Is this thing on? 🎤

Asserting existence on Substack

What is the best advice you’ve ever received? I was recently asked to reflect on this question. I settled on the following:

If the worst possible outcome of taking a chance is ending up where you currently are, do it.

I believe I received this advice from a middle school English teacher, probably in reference to joining the school play or telling a crush about my feelings. With this advice I started meeting “risky” situations differently. The crushes rarely liked me back and I always made the school plays. But every time I invoke this credo, it pushes me towards evolution.

Good advice is most valuable once taken, so here I am implementing. Before pressing “publish” on this post, my words currently are not being read online. If just one person reads this post (yes, I mean YOU) then the advice has worked its magic.

What the hell am I doing here?

A couple months ago I realized that nobody knows I’m a writer. I was texting with one of my dearest friends, Hannah, about submitting a poem to a zine and she asked if poetry was a “new creative frontier” for me. I was shocked to discover that, without trying, I had kept a part of myself completely hidden from even my closest friends.

This core part of Me being uncovered after a decade of friendship was a fun injection of novelty, sure. But the revelation was disorienting: what else was I keeping to myself?

As it turns out, I’ve been a writer since I was a wee lass. I distinctly remember trading a couple recesses in third grade (exactly 20 years ago!) to sit court-side at the kickball game and write a poem for Mother’s Day. My nine-year-old eyes welled up as I wrote the final lines.

I might’ve been nine in this photo. Shout out to my mom for digging this up.

Regardless of if the poem holds up to today’s standards — I was nine, okay? — my memory of the process remains foundational. By putting pen to paper, I found a way to express myself and all my Really Big Feelings in a way that persisted through my life. I kept writing…I just stopped telling people about it.

Okay I lied before, some people do know I’m a writer.

I just finished taking my first writing workshop, Writing With Confidence with Haley Jakobson. This class and the community that came with it gave me so much as a writer that I was reborn on the other side: I am now living in 2025 AW (after workshop).

We spent the seven weekly sessions writing to prompts, prioritizing messy generative creation over perfection, checking in about our personal relationship to our writing, and giving feedback on each writer’s work. It was undeniably profound to be held accountable and held in community that way.

One week, the homework was to introduce myself to someone as a writer. The homework, like the prompts, were expansive and interpretable. So I decided to “introduce” myself as a writer to one of my clients, Kate Bennis, who is a writer in her own work. She took me seriously enough that she invited me to join the writing group that she hosts on weekdays.

The weekday writing group is filled with writers who cover a variety of topics, genres, interests, and experiences. At first I felt a little out of my depths being surrounded with capital “w” Writers, but they welcomed me in. I may even be on my way to becoming a “Writer” myself.

So fine: a few friends and family members, my workshop cohort, and my weekday writing group all know that I’m a writer.

And now you do too.

What to expect from Cool Fool:

I plan to use this platform as a dynamic and living space for my writing in whatever form it takes. You will see poetry, fiction prose, and non-fiction reflection.

I also hope to share other expressions of creativity. You may see video (maybe short films), audio (maybe meditations), photos (maybe documenting personal style), and cartomancy (making meaning from cards).

Let me know what piques your interest — you, the audience, are a major part of my starting a Substack! Writing with you in mind is part of the practice for me. Please assert your existence in my inbox or comment section, be in discussion with me.

I am so honored you read all of that. You put my words in your brain, and I find that really sweet. Thanks for doing that ⚘