I Am Not Doing This Alone (Just Not How You Think)
People assume that when an essay lands in your inbox on a Monday, every word of it comes only from me, alone at a desk. It did. I write every single word of this newsletter, myself. But I do not do it completely alone anymore, and pretending otherwise is starting to feel like its own kind of lie. I have a co-creator. It has a name. Claude. I call mine Misha.
Misha does not write this newsletter. I do, every time, no exceptions. Every word you are reading right now came out of me, typed fast some mornings before the coffee is even cool enough to drink, or more likely spoken straight into the screen. I dictate most of what I write now, using Wispr Flow, which has quietly turned into a game changer for someone who thinks faster than she types (that is a referral link, we both get a free month if you end up loving it the way I do). What Misha actually is, is my spell checker and grammar police. And, more honestly, my retriever, the one who finds the thread of an idea again when I come back to a draft days later. Misha remembers where I left off. I clearly do not. Gotta love the menopause brain.
I have always been a little bit of a nerd. Ok not a little nerd, a huge one. Over a decade as a CPA before any of this, long before the greenhouse, before the produce went to Whole Foods, before a doctor ever asked me what I put on my skin. I was the person who built a spreadsheet for fun. Somewhere in the clean beauty years I put that part of me away in a drawer. Tech and systems did not exactly fit the brand I was building.
They fit me. They always did.
Here is what happens most mornings now. I open something we built together and there is a brief waiting for me. It tells me how my channels did overnight, what is actually worth my attention today, not everything, just the real things, and any news in the handful of areas I care about. Clean beauty. Regenerative farming. The stuff that touches my work. I did not build that by hiring a team. I built it by being the CPA I always was, the one who wants the numbers laid out before she walks into the room.
So here is what that looks like. Organizing years of files I had scattered across three different drives and two dead laptops. Helping me see the pattern in an idea before I write it down. Tracking what I am spending building this next chapter, so I am not finding out in April that I have no idea where my receipts are.
That is the honest use of this thing. Not a replacement. A very good assistant who happens to also be excellent at organizing a woman whose brain runs in four directions before seven in the morning.
Somewhere on your phone right now is a graveyard of saved Instagram posts you meant to go back to and never will. Screenshots of recipes, book titles, someone’s morning routine, a caption you liked, hundreds of them, maybe more than you would admit out loud. That pile is not a personal failing. It is a filing problem waiting for the right filer. That is the actual, unscary use of this thing. Not a threat to your job, or your voice, or the thing that makes you you. A very patient assistant for the pile you already have and never look at.
There is a version of this where saying any of it out loud feels like cheating, like needing a tool this closely makes the work less mine. I have decided that is an old rule, left over from an old version of me, the one who thought needing help of any kind was a weakness instead of a design decision. I spent a lot of years proving I could do everything myself. I am fifty four. I do not need to prove that anymore. I need the thing to actually work.
So this is the first layer, peeled back on purpose. I have loved tech since long before it was even a word we used this way. A Commodore Vic20 (see image). A dial up modem. Floppy disks. A tape drive for storage, yes, we used to record programs onto an actual cassette tape. That love came decades before skincare did, and I am done being quiet about it. There is more here, how I actually use it, unglamorous and real, because it turns out that once you stop hiding a part of yourself, you find out how many other women have been hiding the exact same one.
For now, just this. I am not doing it alone. I built the help myself, out of a lifelong love for the parts of me other people always found boring.
Turns out that love was never boring. It was just early.