My treasured reader.

After today, this newsletter will be on hiatus for a while.

How long? The most honest answer is that I don’t know. Two months, four months, six months — the specifics of what I need aren’t yet clear to me, but I trust that when I’m ready to come back to this space I will know.

All paid subscriptions have now been paused (which I’ve double confirmed with the folks at both Buttondown and Stripe), so no one will get charged while I’m gone.

I thank you deeply for all your kind words of support these past few weeks since I first shared my need for time away from public writing, and I hope this final newsletter serves you well.

It is the spell I need right now: a spell for letting go.

Letting go of the timeline

About four years ago, in a big farmhouse in rural Vermont, I hosted an intimate retreat for seven people. One of the things I loved most about the ten retreats I hosted from 2019 - 2022 is that I always included a live interview, which was structured similarly to a podcast only the conversation was unrecorded and all of the attendees were able to ask their own questions of our guest as well.

At that particular retreat I was lucky enough to interview Mara Glatzel, whose work on how to move from self-abandonment to self-partnership (by not pretending you are a robot without any needs) has been woven deeply into the fabric of my inner life over the past decade, and I am noticeably happier and more well as a result.

That day, our group’s conversation with Mara centered around the relationship between desire and responsibility — the ways in which what we want to do is impacted by what we need to do.

“How can I write a book while I am also working full-time?” one of the retreat guests asked Mara, a clear example of how the urgent often overtakes the important in our real, messy lives.

“You can definitely do it,” said Mara, who is an author herself. “You can write a book if you work full time just like you can write a book if you have young children and also run a business, like me. You can do it; it will just take longer.”

It will just take longer.

Letting go of the fantasy of control

At 8:30am this Thursday I’ll be at the doctor’s office, undergoing a hysteroscopy that will determine whether or not I have uterine cancer.

The hardest part, for me, is the waiting. It’s been 20 days since my ultrasound confirmed the presence of both an endometrial polyp and endometrial hyperplasia, both of which will be biopsied on Thursday, and then it will be another 7-10 days of waiting for the results.

The fact that there is nothing I can do to influence the outcome of this situation is both a comfort and a kind of slow torture. Each day as I go through the motions of my life I feel the constant and currently unanswerable question of “cancer or no cancer??”

I try to surrender my fear, along with my desire to control even the tiniest part of the outcome, and in doing so I find that surrender is not a one-time thing. I must surrender again and again and again and again – and again and again – 10 times a day, 20 times, 100 times.

Mostly what I surrender to is the fact that sometimes there is simply no other option than to wait.

But!!

No.

We must simply wait, and keep waiting, and in our waiting we can explore both the invitation and the blessing of this place of no escape.

Letting go of past versions of self

It has now been more than a full year since I lovingly composted the name Nicole, which I used for almost 40 years, and instead allowed myself to exclusively use the name that feels most true to me now: Nic.

Doing this required the discomfort of asking other people to change, which I’ll tell you right now I did not want to do. Or rather I felt afraid to do it, to inconvenience anyone, to correct them when they used my old name, and most especially to draw attention to the ways in which I am shifting (particularly in regard to gender) since I still don’t even fully understand those shifts myself.

But in order to let go of past versions of self we must actually let go. Let go of how it will be received. Let go of what people might think about us. Just… let go.

This is what I told myself last week, when I took yet another step in the process of shedding my past self: uploading revised versions of both my books, with the new name on the cover and throughout the text. There are still a few small admin things to work out with various booksellers, but the main change has been made.

This means that right now, from where I sit at my desk, I can see paperback copies of both my books on the shelf, each with Nic Antoinette on the spine, and it is more satisfying and affirming than I can possibly explain.

We do not have to be who we once were. I remind myself of this almost every day.

Letting go of goals, of linear progress, of legibility

I do not have a plan for my newsletter hiatus. I do not know what I’ll “do” with my time away from work.

I will live off the money my mom left me when she died – that is genuinely the only thing I know for sure, since it’s the thing that makes this break possible.

There is a temptation I feel to find a way to be “good” at not having a job for a while. There is internalized pressure to do it “well” and to not “waste it,” whatever that even means. When I eventually come back here, when I write to you again, shouldn’t I have something to show for my time away?

These are the narratives of productivity culture, of capitalism, of growth as religion, of linear progress and striving and the pedestal of human optimization.

But you know what? I do not want to optimize a single fucking thing right now.

I do not need to come back from this break as a “better” version of myself, is what I mean. We do not owe each other a legible transformation story, a tantalizing before/after, not now and not ever.

What if, instead, we could simply be?

And that is where I will leave you, dear reader. In this honest place of no plan, no promises, no goals.

I will be back whenever I am back, and in the meantime if you’d like to use the comments to cast your own spell of letting go, I welcome you to do exactly that.

With gratitude and love as I more fully enter this liminal season of my life,

Nic