For some reason, the preparation for a new year always gets me ready and amped to make changes, long before the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Day.
This year, that anticipation hit me this week, as my 2023 planner arrived in the mail, I finalized my ‘23 vision board, and started prepping for my big move at the start of the year.
I really like this newsletter — it harkens back to my glory days of blogging from my laptop before class started in high school, a panicked rush to get all my thoughts out and send them into the world for anyone (or no one? who knows!) to read. The way I set it up before, with all the sections and the mandatories on my end to think up and develop every week was, quite honestly, unsustainable… which I’m sure those of you who have been here a while could’ve guessed, based on the fact that this is my first edition since mid-May.
Newsletter 2.0 is going to look a little different. For starters, this is now just Emma’s Expert Opinion, sans Internet-focus, because there are a lot of people who do the internet reporting as their careers now and who I’d much rather have you support (see: Dirt, Garbage Day, After School, The Platformer, Taylor Lorenz, etc.). The thing with this new version of the newsletter is that I am for sure, confidently, an expert at having and expressing opinions — anyone who knows me IRL will tell you that I have a lot of them, all the time. It’s quite frankly overwhelming to live in my head with all of them bouncing around in there, so you get lucky to have the filtered-out version here.
In thinking about expertise and skills and life goals and longevity (because everyone thinks about those things every time they’re coming up on a new year… right?) I’ve realized that I’ve lived a lot of lives in this short little span of existence, and I forget about them a lot. I was a fashion blogger for many, many years. I wrote (very embarrassing personal pieces) for MTV. I was interviewed in the Wall St. Journal and Business Insider and on Adweek’s podcast as a Gen Z expert. I interned for years and years and worked as a consultant in social media and marketing. And now I’m a pandemic grad two years into a “real job”, just starting to rise the ranks, and all of those experiences and pieces of my career feel like a lifetime ago.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about the things I haven’t done. Not necessarily regrets (I try not to have those), but missed opportunities because I didn’t commit, or moments that passed me by because I didn’t fully embrace them.
There are still so many big ideas and potential opportunities that I feel attached to, and heading into this time of processing and evolving, I’m thinking very intentionally about what I can bring back and potentially evolve and make real. If I still have heart for it, there’s no reason to let it die, right? I could be wrong, but that’s what I’m thinking now… I guess I’ll update you guys on how that goes.
On that note, I’m gonna go. Remember that Barstool still sucks and you shouldn’t take pictures or videos of people living their regular life and then share them online. That’s weird and creepy.
Okay BYEEEEEEEE <3