Big, Bright, Ballsy, Rural Fleabag Loud Opinions, Or: How This Lesson About Finding Your Voice Can Resurrect Your Soggy, Dying Career Ambitions

Your voice will always be your #1 fucking asset

You ever stab a knife through a little kid’s ball?

Let me tell you: WEIRDLY SATISFYING.

Because when you look out the window and suddenly there’s a big blue rubber ball just plopped ever-so-smugly atop your 5 acres of unkempt, slightly chaotic field 🌾, you only have a few options:

1. Leave it there and resent humanity for at least 700 weeks

2. Bring it inside and resent humanity for at least 700 weeks

3. Grab a knife and HANDLE BUSINESS

Now, I suppose I should make this caveat: now that I’m suddenly a rural fleabag, I have pocket knives. So many pocket knives! How does one function without a pocket knife?! How do you all open your boxes? How do you pretend to be scary? How do you scratch your back? How do you sharpen your pencils?!

And—most importantly—how do you show the neighbors that, yes, you can be an absolute psycho and get your anxiety out on small spherical objects that have no business being in your yard?

Boy, I’d make an excellent mom.

But, real talk: rural America has given me something I didn’t know a place could give a person.

I didn’t see it coming. I am a CuLtUrED person who’s WelL-TrAvEleD and I’m supposed to like big cities and Balenciaga and pomme frites and men named Peregrine Montgomery-Smythe (hasn't touched a ten-pound note since Thatcher). And, I mean, I do. I admit it, I do! I do like nothing more than wandering around Selfridge’s reeking of delicious Middle-Eastern money and buying very expensive chainmail T-shirts which I will then proceed to wear on stage while keynoting an event in the middle of London full of people who have more money than christ.

Exhibit A:

But, no matter how many Rabbit and Tarragon Terrine dishes I eat in fancy upscale gastropubs paired with Wild Mushroom & Truffle Risotto while trying real hard to hide the fact that I once shopped at Montgomery Ward, there is something that big, important places, with big, important people cannot give you.

A bigger voice.

Turns out, one of the greatest benefits of going to spend some time in the countryside is the benefit of getting to hear yourself, once again.

And, when you can hear yourself, you can listen to yourself.

It is the first step in finding your voice.

It is the first step in finding yourself.

When you set out to find your voice, it asks you to have an opinion.

You cannot have a voice without one.

Have you ever thought about that? It’s true. When we talk about finding your voice, we are not talking about you conquering your fear; we are talking about you conquering your convictions.

What are they?
Do you have any?

This is usually the deeper problem when you feel tiny and insecure. You are nothing of the such. You are a shooting star. But—even shooting stars lose themselves sometimes.

The way back to yourself is to know what you think.

There is nothing more reassuring, more grounding.

Imagine how solid your world would feel, if you believed in something with all your heart?

I know, I know, we liberals aren’t supposed to do that. It’s a weird contradiction about us. We’re supposed to be open-minded and willing to change our minds often. And, we are. But sometimes, all of that inclusiveness produces something else:

Indecisiveness.

Especially when it comes to what you should be doing with your own life.

Rural America has given me a stronger voice.

This is funny, because I didn’t think I needed one. I’ve been writing on the internet since 2009 like an unhinged werewolf. But, the longer you’ve been on the planet, the more things happen to you.

• Remember that horrific intellectual property litigation I was in for 5 years? Clawed at my voice. The legal system was used to silence me. There were gag orders filed, injunctions filed, emergency orders filed to try and get me to stop teaching online. I tried to write about my experience once and instantly had a defamation claim added to the file—you know, to nip anything I might say in the bud. When you’re in your 20s and you’re taking on someone who has more cutthroat experience than you, you quickly learn how things are done “in the real world.” Oh, such a heartbreaking time that was.

• During that time, lawyers advised me that I should never, ever write anything publicly unless I was comfortable with it appearing on the front page of The New York Times. As a girl who wrote a well-known blog called “The Middle Finger Project,” and who had built her entire business on her irreverent voice, this proved fatal.

• Later, my opponent would go on to find her fame by publicly vilifying other women on the internet—something I found incredible. It was a hard thing to watch. I couldn’t say anything.

• I published a book with Penguin Random House—which was a great experience in and of itself—but one of the hardest parts of that process was trying to make myself palatable for a mass audience. If you want to get into places like Target, you have to fit a certain mould. If you want Amazon to promote your book, you have to fit a certain mould. If you want to get on daytime TV, you have to fit a certain mould. Let’s just say, that’s never been my strong suit. Trying to be “mass-audience friendly” when you are not is the quickest way to lose the very edge that got you there in the first place.

• Over the course of 15 years of writing online, lots of people have written in with lots of nice things to say. Sometimes, people have written in with vitriolic things to say. Last week, I got 3 inappropriate emails—all women, strangely. Everyone’s got something to say about who you are, the way you are, what you said, what you think, and whether you are doing enough for them. This may sound strange, but one of the biggest things that has clawed at my voice over the years is not the big events, it’s the micro punches. The tiny emails that show up that tell you that you’re failing. The tone of them. The expectation of them. The weight of them. The victimness of them. Sometimes I’ll get emails from perfect strangers who send 8 paragraphs, all analyzing me, and how they feel about me, and whether I am deserving of money. It is…strangely heavy. I have gotten good at militant one-line responses, but their emails still linger in my mind. And make no mistake: they do affect my writing. Professionals are not immune.

• Getting older really does a weird number on your voice, WOOF. This one’s clawed at my voice in a very, very big, unexpected way. I hate that this is true! But it is a daily job to resist the idea that becoming older means becoming irrelevant; that you can no longer be prized for the same things you once were: being a person who was on the cutting edge of the world. That whole “age is just a number” horse manure is not true: age is a very real factor in who you are. It directly impacts the level of experience you have on this earth. And that affects everything: your worldview, your opinions, your energy, your willingness to try things that may not pan out in the end. You waste time less. You have less patience for tomfoolery. You do, theoretically, know yourself better. Except that’s a crock of ham, too, for all the reasons we talked about before: the more time you have on this earth to roam it, the more time you have to lose yourself in the process. What age affects is your identity. And, try writing anything convicting when your identity’s out to lunch.

• And, finally, not caring about the same things you used to changes your voice, too. The things I cared about in my 20s, when I began writing on the internet, are not the same things I care about now. I have conquered so many of the things I wanted to conquer, and I wrote about them in real-time, and now I’m onto conquering new things. Things that are important to me. This, perhaps, has been my biggest saving grace: that I am steadfast in my commitment to always finding something that excites me to work on. The projects I worked on when I was younger are no longer the same I want to work on now. Speaking of that, just last week one of the emails I received was from a woman who told me she had followed me since the early days, but I had been changing too much, offering too many different things—and then, in a snide tone, told me “good luck with my new brand of the month.” And, this just strikes me as so silly—first, that it occurs to someone to take the time to write these things to strangers, but secondly, that I am not allowed to change. That I am being kept prisoner by a brand identity I once had. That’s such bottom-feeder thinking. It is our job to expand. That is your purpose: to continue finding the things that excite you, and to continue sharing those things with the world. Anything less, and you are willfully stagnating.

Once I realized that my voice had taken a hit from years of identity erosion, I decided I needed to protect & re-build my #1 asset.

Your voice will always be your #1 asset.

Enter: buying the farmhouse in rural America.

A random decision, I do say so myself, particularly if you know me—a person who has spent her life eating her way across Europe, studying architecture and design, becoming a person who uses terms like “smoking jacket.”

But you know how pregnant animals go into the woods to have their babies?

There are two reasons for that: (1) It’s safe. Predators are nosy. Birth is messy. So pregnant animals instinctively find a quiet, secluded, camouflaged spot to lower the odds of some opportunistic asshole showing up with a bib; (2) It’s secure. Animals need calm to give birth—literally. Oxytocin helps with labor, but it dips when the animal is stressed or feels unsafe. So if there’s noise, chaos, or the smell of too many weirdos nearby (hi, humans), labor can actually stall until they’re alone and feel secure.

That’s how my retreat to the woods felt.

I wanted somewhere safe & secure to reinvent myself. (And I am absolutely refusing to use the word “rebirth” here.)

Somehow, I knew that the best way to explode big was to curl myself up into a teeny, tiny fireball. You know: contract in order to expand.

And, when you contract, you know what also does?

Your field of vision.

Your field of vision is much smaller. You are not distracted by all of the things you have always been.

You find focus.

Focus helps you think, create, and find your convictions again. Focus helps you figure out what matters to you again. Focus helps you see things more clearly again. Focus helps you see yourself more clearly again.

Focus helps you find your voice again.

To the horrors of the committee in my inbox, I am embarking on several new projects this year, one of which is a local newsletter. I want to use technology to revitalize the town I’m from, by uniting the town I’m from. And, I’m going to use my voice to do it.

Unlike in a big city, here in a small town, it is much easier to be heard. And that means it’s easier to make change. It is easier to lead. It is easier to make things better.

This is why a local newsletter can be a total game-changer for a place, particularly one that is struggling.

At least, that’s my hypothesis. I’m going to be working on proving it this year, and I’ll be sharing updates as I go. Some of the coolest things I’m excited about include:

• Making newsletters appeal to a rural audience: I’ll be experimenting with SMS texting (blue collar culture relies on phones more than email); audio newsletters / radio streams; printing physical copies for paid subscribers; associating the concept with newspapers to give a helpful frame of reference; using .com extensions and other branding decisions to enhance trust; sending at 3pm rather than in the morning, and so many other exciting experiments.

• Having fun, addictive categories that make people want to read (and make it something they look forward to & tell people about!). Right now, some of the categories include:

  • Overheard at the Diner

  • What’s On Your Stove?

  • Grandpa’s Fishing & Hunting Report

  • Dollar General Battle of the Week

  • The Lemonade Stand Business Hotline

  • Now Hiring Neighbors

  • FREE: Possibly Working Lawnmower

  • This Old Nightmare

  • Real Estate Snack Bar

  • How Not to Die Out Here

  • The School Scoreboard

  • The Susquehangover

  • The Lunch Lady Time Machine

  • Young People Advice Eating Contest

  • Mom & Pop’s Power List

  • Neighbors of the Week

• Monetize in creative ways. First, the Field Day Business Club is something that local leaders and business folk would pay to be a part of, coming together to exchange ideas, help each other win, do a monthly breakfast, and work toward common goals together. (“Members dues” may resonate more than a monthly subscription.) Second, monetize job board postings because it’s something that demonstrates utility & practicality (a rural value). Third, monetize with new tech such as Mavely, which allows anybody—not just influencers—to get affiliate links for places like Home Depot, ACE Hardware, Anthropologie, Ashley Home, Athleta, AARP, Bass Pro Shops, and more (perfect for a rural audience). Fourth, ad sales are going to be hella fun (and a great way to connect with local businesses & leaders!) Local businesses and restaurants and shops and independent contractors and service providers need good ways to find business. There are no more local newspapers. There are no town websites. There is nothing except word of mouth. (And most of these places don’t even have websites—maybe a FB page, if any.) I’ve also got my foot in the door to print placemat versions of the newsletter to distribute to local diners in place of the one’s they’ve got, for free.

• Run a kick-ass, rurally-minded referral program. I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing what would be an effective rewards program for this particular audience, because your everyday digital downloads & eBooks & digital subscriptions aren’t going to resonate the same way. But, you know what will? Shoutouts in newsletters (there’s a lot of excitement around being valued & seeing your name in print). Physical, tangible products that convey high value and can be automatically fulfilled with the right tech (such as sweatshirts, coozies, bandanas, pet collars, hats, etc.). And giveaways up the ying yang for high-value products: Win a $1,000 gift card at the local hardware store. Win a $1,000 gift card for groceries. Win this sweet new chainsaw. Win a brand-new side-by-side. (Someday, LOL.) Win an all-paid vacation to Ireland. (Where a lot of local roots are.) These types of rewards are wildly effective because, not only are they spreading the word for you (it’s a form of paid advertising), but people trust other people’s opinions here, AND you have the excellent awesome benefit of making people feel more loyal and excited about what you’re doing. That goes FAR.

• Donating a portion of earnings toward a community development fund, where the community will vote which projects get done with the money—without the restrictions and complexities that often come with state and federal-funded grants. (Was just at a meeting yesterday for bidding on new ballpark in town. They have federal funds of $350K, which means they need to pay what’s called prevailing wage—which means the whole project becomes much more expensive to do, and they need to match that amount. It’s cool, but it’s definitely a PITA to navigate.)

ANYWAY, those are just some of the ideas I’m putting into this local newsletter ecosystem I’m building. I’m excited to be a pioneer of local newsletters for small towns & rural communities. And, let me tell you what:

It is easy to find your voice when you have a damn good reason to.

And, maybe that’s what we’ve been missing all along: the reason behind it all.

It’s easy to get wrapped up in posting things on the internet “because you’re supposed to.” Or because “that’s what a legitimate brand would do.” Or because “who are you if you aren’t visible.” Or because of the pressure to create content for the sake of creating content.

But, all of that eventually feels shallow.

You’re a shooting star, after all.

And one thing I know about stars is…they’re meant to fucking fly.

P.S. If you were on the earlybird sign-up list, you might have heard about the experimental group I’m putting together for anyone who wants to try their hand at their own local newsletter. 📝

(You might not have heard!)

I’m orchestrating a group of people who are curious about starting a newsletter in their town & making a difference in their community. I’m giving you everything you need to do it, and walking you through the whole process, step-by-step. I’m even licensing you my own local newsletter ecosystem, right down to the format, the template, the categories (if you want them!), the repeatable process, the referral rewards program, the FB ads to get subscribers, the email automations to monetize, the sponsorships to sell to local businesses, and the tech systems to link it all together.

I’m sending out public details on Monday at 12pm ET. 💥

Come become a member of The First 100 Club and work with me on a fun local project in YOUR town.

(It’s priced at a lower cost than usual for The First 100, since this is all a big experiment! So if this excites you, put Monday at 12pm ET into your calendar, and let’s do something meaningful together this year.)

Thanks for being here.