Hello, hello, one and all, I’m back! This past week my home was, yet again, filled with visitors from strange lands (friends from out of state), and I spent a lot of my time “chillaxing” with them. Never fear, for I am back again with another newsletter here on Trauma Response. This was intended to be a Friday post, but at about nine o’clock p.m. yesterday I realized that I’d never posted this, so consider this just a fun little Saturday thing! This post will be a little different, I won’t be covering any breaking news or talking about the state of Twitter under Elon Musk (though it is both almost exactly the same and somehow worse), instead I will be doing a brief life update and filling you all in on where I’m “at.” Let’s get to it.
As we should all know by now, I have been unemployed for the better part of five months. I’ve seen this newsletter as my “job,” and have worked hard to get one to three newsletters out weekly, and I like to think I’ve mostly succeeded at that job! But unemployed I am no longer, for I have swallowed my pride in the face of dwindling funds and have taken another receptionist job at an undisclosed location (they’re not sponsoring me) here in Chicago. This is not to say that Trauma Response is coming to an end, I enjoy writing here and my job on LinkedIn is still “Newsletter Writer,” but my schedule is now nowhere near as free as it was even a week ago so I may upload newsletters on a more fluid basis.
When I first started this I had one post on Tuesday every week. Then I realized that I probably needed more so I switched to three posts, one for Friday, Sunday, and Tuesday. Then, with two other posts to contend with, the Tuesday post became harder and harder to make special and, if you haven’t noticed, I haven’t put on out in a while! Now that I’m employed I will most likely retire the official names of “The Friday Post” and the “Sunday Post,” because, to be frank, newsletters might not come out on Fridays and Sundays. I’ll mostly be working mornings and getting home anywhere between one and five o’clock, so I’ll have plenty of time to write after my shifts and I can promise that at least one newsletter will come out every week.
One of my own personal hurdles during this experience has been creating arbitrary rules for myself and trying to hold myself accountable for them. I told myself three newsletters per week and often struggled to come up with three different topics. Most of the time ideas came to me from on high and I was able to let my creative juices flow into three decent posts, but on several occasions, the process of finding those ideas felt painstaking. In hindsight, I probably should’ve cut myself some slack, it’s not like I’m being paid to write 1500 words about how much I hate Chicago cyclists, but I wanted (and I still want) this publication to thrive and have good content. In my eyes, this new job is a reprieve from arbitrary rules, an excuse, if you will, to ignore them. From this point on my fake rules are gone, I make no promises other than “this newsletter is not dead.”
Five months of nothing but sitting on my ass, watching The Real Housewives, and writing was very fun, but I’m excited to return to the world of the bi-weekly paycheck and finally, again, be able to make frivolous purchases. For probably the last two months I’ve also been applying to entry-level writing jobs all over Chicago and the internet, and I don’t intend on stopping now that I’m employed elsewhere. I don’t plan on being just a pretty face that greets you when you walk through the door of [REDACTED] for the rest of my life, but I need to remain that pretty face so that I can afford a new apartment and not fall into poverty.
So, yes, I am back. Back to assuage the fears you didn’t know you had that this newsletter is dead. Trauma Response is not dead, Trauma Response will never be dead, and in the event that I do stop writing on here, Trauma Response can never truly die because it is always alive in our hearts. I’ve loved writing for a long time, and I love being able to show you that here. I don’t have any plans to stop sending emails to your “promotions” folder on Gmail at least once a week alerting you of a new post, and I also don’t have any plans to stop trying to do this professionally. Trauma Response will still be here long after you or I are both long dead, in 1000 years aliens will discover my MacBook Pro and log on to Substack dot com and discover this newsletter, and I believe they, too, will fall in love with my prose and ensure that this newsletter lives on into infinity.
Thank you all for reading this, and I’ll see you whenever a lightbulb appears over my head alerting me of a new idea to write about, hopefully sooner rather than later. XOXO, Holden.
p.s. I know I said I wasn’t making any more promises, but, as it is almost the end of the year, you can for SURE count on a few different “End of the Year Ranking” listicles to come out during the month of December, so if all hell breaks loose and I get writer’s block for eternity at least you have those to look forward to! <3
Congrats on the job! Perhaps you'll find some material at work to write about. If I was a writer, I'd have plenty. You only have to walk around the Home Depot for awhile, to see what I mean. Love you.😘