Welcome to vessels

Why I'm writing this newsletter

Hello! Hi. I hope this can serve as an introduction email, a welcome to the proverbial (but also real, see below) chat.

Long time newsletter reader, first time newsletter writer. It’s taken a while to note the progression but, turns out I’ve been reading newsletters since back when they were called blogs. In the early- to mid-aughts I remember logging in each week to see what Joy the Baker, orangette, and the long-disappeared no sex city were up to, to see what musings they had to share with me from their couches, or kitchens, or beds. They felt like my friends, my online community of one-sided interactions. For a few hours each week, I got to sit there with them, listen to their imagined voices, gaze out their windows onto lush gardens and rain-soaked streets.

Lilacs in southern Vermont, May 2021. Shout out to ye Minolta Hi-Matic AF2.

I’ve always enjoyed being invited into someone else’s home.

During that time I kept my own blogs, too: one about maps, one about baked goods, and a still-secret tumblr of deeply unedited journal entries. I kept those blogs, updated them, began new projects and experimented with the kind of female-centered confessional writing so much a trend of its time. Yet I (luckily?) didn’t share any of it with anyone I knew.

Indeed, my blogs would have remained secret until one fateful party when a friend came up to me and mentioned something about how good a muffin I ate earlier that week had looked. What? I said, while probably holding a jello shot.¹ You know, on Instagram, she said. Maybe I’d already had too many jello shots but her words caused something to try to leap out of my stomach. Instagram? I repeated. Instagram? Wasn’t that one of the photo-editing apps I had recently downloaded, just another way to make a muffin cross-section look extra fluffy using a certain filter?²

My friend laughed. Yeah, she said. I follow you on it! You should follow me back. She opened the app on her phone, perhaps a cute iPhone 3.³ And there, in its perfect square, was a photo of a muffin I’d consumed earlier that week and written about on my supposedly-secret baked goods blog. Beneath the photo were a few names—my friend, another friend, a guy I’d taken a philosophy seminar with in college—people who, my friend explained, had “liked” it. Well in order to have liked the photo they had to have seen the photo. And that, folks, is the day I learned that Instagram is a social media app.⁴

This is me, in San Francisco, in front of the devil’s house. Self timer on Minolta Hi-Matic AF2. February 2022.

So. Why am I here?

I’m here because I’m tired of keeping various parts of my life hidden away in separate boxes.

I’m here because I live in a lovely place with people I want to continue getting to know and a community in which I want to invest; a place that also happens to be far from a lot of other people I know and love. I crave a vehicle through which to transmit ideas and updates and musings and frustrations, a vein of engagement with those near and far.

I’m also here because, like all of us, a lot has happened over the past few years in my outward-facing life—a cross-country move, a new job that finally allows me to live my values and contribute to a world in which I want to live, two (!) fiction publications, several zines, a house—as well as in the world (I simply can/will not make a list for that)—as well as in my inner development and journey.⁵ A lot has happened to lead me to this place, and I find myself craving integrity—a practice of bringing my full self to the varied aspects of my life. The common thread is writing.

So here we are: follow along as you wish. I can’t promise I’ll be able to update consistently, given my full-time job⁶ that it feels great to finally care about. I also can’t promise to give these posts the editing my perfectionism would prefer. What I can promise is to show up as I am when I am able; for me, that’s good enough.

Have a great day everyone!! Welcome to my ~blog!!!⁷

Cheers,

Julia

1. It was 2012, after all.

2. Truly this was Instagram as 100% chaotic good.

3. You know, while we’re on the topic of social media oldies…

4. Lest I abuse the footnote function, see here for a captivating take on Instagram’s rise and fall through the eyes of n+1’s former/current/who can keep up managing editor.

5. Whatup, therapy! You rock!

6. Is this networking? Click that follow button if so!!

7. I know, I know, this is not a blog. Isn’t it though?