Hi!
Long time no e-mail. I have two big updates, but before anything, I’d like to say thank you. You probably first found me on Medium and, for some reason, thought I was worthy of a place in your inbox. You couldn’t possibly know how that motivated me: a fledgling, independent online writer. But it did. So again, thank you for subscribing.
Originally, I put this up with the hope of connecting more closely with my readers. But at the time, I didn’t really know what that entailed, much less how to do that with my writing. So my newsletters then were really no more than a virtual megaphone. “Announcement: I wrote a new thing on Medium! Please proceed to this link.”
But I always saw the redundancy: Why send a newsletter and trouble you with another link when you could so easily enjoy my work right here?
So, that’s update #1: Instead of Medium, I will now mainly write here. The full length of my work will be sent directly to your inbox (and your Substack app, if you have it. If you don’t, I highly recommend it.)
The second update is I am relaunching this newsletter. This “rebrand” is a way to align with a broader change in my writing—a shift that I think I was always bound to make but just wasn’t sure how.
Let me explain—and I promise it’ll eventually tie into my newsletter.
You’ve probably come to know me as a self-help writer. It’s a genre I’ve had and will always have massive respect for, and I will gladly shout its tenets from the rooftops: Manage your time. Build habits, routines, and time blocks. Don’t binge on that bag of chips or scroll through your feeds for hours on end or whatever it is that gratifies you right now but robs you of your future, desired self.
But the thing is, I didn’t begin writing so I could tell people how to “best” live their lives. And by “begin”, I’m not referring to my start on Medium, but my childhood diaries and blogger—cringe—days. Frankly, I never did get comfortable writing in the second-person POV (a common practice among online self-help writers) nor do I like, as writer Haley Nahman put it, patronizing readers with certainty (“Start doing X and it will change. your. life!”) As Nahman further points out: “Because what do any of us know, really?” (A fellow self-help writer who has a similar writing approach once called our preference—and I really love this term—“soft-help”)
I write because I’m oddly and fortunately an expressive person. I write because I like poetic things and because I think a well-told story is nothing but sheer alchemy. I write because I’m fascinated by real-life events, how they make me feel, and what they can teach me about myself and the world around me. I write because life is beautiful and heartbreaking and rich with surprises—its full depth, expanse, and meaning we can thoroughly enjoy, but sometimes, at the cost of its practicalities.
I live on my own now, but I do have the option to stay with my parents on the weekends. With a flexible work setup, I can even extend until the work week. Their house, by the standards of Metro Manila’s traffic situation, is far from the city. But it’s not the transportation or traffic that bothers me, but knowing that changing houses—spending time with them—would disrupt my regular programming. My parents aren’t exactly getting any younger, and there I was, worrying about missing my workout program.
Life is more manageable, productive, and thriving with systems and routines.
But—as I’ve had to continuously remind myself—systems and routines do not make a life.
And if the pandemic has sobered us up to any truth about being a human being, it’s that we’re all just trying to get by. Day by day. Every day. More eery is the often invisible truth that every individual is diseased in some way. Everybody has some personal demon, some void to fill, or some big, hairy question nagging at them.
Recently, a friend told me that she suddenly found herself asking, “Is this it? Is this all there is to life?” And that’s despite knowing she had the basics and more: a job she excelled in, a sturdy support system, a partner. As we tackled her dilemma, it was clear that it wasn’t a lack of gratitude or a sense of dissatisfaction.
I think it’s just a strange, normal human thing. We’re sentient beings who recognize, notwithstanding our perfectly-choreographed daily routines, that there’s gotta be more to life. Yes, I’m referring to that Stacie Orrico classic, where she profoundly sings: "Well it’s life, but I’m sure / there’s gotta be more / than wanting more”
As Orrico asked in her song, what is this thing that’s missing? I have a few guesses: The feeling of being seen. The ability to stay true to one’s self, and to believe that you are enough. The knowledge that you can craft a meaningful life. The chance to see our selves and our surroundings in ways that feel even just an inch more expansive or whole, if not entirely new.
These are all themes I know I truly love writing about.
Okay, so what exactly is it that I’m making a big deal out of? Well, it has been a real creative crisis considering what I’ve started and what more I can do if I niched down to self-help. Not to mention the genre’s popularity and evergreen-ness, which feels a lot like its own safety net.
But I have a day job; it was never lost on me that I only have so much time for my art. Should I write what’s easy (and proven and lucrative)—or what’s true?
This newsletter is my answer.
Welcome to Skinny Deep
The urge to follow what’s “in” or what sells isn’t just a writer’s or artist's problem. At its core, it’s an all-too-familiar struggle: we end up listening to things outside of ourselves—and allowing them to have more bearing than they should.
“Just be yourself!” We throw the advice around as if being unapologetically yourself was a switch you can simply turn on. Being yourself requires having tuned into yourself. And in this noisy, fragmented, hyperconnected, overstimulated, image-driven, perpetually-trending world, we’re set up to pay attention to everything else but ourselves. Our modern lives hardly leave space for our inner lives, which makes it increasingly hard to distinguish one thing from another: What’s fact and what’s fiction? What’s honest to yourself and what isn’t? What matters and what doesn’t?
Going back to Stacie Orrico, maybe the way to feel like you have more, to reach a real sense of adequacy, and to be less swayed and scattered, isn’t a matter of addition— but subtraction. A way to eliminate the extraneous: our false, outdated beliefs, the force-fit, externally-pressured desires, and the shiny-but-fleeting things.
I will cover a lot of ground in my newsletter, and it will come in different forms (see list below), but what ties it all together is the ability to lead with authenticity. Everybody deserves to be able to skinny-dip, to show their selves fully, bravely, and proudly, in the singular ocean of their lives.
This reminds me of something from Neil Gaiman’s commencement speech Make Good Art. Though it sounds like creative advice, it’s a good reminder for life in general:
The one thing you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can. The moment that you feel that just possibly you are walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind, and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself—that’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.
One more reason why my newsletter is called so: I’m not sure why, but I’ve always carried an introspective streak. On a good day, I’m a hopeful meaning-maker who can offer a redeeming, if not positive perspective. On a bad day, I’m an incessant overthinker who can take things—and thus write—way too seriously. I have to remind myself that I’m allowed to be my cheeky, pop culture-loving millennial self—and that she is not antithetical to the curious, philosophizing old soul in me. The name Skinnny Deep reflects and reminds me of that. And as I blend and ricochet between these two personas, I hope it makes for a more interesting reading experience.
Here’s a more detailed list of what you can expect from my newsletter:
Essays about modern life, personal growth, and self-understanding
Things I wish I knew earlier
Inspirational thoughts
Think-pieces—as a post-it on my desk says—on “ideas that I burn for”
My “life frameworks”—mental models, concepts, or systems I’ve invented based on my hard-earned understanding of how to go about an aspect of life (An aside: These are my biggest hits on Medium, and I’m planning to compile and share them with you sometime soon)
A glorified personal blog (Rest assured, I’m not here to spill my guts all over your inbox, and I painstakingly edit my work in consideration of your time)
Links & round-ups of meaningful content or resources I’ve come across
A place to rest and meditate on what matters
Change. As I, like you and every other human being, will naturally evolve from acquiring new experiences, so will this newsletter
Now I know this sounded like this whole dramatic exit from my self-help writer phase, but you know what they say: you can take the writer out of the genre, but you can’t take the genre out of the writer. I’ve always set out to write with the hope of inspiring, moving, and equipping people to live their best lives. That hasn’t changed; I’m simply doing it in a form that feels more real to me, and consequently, more compelling to you.
But if you think this “rebranding” really isn’t your jam, just hit unsubscribe.
If you’re staying, you can expect to read Skinny Deep every Sunday, 9 AM PHT. Best paired with whatever coffee you have at home. And as you dive in with me, I hope that, momentarily, it takes you to a place that feels something like this: