eventful swapsie, feeels, a vast open space, late blooming

a change in schedule and some context

Mendy Neralic

May 21, 2025

You can listen to me read this letter aloud here:

1×

0:00

-4:52

A little heads-up - I’m going to shift publishing AnyThread to Sundays instead of mid-week, beginning this weekend.

I’m still playing around, but this makes more sense with my schedule. I’ll also start to republish from my archive of newsletter stories, here and there, that I didn't publish as articles per se.

So in my ongoing reorientation, today I’ll offer a tidbit - and see you for more on Sunday.

The old world is made new at the birth of every baby, and every New Year's Day, and every morning, and the Buddhist says at every instant.

Ursula K. Le Guin in ‘Dancing at the Edge of the World’

I’m still in a process of reorganising and settling into a rhythm around writing and publishing articles and letter offerings here on Substack. I feel like I’ve been harping on a little about the move over here - it’s been almost a month after all! But I’m truly surprised and intrigued by how it’s left me a little unsettled and disoriented.

I thought it could be energising, but imagined it would be a mostly uneventful swapsie!

I’m sure this has been a correct move for me, but it feeeeels different over here. Or perhaps I feel different here. More exposed.

My cute little newsletter, delivered diligently each week to my little group of subscribers, felt cosy, like sharing to friends. Even though it's more or less the same people (I’ve lost and let go of quite a few in the move), it feels like there are no walls - here it's a vast open space.

It reminds me a little of the time I began my Arts / Psychology degree at the University of Queensland in the 1990’s as a mature-age student. I went from living a regular, and a little insular life, to walking into that huge campus and attending lectures that spoke about feminism, gender, politics, and the psyche! It was a completely new and strange world.

It's a cliche, but the literal and archetypal energy of the place cracked my mind open. My senses were flooded with so many new experiences, it was like being injected with light and fire.

In my mid-20s, I was still quite naive - it was the 90s, information and diverse perspectives were not at most people’s fingertips, I was from migrant origins, with a parochial Central Queensland childhood to top it off.

I’d recently escaped an awful marriage, so study signalled my entry into a new life chapter - a late emergence into my blooming womanhood passage.

Obviously, a move to a different newsletter/ writing platform is not as epic as repositioning my whole life and career, but the energy of vastness and wildness here feels real and is a glint from that old era.

I also really love it when a seemingly ordinary event like publishing ideas and writing on a new platform can unlock a forgotten or not-thought-about-moment and create a link between two seemingly disparate events. It helps establish a meaningful relationship between the two events in time. It connects the two me’s over time. And it helps me re-see both moments, giving each more context so I can create a new, richer story - restory - both moments.

— If you’ve had an experience where a mundane moment has unlocked a memory - to help you make more sense of it, or to give you a new perspective on a thing, I’d love to hear about it.

Any Thread with Dr Mendy Neralic

Discussion about this post