Hello!! And welcome to the first email from the new home of this newsletter!!!
Firstly, thank you SO much for all the love since I became an official Substack girlie. I’m genuinely so excited to have you all here. As you’ll know from last week, I’m a few weeks into maternity leave, and apparently giving me this much time to think was a dangerous decision because I have gone slightly wild with ideas for this newsletter.
I really wanted to make this somewhere you get more from than just one email a week. Somewhere I can keep all the useful things I find, share more of the recommendations I’m constantly forcing on people, build resources you can actually come back to and generally give us a bit more room to play around with things.
Which brings me to the giant recommendations list. I hope you’re all loving it!! What started as me selfishly crowdsourcing enough entertainment to get myself through the newborn bubble has become a slightly ridiculous library of all your favourite films, series, podcasts and books. And I’m absolutely not finished with it. I’ll keep adding to it as I find things and you recommend them, so hopefully it just gets better and better.
I have approximately 400 more ideas for what we can do over here, so I’ll try to pace myself. Otherwise I’m just very happy you’re here x
This week’s podcast was the release of our live episode with Jemma Sbeg, which we recorded back in June (in a skyscraper, on the hottest day of the year 🥵). Here are some of my favourite quotes Jemma mentioned during our conversation that have really stuck with me.
Also, if you haven’t watched the full episode yet, I’ve dropped it below.
You have to stop thinking that trusting yourself means knowing you’re making the right decision. Because I literally don’t think anyone knows that. You make the best decision you can with the information you have at the time, and sometimes you’ll get it wrong. But the trust bit is actually knowing that if you do get it wrong, you’ll figure it out. Very, very few decisions are this one irreversible fork in the road that determines the entire rest of your life.
And I also don’t think you need to suddenly stop asking your friends for advice. I ask people what they think all the time. But there’s a massive difference between getting someone’s perspective and basically asking them to make the decision for you. Take everyone’s opinions, sit with them, and then actually ask yourself, okay, but what do I think? What would I choose if no one else was going to know about it? Because you only really learn to trust your judgement by making decisions and seeing what happens.
And also, you’re 20!! Of course you don’t have enough life experience to know exactly what you’re doing yet, because this is the bit where you get the life experience. You’re going to make choices you’d make differently five years later, but that doesn’t mean you messed up your life. It means you know something now that you didn’t know then. I think you have to give yourself permission to make the best choice available to you now, rather than trying to somehow make decisions with the wisdom of a future version of you that doesn’t exist yet.
Next week on the pod, we’re doing a deep dive on why feeling uncomfortable is actually good for you.
I hope you have a wonderful week & I’ll see you very soon,
