When I started Feather & Flint in September 2016, I thought I knew what the future looked like: Hillary Clinton was about to become the first female president. The man I married two and a half years earlier was the person I’d spend the rest of my life with. Soon, I hoped, I’d warm to the idea of being a mom; and I needed to do everything in my power to secure my place in the world before that moment arrived. I spent my lunch breaks on the phone with recruiters, trying to find a job that would feel fulfilling without squeezing every bit of creativity and energy out of me by the end of the day.
Feather & Flint was an outlet for the kind of writing that I couldn’t do as a marketing copywriter; for the kind of stories that I found myself sharing with close friends over a bottle of wine, hoping that my experiences could help other women feel less alone. But it’s hard to create a truly compelling lifestyle blog when your life isn’t any different from anyone else’s. In an oversaturated industry, I was a newly married twenty-something who worked in an office and commuted home to the suburbs every night. Though I hadn’t yet realized it, I was walking a tightrope all the while: I was trying to find my way out of a job that I seriously worried was taking years off my life, then pouring every extra second I had into launching a blog that felt like my ticket back to the life I’d imagined when I dreamed of becoming a writer. I was sharing my advice on topics like “planning a wedding that’s true to who you are” and “misconceptions we all have about soulmates,” while in reality, my husband had started regularly sleeping on the couch. The stories that I wrote were sometimes, unintentionally, a vehicle to reframe my own experiences in the way that I needed to see them in order to find happiness in a life that wasn’t as happy as I liked to think.
Looking back over the posts I’ve published on Feather & Flint so far, it’s clear to me when the shift occurred. For the first two years, I had pushed myself to pull something together every month—even if it wasn’t the kind of story I’d imagined myself writing back at the start. In the oversaturated blogging industry, it’s almost impossible not to get caught in the trap of recreating the same content that already exists because it seems like a formula for success—content that’s simple, safe, shareable, and search-engine-optimized. I gradually lost touch with Feather & Flint’s value proposition in an environment with no shortage of opinions and inspiration.
But in the middle of 2018, my life began to change. I started writing a novel and traveling on my own. As I drew closer to myself, then started establishing boundaries around my time, I was able to admit that my life and my husband’s life were no longer one—that we were two parallel lines that would never again intersect. As our marriage ended and I started over on my own, I set ground rules for my new life, centered around the things that I now understood were absolutely vital to my happiness: the space I needed to let my creativity flourish; frequent opportunities to enjoy the beauty all around me; and time by myself to confront the anxieties and inconvenient truths that I’d done myself a disservice by repressing until that point in my life.
From then on, I started writing from a place of raw honesty and vulnerability rather than a desire to run a conventionally successful blog. The stories I’ve told on Feather & Flint since late 2018 are the ones that rattled the bars of my mind until I let them out; and I did my best to not just tell my own story, but to offer up the advice I’d gained from my experiences, hoping that it would find its way to someone who needed it. (And many times, I’m grateful to say, it has.) When I got divorced, I wrote about the way I’d reshaped my life around my own priorities. When my mom died, I wrote about the surprising glints of happiness I found in my own grief. When I met the love of my life, I wrote about the way that our relationship had made me rethink marriage as both a civil institution and an expression of love. When the pandemic hit earlier this year, I wrote about the ways I’d found to reframe anxious thoughts during a crisis that I feared might be less acute than many were willing to believe at the time.
—
At some point in 2020, I think every one of us has felt like the words we have to share are insufficient in the face of the overlapping crises we’re living through. After hearing one too many brands repeat the same vague phrases until they became totally meaningless—“now more than ever,” “in these uncertain times,” “we’re all in this together”—we can all spot less-than-sincere marketing copy from a mile away. The seemingly endless onslaught of death and injustice over the last several months has made it clearer than ever that the world doesn’t need another goddamn lifestyle blog. Though there’s joy to be found in recipes and travelogues and inspirational quotes in a time when we’re all stuck at home, there are many more well-established bloggers in those spaces who have that covered.
As a society, we’re rethinking the way that we’ve led our lives up until this point—from the pace at which we’ve been living, to the joys and values we’ve sacrificed to get ahead. We’re all figuring out how to balance work and life when the lines between the two have never been more blurry; how to shore up relationships with loved ones we may not have seen in six months, as well as those who we may have seen more of in the last six months than we’d ever expected; and how to carve out room for happiness amidst the persistent anxiety of a pandemic, a critical election year, a civil rights crisis, and a climate emergency.
In this difficult moment in history, maybe the best thing we can do for each other (in addition to donating, volunteering, and voting) is to seek out the unique contribution that we can each make to ease the struggles of at least one other person outside of our own homes. And when it comes to the psychological obstacle course that we’re all grappling with to some degree… that’s where I think I might be able to help. I can turn my own experiences with love and loss and the search for fulfillment into powerful stories. I can share my experience with starting over from scratch when you realize you’re living a life that no longer resembles you. I can share advice on recognizing yourself as a friend when you finally find yourself alone with your thoughts. I can write about discovering happiness in the tiniest moments in your day-to-day life, even when it feels like the world is ending.
So, that’s what you can expect to see here and on my Instagram and Facebook accounts from now on: honest stories about finding fulfillment in this strange new reality we’re all figuring out as we go; and glimpses of everyday beauty to remind us of all that we still have to feel grateful for. There’s so much that I can’t wait to share with you.
Don’t miss an update—follow Feather & Flint on social media:
Instagram | Facebook | Pinterest | Bloglovin’ | Spotify
