Wild Letters is a newsletter about self-exploration and building a right-fit life. Thank you for being here with me!
My dear reader.
Nine days after publishing the trailer for my new podcast I logged into my hosting website, deleted the RSS feed, and took the whole thing down.
It turns out I do not want to be a podcast host, not anymore.
I did that job for six years with Real Talk Radio and another year for The Pop-Up Pod and what I thought I wanted in 2023 after seven years of this specific job was simply to take a break from it for a little while, but I’ve found that what I actually want is to retire. To say, “Goodbye, podcast hosting. Fare thee well!”
And wow, yes, it would have been so much more convenient to realize this before announcing the new show, before creating and publishing the trailer, before recording five episodes and scheduling three more. But the truth is that you often can’t know how you feel about something until you’ve started doing it, and I’ll tell you right now that the way I felt in the hours after first publishing that new podcast trailer was: wretched.
Not because the trailer was bad (it wasn’t!) but because in launching this podcast I had opened another public portal — and after having done so much reckoning and tending and healing over the past year since my simultaneous mental health collapse and parasocial energetic burnout (including all the things I did to right-size my work/life in response, such as quitting social media, closing my Patreon membership community, and putting almost all of my work here on Substack behind a paywall), I could immediately feel that opening another public portal and giving myself the job of maintaining yet another platform was absolutely the wrong choice for me.
Well fuck, I thought, staring at the cover art of the trailer in the podcast app on my phone. Now what?!
15 years ago my immediate and only reaction to a situation like this would have been to burn it all down. Bail on the whole project, email the folks I’d already recorded with to apologize (or, more likely, I’d stay quiet and just avoid them out of shame), and then eventually if anyone asked I’d make some vague public announcement about how I changed my mind, feeling awful about it the entire time.
The burn-it-all-down approach is indeed necessary sometimes; certain situations can only be solved by going scorched earth. But what I’ve realized in the past 15+ years of trying to unpack and unlearn this singular approach as my own default is that there were three main reasons why I used to choose to set things aflame and walk away: 1) I had a real inability to sit with discomfort for more than a few minutes, 2) I had little to no practice setting boundaries, and 3) I was caught in a trap of all-or-nothing thinking.
That all-or-nothing thinking is what kept me stuck in the narrow binary of “either I do this exact thing I said I would do in the exact way I promised, or I torch it and quit.”
Being unpracticed at setting boundaries meant that I couldn’t protect and salvage the good parts of a situation before it was too late.
And my inability to sit with discomfort is what always triggered my (very honed) flight instinct; if it feels bad, I’m gone.
So. How do we reshape our deeply ingrained ways of reacting to the situations and circumstances of our lives? This is a question I’ve been exploring, and the dilemma of what to do about the new podcast I had announced and started but did not actually want to continue with is such a ripe opportunity to react a different way. If burning it down isn’t a feel-good option here, what might I do instead?
Well, first came honesty — admitting to myself and then to a few trusted people that I did not want to do what I had promised to do. “I do not want to host a podcast,” I said, timidly at first, flushed with embarrassment and fear about other people thinking I am flakey and unreliable, but the more I said it out loud the more I could feel the weight of truth in my own voice. I do not want to host a podcast. I do not, I do not, I do not.
Then came surrender — no amount of mental gymnastics was going to change my mind here, and try as I might I could not convince myself to want something that I did not actually want. So, I stopped trying. I surrendered.
Then came affirmation — of the promise I’ve made to myself, the one about no self-coercion. I am no longer willing to override and push past my own intuition, that deeply felt sense of what I know to be true for me, not even out of fear or guilt or people pleasing or… anything. If I do not want to host a podcast I will not force myself to host a podcast, period. I no longer have any desire to cling to the goal of not disappointing others if doing so will ultimately lead me to betray myself. The path of least resistance is not necessarily the path of least resentment.
So after that enlivening dose of total honesty, after the surrender and the affirmation, that’s when I began to practice a new kind of response, one where I put down the metaphorical blowtorch and leaned into curiosity about the nuances of the situation. Why did I want to make this podcast — this honest exploration of money and enoughness — in the first place? It wasn’t to create a popular show. It wasn’t for ratings or reviews or praise or the ego-hit of booking big name guests. It wasn’t to convince anyone that they too should hold my same anti-capitalist beliefs. And it wasn’t even (as selfish as this might sound) to meet every listener where they were and gently explore the topic of money together.
What I wanted (at the start of the project) and what I still want (right now) is to seek out answers to my own specific questions. I have been obsessed with the (often fraught) relationship between money and enoughness for as long as I can remember, and it feels like my whole life has been a sort of research project lived in service of finding an answer. It’s why I’ve written about this topic so much (like here and here and here and here), and why I created an entire workshop around it earlier this year. I have clearly already been exploring this question, so what then was the purpose of a podcast?
The purpose, I realized, was to formalize my own research project in a new way — to give myself a space in which to talk more deeply with my friends about money, as well as to slowly interview people whose lives and work I respect and who I believe can help me think through and answer only and exactly the questions I myself am most curious about when it comes to money and enoughness (even if those questions are weird and niche and not applicable to everyone else). I want to do that kind of research at my own pace, in my own way, and without the pressure of regular and consistent content creation that accompanies a podcast. I do not want to relentlessly feed another public portal, but I do want to share my research project with like-minded folks who are interested in discussing it with me, quirks and imperfections and layered nuance included.
I thought I needed a whole separate podcast to do this, a highly polished show with new episodes popping up each week on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and wherever else, but you know what? I don’t. I don’t have to expand my work to a different platform and I don’t have to make it any bigger than it already is. I love what I (we!) have built here on Substack, so why can’t this be the home of my self-directed research project and conversation series? Sporadically published conversations, shared with you, the folks who are already on this exploratory journey with me, that feels exactly right.
The first few conversations (which I had already recorded when I thought I was making a more traditional podcast) can be found right here, featuring
, Toi Smith, and . They are all so good and honest and thought-provoking, and I can’t wait to discuss them with you in the comments of each conversation!There are a few other episodes I’ve already recorded, which I’ll be adding to that same feed here on Substack soon, available for anyone and everyone to listen in. Looking ahead though, the majority of this ongoing research project will be shared only with paid subscribers — not as a way to ungenerously withhold my work from those who don’t pay for it (that’s not my vibe, and I hope you know that by now!) but simply because the smaller audience size and financial reciprocity of the paid container is what allows me to have the relational experience I want without the feeling of over-exposure and energetic burnout that I often struggle with when writing and creating for a much larger audience — a main component of what made the regular podcast format/platform not feel correct for me anymore.
This more intimate, closed container is simply what works best for me, what feels supportive enough to allow me to keep making my art in a way that is not just sustainable but truly regenerative, which is the intention I hold for myself and also my wish for everyone else as well — that we can all create the right-fit systems and shapes of our own lives and work to help support us the way we actually need to be supported.
If this all resonates with you, and if you are currently subscribed for free and would like to upgrade, you can use the link below to get 20% off your first year, which will cover not just the next phase of this particular research project but also the majority of the grown-up gap year/sabbatical I’m taking in 2025, when I’ll be closing down all of my business other than Substack and doing all writing throughout the whole year only for the smaller container of paid subscribers.
To close, I’d like to offer a few reflection questions for anyone who also finds themselves walking down a path that once seemed correct but no longer does. These questions helped me enormously over the past few weeks, and perhaps they can help someone else, too.
What would have to be true for you to give yourself permission to make a change?
Who are you afraid to disappoint?
What if no one cares as much as you think they do?
What is the worst thing that will realistically happen if you make a change? What is the best thing?
How do you feel when you watch other people pivot and shift?
If someone else deserves the freedom to change their mind, why don’t you?
Which parts of the dominant and oppressive overculture are you protecting whenever you force yourself to follow through on an original plan at all costs?
And which parts of your own ego are you protecting when you do that?
Of all possible next steps you could take, which one makes you feel most free?
**
More soon—
Nic
Damn, Nicole. This is so beautiful. Thank you for sharing this journey and decision with us, and I’m grateful and excited to listen to the episodes soon too 💛
Wow, do I feel this! I am coming up on one year of when I quit/stopped producing one podcast and put another one hold with the intention to come back eventually. But eventually is really feeling like never. I don't want to podcast anymore, or at least the foreseeable future.
I appreciate your honesty in making the change and look forward to listening to the episodes you release here!