Welcome!
Unresolving is a newsletter loosely exploring questions of identity and adulthood in non-traditional forms. It’s about untangling who we always thought we’d be, and reconciling it with the unruly process of understanding who we actually are.
At some point in my mid-thirties, I realized I was chasing goals I set for myself over a decade ago, without adjusting them based on who I’d become in the process. Turns out, a lot of my friends were going through the same reckoning—especially (though certainly not always) women who were also single and childless. When you assume life will float a certain way — the way nearly all stories end for women — and then it doesn’t, you’re forced to ask yourself which direction you really want to go.
There are depictions of adulthood broadcast everywhere, but most still revolve around some version of partnership, children, and financial success. I find myself starving for women constructing a life on their own terms, open about their struggles choosing whether or not to have children, the trade-offs between financial success and pride in one’s work, the challenges of loneliness when you’re single, the compromises of partnership when you’re not. Women trying to access—outside of expectations—what it is they actually want, or at least be in honest pursuit of it.
So. This newsletter digs into all that. It’s an attempt to feel less alone in the pursuit of crafting a version of adulthood that feels, not always good exactly (and often far from it), but at least true and honest—of our own making.
I hope you enjoy!
A little about me:
I’m a Brooklyn-based writer and tech professional. A few years back, I started the dating app, Chorus, in an attempt to make modern dating more human (and recently had to dissolve it). Before that, I worked at places like Etsy, Accenture, and Girls Who Code. I have a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering and an MBA, and didn’t start writing until my mid-thirties. I write mostly about feminism, gender, and technology. My writing can be found in The Rumpus, Catapult, Salon, Slate, Hobart, Five:2:One, Vice, and others. I also write regularly for Medium.
The more personal stuff:
Raised without financial stability, I started my career obsessed with climbing the corporate ladder, and proving myself in male spaces. This need for men’s approval was a total asset professionally, but, personally, I was flailing. I spent way too much time chasing unavailable men, battled a stubborn, amorphous eating disorder well into my thirties, and was generally disconnected from what it was I wanted, men’s approval aside. After a decade, I left the corporate track for what I thought was my dream job at a feminist nonprofit, but, even still, something didn’t feel right.
I never thought of myself as creative enough to put words on paper, let alone call myself a writer. I mean, I fantasized about it constantly and snuck writing in secretly, but I was an engineer, a business person, I knew nothing of the literary world. It felt ridiculous—mortifying, really—that I thought what I had to say was important enough to take the time it took to write it down. I dated writers, instead. But in my mid-thirties, after a bad breakup, a cross-country move, and a career shift, I finally built up the courage, or maybe just the desperation, to try writing myself.
Writing, for me, was the catalyst for starting to figure out what it was I wanted, societal expectations aside. I stopped dating and spent nearly all my free time writing. I quit my full-time job and launched my own company. I abandoned the idea of marriage and children as the cornerstone of adulthood—something I hadn’t actually felt in any way, shape, or form, but had been lodged in my brain for, well, ever. And I began retreating regularly to the woods to spend long periods of time alone. I was making progress! Little did I know, that was just the beginning. The company didn’t work, I ended up in a relationship after all, and writing isn’t exactly something to make a living off of. Now, at forty, I’ve realized the answer is ever-changing and the question much broader.
In the most basic sense, this newsletter an ongoing attempt to access and articulate specs of selfhood that feel true, even, and especially, well into adulthood, when so much of culture seems intent on obscuring it.
More writing, for context:
Here are some of my essays, if you want a better sense of what I write about:
