"Perfect" is not how great things get started
On how I learned to stop giving a f#$@ -- and started In Tending
Save the Date for Our Upcoming Circle Series!
Our last circle of caregivers was so delightful that we’ve decided to keep the Tuesday morning time the same for the rest of 2025. Please save the date for these upcoming conversations!
Caring for K-12 kids: Tues July 8, 10:30am EST
Affirming neurodivergence (ours and/or our kids'): Tues August 5th, 10:30am EST
Caring for other adults: Tues Sept 2, 10:30am EST
Navigating cross-generational conversations about care: Tues Sept 30, 10:30am EST
Making space for grief: Tues Oct 28, 10:30am EST
Burnout prevention: Dec 2, 10:30am EST (note: this is the week after Thanksgiving)
Note: if you’re not signed up to get the Zoom invites for our community gatherings, please click the button below to get on the invite list, which keeps the Zoom container secure and workable for all.
A few years ago, a dear mom friend and I stood on a playground, talking about this new writing project I was working on.
“I’d be so scared every time I hit publish,” my friend told me. “Scared that I’d sound crazy. That people would hate it. But you don’t seem to be worried about that.”
“Oh, I definitely worry about that!” I said. “I just do it before, during, and after hitting publish.”
When I first started writing on Substack, I hadn’t published much in a while. While I began my career as a journalist, covering music, food and culture for a wide range of publications up and down the East Coast, I’d then gone to school for a master’s in education. Afterwards, I found myself consumed by the 24/7 demands of being a K-12 teacher in a high-needs community, while also getting certified as a yoga teacher, doing fertility treatment and then parenting a baby through a pandemic.
My intention with this newsletter in the beginning wasn’t to start a long-running publication or a community. It was probably more akin to taking an instrument I was re-learning to play out to a public park, and throwing my instrument case on the ground in case other people liked what they heard enough to throw a couple of dollars down. I was simply trying to re-discover my relationship to creative play in order to heal from burnout.
And then, something magical happened.
You.
Every person who showed up in those early days, and then kept coming back, encouraged me to keep writing. About grief. About listening to the needs of our sensitive brains and bodies. About using mindfulness to slow down and stay sane while doing so. About realizing that there were many other caregivers out there, doing the same, with their own wisdom to share.
You are the ones who taught me just how many of us are looking for one other.
And thus, In Tending was born.
It feels fitting that the first anniversary of In Tending should fall upon the Community Tuesday on which we are scheduled to talk about the f@#$s we’re no longer giving. Because giving a f@#$ about perfection would have doomed this project from the start, and I think it continues to doom so many projects like it that this world really needs.
I am haunted sometimes by the thought that I might have actually listened to that voice inside of me that said, “Don’t write anything. It’s not perfect yet. They’ll think you’re crazy. They’ll hate it.” That I would have walked away from such an important part of myself. That I never would have met you.
To continue to make this thing, I have had to constantly experiment with the Buddhist notion of Right Effort — a sense of not being too loose with this thing, but also not being too tight. I’ve had to set intentions, and check in with my body a million times to see if I still have the capacity to carry them out, and scout the rapids ahead to navigate any external challenges I’m lucky enough to see coming. But I’ve also had to release any sense that I know what I am doing in some unequivocal way, that I have all the answers, that I am privy to some sort of long-term plan. Writing a newsletter, like caring for a loved one, is primarily a series of lessons in tolerating uncertainty.
If you feel me, you are warmly invited to ditch your perfection-related f@#$s here in the chat now. For a few more insights and highlights from this past year, scroll on.
When I first started writing on Substack, in January of 2023, I wrote under the newsletter name Initiation Writes, and focused primarily on stories of personal transformation. In my first post, I mostly wanted people like me to know that if their prior lives and plans had recently ended in ashes, they were not alone.
In the post in which I changed the newsletter name to In Tending, in the summer of 2024, I knew I was no longer alone. And thus I wanted to better convey the sense that my writing and community-building work here, going forward, would no longer be about me, if it ever was. I wanted to make it clear that the focus would now be on supporting all kinds of caregivers, in following their own Calling to clarity and liberation.
This year, we’re celebrating the fact that I am no longer facilitating our community conversations alone. Because Meredith Rodriguez, that dear friend who once stood with me on the playground and said she wished she too could find a space to speak her mind, has now joined me as a collaborator on this project, co-hosting our community Zoom gatherings.
While I might have gotten this creative endeavor started, very imperfectly, Meredith has encouraged me in so many ways to let it continue to be imperfect. To allow it to breathe, to grow, to evolve. To embrace the life-changing magic of not knowing what the f@#$ is going to happen next.
In these two conversations below, Meredith lays out her own down-to-earth, wise-but-accessible philosophy on caregiving and mindfulness. Our community, and my own caregiving practice, is so much the richer for it.
Now, the two of us get to remind each other regularly that wherever and whenever we choose to show up creatively, nothing has to be perfect.
And sure, some people still might think we’re crazy, or hate it. But in my experience so far, many more people will say, “Thank you. This is exactly what I needed to hear.”
Congratulations on One Year!! And cheers to keeping perfection off the goals list. It's so hard, but writing is the ultimate exercise in "done is better than perfect"
Thank goodness perfection isn’t the goal. Thank you for all you do!