TinyLetter, the host of my longstanding (and, recently, intermittent) email newsletter, is shutting down services next month. We had a good run; I was on there since 2016, a whole eight years ago. In those eight years, I’ve lived at seven different addresses across five cities, only two of them in the U.S. I’ve picked up an extra degree, a new career, and plenty of grey hair.
Here we are now: new year, new life, new (digital) home.
In March 2020, I started what I called “The Quarantine Project,” writing daily diary entries in a Google Doc. Yesterday, while I was tapping in an entry as usual, I hit Google Docs’ character limit for a single doc. (No, I also did not know know they had a limit on that.) My diary is 288,004 words (some, from the early months, attributed to my friends Caroline and Jack). That’s 469 pages, memories recorded over the space of 1,389 days. All of this seems totally arbitrary, except that it’s not: maybe Google is telling me it’s time to close The Quarantine Project, a tab I have religiously kept open on my Chrome browser for nearly four years now, and that came to include a life far beyond “quarantine.”
And maybe it’s time for me to share my writing again.
On Instagram yesterday, I posted unedited snapshots of my first five diary entries. Not every day of my reflections over four years is fit for public consumption—at least not yet. But based on the feedback I’ve received so far, I think there’s an audience for some of it. If you’re here, I think you might be that audience. Maybe your friends are that audience too. Maybe there are people who wouldn’t mind escaping into the strange reality of a city girl who disappeared into the mountains in Idaho for a few years. I kept the diary to keep my sanity, as a place for me alone to wrestle with the intersection of my memories and my changing circumstances. It is unpolished, deeply personal, and frank to a fault.
I had lots of ideas about what I wanted a relaunched and rebranded personal newsletter to look like, but I want to start here: sharing some snippets of The Quarantine Project. And then let’s see where this goes.
Day 1, below.
