I used to garden a lot with my dad when I was a little girl. Mostly vegetables, but I had this one pink button rose bush in a mid-size terra cotta pot that sat under my favorite peach tree. I loved watering it and pruning it occasionally so new little rosebuds would form. It made me feel pretty to have this little rose bush in my care.

For years it blossomed and thrived. Until one spring when its leaves started yellowing and cracking at the edges, and I couldn’t figure out why. I knew few interventions, so I stuck some rusty nails in it and kept watering it. Apparently far too much because pretty soon it began to smell. At first I didn’t know where the stench was coming from. I would walk by and it would waft up my nose. I sniffed around, like I do around my nephew’s butt sometimes, and I realized it was my rose bush!

I called over my dad who was always working in the far edge of the garden. “Root rot!” — he yelled before he even got to me. He quietly examined the thing, jiggled it around by the base, and swiftly struck the clay pot with his trowel, WHACK, and it broke into a few large clean pieces. Thick slimy brown water oozed out of the rootball and it was exposed. It stank and I was horrified. I think I cried a little from the shock of it all because it felt like such a rough way to handle a tender rose bush, especially when it was suffering. My dad said to just leave it, let the thing air out, and to trust him — and nature. Life is resilient, he said. It finds a way to keep going. He still says that and he’s usually right about everything, so I listened.

But I checked on my bush everyday. I never knew any kind of plant could survive like that. I thought the roots had to be covered up, tightly packed with soil. I nagged my dad with questions and concerns about it, but he said very little. Sure enough, as days turned into weeks, I started to see changes. All the gunk eventually dried out, the smell went away, and new little shoots started to spring up come up near the base. Pretty soon it was covered in buds that would soon burst open and delight me again.

(This is a really long story about a bush. Wrap this up.)

That’s my internal critic. I was reminded during the pop-up that a sense of urgency and having something real to write about drowns her out nicely. But it’s been days since I dispatched this and look — here she is. I’ve decided she smokes a lot and wears rose-tinted glasses in the most non-metaphorical way possible. Basically, she’s my friend Jenny, who is the least critical person ever based on my experience making radio with her last week, but she’s super insightful and a keen editor, which is what makes it easy for me to cast her as my internal critic because then we can be friends, we can have a dialogue, and the critic morphs into a thought partner. And I think that’s swell.

(Get back to the bush Swati. They’re going to forget about the damn bush.)

You see, sometimes things just need air and nothing else will do. Things — and people — need to break, tear away, fly up and out. Nutrients, amendments, water, sun, moving around, none of it’s gonna work. You just need oxygen.

I’ve been thinking all week about about how to describe the radio trip and what it did to me and that rose bush was all I could think of. How I am that little rose bush whose conditions needed to be destroyed. I had been stagnating in this putrid soup of the American news cycle, feelings of impossibility and confinement in a regressive society, female rage at greedy lustful men destroying the world, depression about what it’s doing to kids. So much stuff that was draining the deep reservoir of hope in my soul. Nothing was replenishing it or nourishing me for long enough, my work kept getting thwarted, and I was stewing in my pot.

But finally, something cracked it and let in some air. Taking to the wilds. The desert. Exiting the simulation of everyday life to learn something new and hard. The Transom audio storytelling workshop, an experience I highly recommend to anyone even thinking about it a little bit.

The simulation is powerful. It’s impossible not to get swept up in the everyday. This newsletter right here is a great example. I procrastinated all week to write this because I lost my daily rhythm, the pressure and (self-)expectation to produce. I got caught up in work emails, family and friends, and to-do’s for the nonprofit, which is finally emerging, a bud about to burst open. Insurance COAs. The first contract. Meetings where I have to talk about myself (ugh) and why I’m doing this. All important! But man was my heart in my gear bag and with my radio people in the desert. It’s not fun drinking six espressos by yourself. I felt something I don’t often feel. Loneliness! Like I was torn apart from my lover.

I did get one boon this week that took the edge off of desperately missing all of the new creative friends I made at the workshop. A friend of mine got last minute tickets to see Pete Buttigieg in a packed auditorium in Pasadena. So I met him in a parking lot in the nick of time, hurled myself in his car, and off we went.

“Action creates hope,” Pete said. Action. Creates. Hope. Yes. THIS.

I decided late last year that I was going to lobby to change up my client work next year. I’m not leaving public education. I just need to experience a new environment and team within the system. It is always really hard for me to do this because when you work with young people, you develop enormous amounts of guilt about leaving them. A kid named Sybelle came up to me yesterday and asked me where I was all of last week, and that she missed our usual banter. I acted cool about it, but that kind of stuff jabs me in the heart and I have to catch up with her next week.

A lot of young people don’t have emotionally stable, present, invested adults in their lives, especially those at the continuation school. There is a reason they’re there. Nobody is checking on them. When you’re there all the time, they get used to you and begin feel safety in your presence, something all kids deserve. It’s scary for them. So the mere thought of switching things up is hard because you worry they’ll feel betrayed, that your natural progression as a professional will kick up their feelings of abandonment.

I don’t think these are unreasonable concerns. Working with kids necessarily erodes the self/ish part of you because they’re just that important. It requires a degree of overlooking the self. It requires radical commitment, not just a two year blip like Teach For America. You can’t do this overlooking of the self forever though. It’s corrosive. And I’m at that point where I can feel the immense fatigue, the secondary trauma of working in this environment of crime and scarcity, infiltrate my hope. So I’m reimagining what my engagement with this place looks like, and where else in the system I can have impact. Meetings have been set up. Things are in the works. It’s all moving.

But until a week ago I was extremely stressed out about all of this. I felt I couldn’t jump ship with something exactly lined up. I also worried about weird stuff I don’t normally think about: my ability to get along with a new group of people. What if I’m too jaded now, having worked at the “tough school” for so long and I think everything is bullshit? (It kind of is.) What if my heart was a rock now, my brain immovable and not easily inspired? Am I being insane for seeking change during such an unstable time in this country?

But going away to the desert for a week, shacking up with complete strangers, and collaborating on really hard work together instantly vaporized all of it. It cleaved the pot I was stuck in clear in half and all my soul gunk — the fear of change, feelings of indispensability, safety in communities — burned off into the desert ether.

When it comes to seeking learning, I’ve noticed something happening around me: people pursuing degrees and certificates and whatnot that formalize skills they already have. It’s so strange, expensive, and useless. But systems reward it. “Get this professional degree and get a salary bump.” I decided a few years ago I was only going to pay for learning that pushed me into a new zone altogether. And I believe in school. I recently made a new friend who’s going to business school soon and I think that’s wonderful. It’s ok to invest in yourself and not just think about AI and how it’s going to destroy everything. To invest in yourself is to believe that you’re ultimately more valuable, that whatever you synthesize based on your life exposure and experiences in the classroom will enrich the world somehow in a way machines can’t. I don’t want to live in a world where people stop believing in institutions, and I’m so glad I made a small investment in myself through this workshop. That was me endorsing this idea, affirming its potency.

The workshop reminded that I am indeed good at learning new things, that I am teachable and coachable. It’s weird how a person can forget this about themselves. I was also reminded how important it is to surround yourself with the right people. People who pull you up, people who are analogous in terms of goals and their commitment to them. I tell kids to do this all the time, but am I doing it? Or have I gotten entirely too comfortable in a community assembled for me by an institution with its agenda in mind? Don’t get me wrong, I love some of these people. But am I truly growing intellectually? How can I and should I be a more active participant in developing the communities I’m in? The workshop gave me new direction and vigor in all of these things.

I learned — and played — at the fringes of my personality in the desert. I don’t know if this happens everywhere with the workshop. I think there was some special magic with being at the fringes of society where John V. said you could create a little trouble without falling into to trouble.

I was at the fringes of my technical prowess in the desert, on the fringes of my womanhood because I was bleeding for the better part of the workshop and making do, and on the fringes of my public personality writing this newsletter.

The most valuable soul-nourishing feedback I got as a result of writing this thing was people telling me I had found my voice. That this was it. That they heard it in my writing before, but it wasn’t interrupted here. And let me tell you, they were right. When I have a lot of time to write stuff, I go back and launder a little bit. Take out that word here, or woop, you can’t say that here. No time for that in the desert when Mr. Weinberg says you have one night to write and edit your script. I was just writing this thing unfiltered and firing it off. God knows what I said. What I do know is that Transom very kindly shared it on all of their channels after I mentioned something about handjobs, which mildly mortified for me for like a half a day, but as JB reassuringly texted me — Everyone likes a handy from time to time. Don’t sweat it. ☠️

See, I did it again. Good lord. Lock me up people. But you know what, audio people are cool like that. They’ve heard a lot of stuff.

The voice stuff has been the greatest gift in all of this. Turns out my sense of humor pairs well with audio work. I think when I was a younger woman, I struggled to “dress” my sense of humor properly. I felt like I had to put it in church clothes or something in order to take it out in public. It’s hard sometimes being a funny woman. Men are scared of funny women. Turns out it’s a great filter eventually. It weeds out the insecure ones. But still, it’s just something I’ve had to think about my entire adult life and there were years in my 20s when I just wanted to dainty and stupid instead. It was orgasmic to let my hair down completely, cut loose, and just roll around in it with this newsletter.

I told my friend Ashlie all of this, and she said:

“The intimacy of audio, the close quarters... with the written word alone you can hide. In spoken word you can't. You can tell from a person’s voice. It breeds a kind of vulnerability.”

So I’m just going to stay in this space for as long as possible. Spend time with people and thoughts that fill my head with the best ideas. Continuously seek greater and higher purpose without losing in touch with the people, which is where I think creativity begins.

The most purposeful place we can be right now is in our communities, and the most purposeful thing we can do right now is talk to the people in them. Vox populi.

Writing this newsletter truly changed my life. I had never done anything so creatively high stakes before. And now I want to do it again and again and am concocting ideas. Stay tuned!

I want to thank a few people for placing me on this path. My cherished friend Craig Mod for being the snake preacher of this kind of bookended creative thing-making. 🐍 Lord, I receive it. Now I know why he’s been yammering about pop-up newsletters all these years. To the fabulous people on The Good Place — Keith, Michael, Don, Mara, Kevin, Genevieve, Matt, Lisa, Seth and a bunch of others who wrote in throughout the week to encourage me. To my Transom Bombay Beach soulmates — David, Ashleyanne, Jenny, Zach, Julie, Devon, Tanner, Tess, and Sandi. And the bartender at the Ski Inn who made me a cheesy veggie burger everyday. To my friends Ashlie Stephens and Jeremy Bassetti for listening to my audio sample for the Transom storytelling workshop application and encouraging me to leave my comfort zone to go make radio. To my work friends back home, Teresa, Joe, Carlos, and Karina, who at my request were elusive when people asked where I was. It worked because some thought I had joined a cult. Others thought I was at a nudist retreat. All possibly true to varying degrees, maybe sort of.

I’m going to sign off now because it’s a busy long weekend, the weather is great, and I’m seaside. Different sea though. Colder. Full of not ghosts of dead fish. I promised a bonus issue and there will be one. Expect it when you least expect it. It will be weird.

And OH, if you want to keep up with whatever I’m doing, subscribe to my work on my website. You’ll hear about new pop-ups (this is a thing now!!!), audio stories, projects, future work, curse-word rants, all the things.

Thank you, and Happy Valentine’s Day. 💋