulls in the fig tree from The Bell Jar, Jo March from Little Women, a line from Call Me by Your Name. A slow emotional bankruptcy, filed over years. “You become someone who almost lived.”The Artist’s Way for the Reality of a Creative Mother
I loved this one because I’ve been one of those struggling through The Artist’s Way again…I read it years ago, but this time, it’s not quite fitting like it did before. Lauren’s take pulls apart The Artist’s Way for the creative mother in 2026 who lives a life with no silence in it, no Taos adobe house at the end of a dirt road. The book tells you resistance is the problem. A cat giving birth needs darkness to labor…disturb her and it stalls…nobody calls the cat resistant.The Water I’m In
It’s been a really heartbreaking and at the same time, inspiring time following Suleika’s journey battling cancer. The treatments keeping the leukemia at bay are no longer working, and she’s packing for her third bone marrow transplant. A 20-year-old man in Poland is preparing to give her his stem cells. She’s following her dogs around the house, burying her face in their necks, inhaling the corn-chip smell of their paws. “For now, this is the water I’m in.”
THE GLASSWARE
(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)
Nectar, Pollen, Honey and Patience
Will is a private chef and beekeeper in West Berkshire and this is his autumn honey harvest. He talks to the bees throughout every visit, tells them the news. An old tradition: bees are said to carry the souls of those who’ve come before us. He thinks it also helps them understand he’s no threat. My friend Lila keeps bees, too, and it’s so fascinating…I loved Will’s beautiful accounting of his journey as well. There’s also a fig, wild honey and mascarpone tart recipe for paid subscribers, pretty amazing.Beyond the Days Off: The Beautifully Busy Rituals of Japan’s Silver Week
Honami is a 57-year-old Japanese homemaker writing about her culture in close, specific detail. This piece covers Silver Week in Japanese culture…seven consecutive days around the autumn equinox that, for her family, mean an incredibly busy cluster of ceremonies. Respect for the Aged Day, the harvest moon with rice dumpling offerings, Ohigan, the Buddhist practice of visiting ancestral graves on the equinox when the line between this world and the next runs thinnest. And then Ohagi: the sweet made from glutinous rice and red bean paste, named for the bush clover in autumn, that her grandmother woke at 4am to prepare by hand. “Eating those warm, incredibly delicious Ohagi first thing in the morning...remains one of the most precious memories of my childhood.”
THE NAPKIN
(for wiping away the week’s mess, the reset)
The Feeling We’re All Longing For Is Presence
I really love Yas’ writing so much, she’s got a beautiful way of drawing you in as a reader and then somehow you forget they aren’t your own words…so, so relatable. She’s a week into a six-month social media break, and navigating what presence actually is and what has been systematically traded out for it: convenience, certainty, the illusion of comfort. “Humans are animals,” she writes. “We rely on the same resources (food, shelter, water, safety) as a bear does.” When those connections get automated and delivered, our nervous systems respond the way animals in a zoo do.Balance vs. Alignment
Jamie Gilpin spent years in executive leadership with her Apple Watch pinging her during board meetings: are you in a workout? Her heart rate was that high…she missed her period for a year. She’s writing about two causes of burnout, and most conversations only cover one: the imbalance of workload…but the other is misalignment. What happens when you learn to position how you talk so the men in the room can hear you, when you quiet your intuition because someone asked where’s the data, when your empathy gets called a liability…it’s the mask. Such a good read.
THE DESSERT PLATE
(the sweet stuff, pure joy, no justification needed)
The Mother Sauce
Millie has wanted a wolf cut for weeks, the one standing between her and the whole rest of her life…and I wouldn’t budge. Because I could see what was so clearly behind the obsession: the exact same spell I tried to conjure a hundred different ways when I was her age. New school in South Carolina, no friends, birthdays that went by like any other day. I found my childhood journals earlier this year and they gutted me…I'm raising her and re-raising myself at the same time. Day two of middle school she came flying out those doors with a new friend beside her…her shoulders dropped…and mine did too.♥
Happy Thursday, turkeys!
More of this next week <3
xo, Jess
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