It's just a newsletter, no one died

A story of breaking up and getting back together

Illustration by Léo Hamelin

I was talking with a longtime newsletter reader this week who reminded me why I originally started writing – and why walking away from it was so difficult.

He's launching a paid version of his own newsletter and wanted some advice. As we discussed his plans, he mentioned signing up for my newsletter during the pandemic when its niche was freelancing advice. "I just want to say, I imagine it must have been really hard to walk away from that," he said.

Those words unlocked something. In that moment, I realised how many conflicting feelings I've stuffed away about this newsletter – the joy, doubts, and persistent sense that some vital part of my identity has been lost, despite my efforts to revive it. So, today, I’m going to get into it.

In June 2022, after five years of writing practical advice on how to freelance, I closed down my newsletter. But six months later, just like Alex Levy returned to hosting The Morning Show, I sent out a new email. It was about selling my old junk at a car boot sale.

Much like when I’d started my newsletter, I didn't have a plan and just kept sending posts about how I make money as a freelancer, making friends with my kids who live on my street, and why I love January. And now it’s been exactly two years since I announced my goodbye and I’m back without properly acknowledging – neither to you nor myself.

I started this newsletter after I got laid off from my journalism job. At that difficult, vulnerable time in my life, starting a newsletter was an act of taking back control. It was about redefining myself on my terms after having my career rerouted without warning. It gave me that all and more – forging a new path that was better than the one I’d been on.

So when I walked away from the newsletter in 2022, it wasn't just ending a project - it felt like shedding a part of who I was and that defiant, comeback narrative I had crafted. The newsletter had become inextricably linked to how I defined myself professionally and personally. So even though I made the decision to close it down – and even felt relieved in the days after announcing it – there was a lingering sadness around my choice.

I lost the routine of writing, the connection with readers, and the sense of purpose and accomplishment it gave me. As stupid as it sounds, I even missed being able to say “I write a newsletter” when asked what I do. Underpinning all of that, I lost the identity and narrative I had built around being the voice behind that newsletter, that brand of resilience risen from the ashes of a layoff.

Returning six months later didn't fully resolve those feelings. That was in large part because previously, I singularly wrote freelancing advice, so the newsletter's premise and purpose were clear-cut. Now, my content covers a much wider range of topics and I struggle to succinctly describe what I write about. So on that call with the reader, when he said how clear the focus used to be, all I heard was how it now lacks a cohesive identity. I managed to "get the newsletter back," but it's not the same as before.

There’s a Harvard Business Review article that went viral at the start of the pandemic that I find myself thinking about often. You probably know it, the one titled That discomfort you’re feeling is grief, in which David Kessler, of the five stages of grief, explains the different kinds of grief people were experiencing during the pandemic. It not only gave language to the feelings I couldn’t name at the time, but it also articulated the nuances of grief and loss. 

There are so many amorphous losses we can experience – ghosting, layoffs, relocations, infertility – that are hard to process. I think of these as the ‘no-one-died losses’; there was no death but there is grief that hurts in its own, distinct way. What I’m feeling right now feels like a no-one-died kind of loss. So while it may seem dramatic to hang so much weight on "just a newsletter," for me it epitomises the kind of loss you can’t quite get your arms around. A hum of sadness that you can’t neatly explain. 

During my six-month hiatus, I tried to write about how I felt. About how I’d had this successful creative project and that I walked away from it. But the narrative became messy when I rebooted the newsletter, so I assumed my story had collapsed.

Now enough time has passed, I can see what the story is – and it’s not about a newsletter. It's one about the feelings that linger even after regaining something that was; the absence that remains when you can't seamlessly slip back into a role that you had to let go of, despite your best efforts to reclaim it.

In its crudest terms, it’s a story about breaking up and getting back together. You think reuniting will restore what you used to have. But there are always echoes and aftershocks, feelings and dynamics that linger and never quite fall back into the old patterns, no matter how hard you try to force it. A gap between the idea of reunification and the reality of it.

This kind of post would typically ramp up to some kind of announcement of a new chapter. That’s not what this is, lol. I don’t yet know what's coming next, but I’m hoping that acknowledging what’s been will help me – finally – get there.