Hey Reader!

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been feeling the P R E S S U R E lately. Pressure to save the planet, pressure to combat fascism, pressure to secure my financial future, pressure to have some fun, already.

Seems like the culture is a pressure cooker - and is it going to expel a nice healing matzoh ball soup or just more toxic steam? I have my suspicions.

Like many Americans 🇺🇸 I have a benefits job.

Meaning that I have a day job that I do almost exclusively for the employer-sponsored health insurance. They also pay me money, which is nice, but I’m there for the benefits. 🏥

This is a terrific thing and I am NOT complaining. But it does take a chunk of time and a fair bit of energy. Such that writing sometimes feels like it’s being shoved to the corners of my life which is not exactly a place in which it thrives.

So - if you were under the impression that I just sit down and spout prose like a fountain on a hot summer day, let me disabuse you of that notion. While writing comes naturally to me, I don't count on it to flow like water from the tap.

⛲️ 🙅🏻‍♀️🚰

Sometimes I’m in the zone and sometimes it’s like mining for diamonds and finding only coal.

And that pressure can show.

It appears in stilted sentences and ham-fisted analogies. It’s the feeling after you’ve hit send that you forgot at least two of the things that you were determined to include this week.

What helps? Practice, mostly. 💡

And warming up. I do that every morning at 750words. I love this place. It’s a private journaling site loosely based on Julia Cameron’s morning pages.

Yeah, I KNOW she demands that you write by hand but I’m insubordinate like that. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Every morning I make a cup of coffee and open my laptop and write at least 750 words. It’s actually pretty easy.

Some days I eschew both punctuation and capitalization and just pour out words with many, many typos.

On other days I write rough drafts of things, or use journaling prompts to explore some aspect of my psyche, or just contemplate the world around me and the one inside of me. 🌍 🧠 💚

There’s also some gamification, including lots of fun badges. Those help you stick with it until it’s become second nature. Check out my page to see what I’ve racked up over the past few years.

Anyway, this isn’t an affiliate post or anything, I just love the site. At $5/month it’s a steal, and if you need help becoming the writer you want to be it’s an excellent tool.

And while it doesn’t really combat the pressure of daily life, I’ve found another thing that helps, a little.

It’s making the decision that things can be easier. 😌

For many years I’ve struggled with the idea that if a thing is easy then it must not be worth very much. So stupid. Apparently I told myself that a very long time ago and it’s taking a lot of work to unbelieve it. 🙄

Now when I’m ready to do something; anything, really, I ask this of myself and the world: Let it be easy.

Not that I’m opposed to doing hard things. But let it be easy to start and easy to let go and easy to take the scary step and easy to live the good life.

Let it all be just a little bit easier. For all of us. 😘

xo, Julia

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PPS Having trouble hitting send? Finding your voice? Deciding what to write about? Staying consistent? Let's chat. Grab a spot on my calendar.​

STEAL THIS

The PS.

When I was a child (and also a young adult), we wrote letters. Like, friends wrote to one another because long distance was expensive and there was no internet. 💌 📬

I kind of miss letter-writing, though apparently not enough to start it up again.

Anyway, one of the most fun things about writing letters was adding the post-script, or PS. My friend Jennifer and I would end letters with PS, PPS, PPPS, PPPPS, etc. The longer we could keep going the funnier it was. 😹😹😹

PS is a pretty cool addition to your email, too. Lots of the people I’ve learned from use it to great advantage. 🏆🏆

So - what goes in a PS?

An additional thought that highlights how clever and amusing you are. A link to a podcast you were on one time. A link to a blog post, freebie, or any other thing you’d like to share. 🎁

How about a link to a small evergreen offer you like to trot out every once in a while? 🤔

Give it a try - add a PS and see if you can pop in a link to something you’d like to get more eyeballs on.

​The Commodores know how to make things easy, and so does this email. Forward it to someone who needs a little less struggle.

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