MISSING PERM PRESS! REWARD OFFERED!

Where the hell is my newsletter? No, seriously, have you seen it?

Where is Perm Press?

Your guess is as good as mine.

I looked up and down and left and right and under the hedges and over bushels and at the bottom of the bag of clementines at the fruit market and behind the two hands at the clock tower that click click clack and tell me it’s due time to hit “Publish”.

I checked over the rainbow and under the moon, I laid down on Washington Street and the cars passed over me one by one like Hot Wheels on a conveyer belt. But the gears and their engines did not inspire me, nor did the setting sun at 4PM on a Tuesday.

So where is Perm Press?

If you find it, let me know! $CASHMONEYREWARD$ UPON RETRIEVAL.

In all seriousness (or lack of seriousness?), people keep asking me where my newsletter is. It’s a fair question—you got invested and then I forgot to text back for 26 weeks. Which unfortunately is not unlike many of my friendships, so I guess that makes us true friends.

Part of me prides myself in writing a newsletter that is as unpredictable, or at least as predictably unreliable, as I am. Another part of me wishes I had the guts to publish consistently, but I regret to inform you that I am…

A COWARD. There, I said it.

But aren’t we all?

Sometimes, I feel that life is one big masquerade, dancing and parading around better versions of ourselves—inflated egos and hidden intentions, masked by our own sense of pride or the timid shame in our spirit that tells us we have not lived up to our standards for ourselves.

Life sometimes feels like a meticulous dance with the shadow self, balancing the desire to behold and to be beheld. To see and to be seen.

I wonder if many of us are comfortable with either.

Me after I post on Substack.

In this age, our attention spans are quite short. We’re comfortable with the act of watching, or “seeing”, as a form of numbing. Think of how quickly you pick up your phone to scroll when the smallest negative feeling arises. Psychologists frequently refer to our phones a “self-soothing” devices—basically “adult pacifiers”. If you don’t believe me, try purging social media from your phone for a week. It will drive you mad to not be able to scroll after the smallest negative remark from your boss, or when the person ordering ahead of you is taking too long to order their coffee (i.e. me).

This, however, isn’t the kind of seeing that I’m referring to. I’m talking about the act of beholding—to see something as it really is, without the veil, the mask. To hold something in quiet contemplation, wonder, and appreciation. To see things the way they were intended to be seen.

Most of us don’t want to look that deeply. Probably because when we behold something deeply, it almost always reflects back a truth about ourselves—the very thing we were trying to avoid in the first place.

To see something unmasked requires that we remove the mask from ourselves.

Sometimes I wonder whether we wear masks to hide from other people, or if the masks we’ve curated are actually our way of hiding from ourselves, crafted as the result of external rejections slowly internalized.

Four-year-old Seren felt this to her core.

It’s one year since I started Perm Press. They say that most Substack writers experience a plateau between 14 to 16 weeks, with some sources saying that 80% of writers quit Substack within their first year.

I understand why. For someone who once prided themself in being vulnerable, honest, completely myself, writing online challenged how open I was willing to be with my audience, and how uncomfortable I truly am with exposing even small details about my life. I noticed myself putting on a filter—What should I say? Is this appropriate? What will my friends think? What if my pastor saw this? What if my old professor reads this and laments how little my craft has grown since 2021? (Margaret, if you’re reading this, I love you. Lol.)

It wasn’t only what I should say, but how I should say it. I constantly feared writing poorly and couldn’t stand looking back at old posts, cringing that I’d released something so embarrassing to 100 people on the internet. It didn’t matter how much affirmation I received, it wasn’t enough to overcome the blaring internal voice of—

YOUREAFAILUREYOUREAFAILUREYOUREAFAILURE.

To be clear, no one was telling me I was a failure but myself. Still, no one is telling me I’m a failure. But small external rejections began to shape my image of myself, until I felt too tired to refute them. And writing only seemed to amplify the voices of internal criticism that I’d tried so hard to suppress most days of the week.

If my reflection accurately showed who I am inside.

It’s now November, and after a long, busy season, and with nothing else to do now that the weather has dipped into the 40’s, I know I have to write again.

God has been giving me many gentle nudges—through words of encouragement from friends and family, to seeing one of my best friends finish her first novel (yay, Sara!), to motivation that seemed to come only from above to finally edit my musical and submit it to a competition.

I don’t watch TV, but when I do, I only watch Sex and the City. And, as much as I hate to admit it, maybe watching Carrie write about the most mundane and cringey things in life gave me the final nudge to take out my computer again and write about all the cringey things in my life that I convince myself no one wants to hear about. Because I couldn’t help but wonder…if all the modern day Carrie Bradshaws who don’t have two degrees in writing are blowing up on Substack, could I—an educated and undisciplined queen—gain enough success from writing on the internet to finally purchase the Aritzia Super Puff?

So where does this leave us? Where is Perm Press?

Who knows!

Maybe you’ll see me next week while you eat your cranberry and potatoes. Maybe you won’t. It’s all very mysterious. Maybe mystique and inconsistency is part of the fun of it. Maybe we all need a bit more of that in our lives. Who really knows.

Until (possibly) next week,

Perm

P.S. I feel guilty for leaving you on read, so I made you a playlist. Here’s everything I’m listening to right now <3