So Glad I'm Here (Yes, Even Now)

Work life balance, motherhood, and finding my professional purpose editing Open Secrets Magazine amidst the chaos of 2025

Selfie outside LACMA from my whirlwind October 2024 Los Angeles weekend

Before I get into what I’ve been up to, especially since I’m sharing a photo of me smiling at LACMA during my whirlwind Los Angeles weekend in October 2024, I want to encourage you to donate to any of the GoFundMes you’ve likely seen circulating, or to a group like Letters From Altadena, which is providing relief to families whose homes were destroyed who were already struggling financially before the 2025 wildfires.

I started writing this as a Note on Substack. I’m not even sure how to link to my Notes but if you follow me on Substack, which, confusingly, is different than just subscribing to this newsletter, you can see my postings there most days. I’m using it similarly to how I used to use Twitter, which I’m barely using now that it’s X, for what I hope are obvious reasons.

But as I typed this on Monday, it started to get longer and longer and I’ve been feeling guilty for not sending a newsletter, so I decided to make this my first post of 2025. I hope to be sending newsletters more often, but I know better than to promise a set schedule here. What I can tell you is that my personal essay magazine

Open Secrets

is publishing new essays every week and most weeks a column.

Last week I wrote the first of our new Essay Writing Tips column, we just launched the Radical Pleasure column by

Athena Dixon

, there’s the Dear Daddy advice column, and my ADHD Diaries column is launching next week. I’m also working hard on our in-person personal storytelling summit Open Secrets Live, happening in New York on Saturday, May 3.

I’ll be interviewing THE

Jane Pratt

, editor of

Another Jane Pratt Thing

(essayists, you can submit to their It Happened To Me column!), and former editor of Sassy, Jane, and xoJane, and we have an amazing lineup of over 30 memoir authors, essayists, storytellers, and editors from Another Jane Pratt Thing, HuffPost Personal,

Narratively

, HarperCollins, and Random House, who’ll be sharing details on how to get published and what they look for from submissions. Early bird $25 tickets are available at Eventbrite; the price goes up to $35 on February 1.

So that, plus my freelance writing and being a mom and caregiver and human being are a lot to juggle. Some days I get super overwhelmed and wonder if I should give up working for a while to focus on my baby, because there’s no way I can do all the work I dream up and give her the full attention and interaction she deserves. I just hired a part-time babysitter, who’s taking care of her while I write this, which is a wonderful step for me and I think helps expose her to how another person interacts with her.

Even when I get overwhelmed, and especially at this time when the news is basically a variation on How much worse are things going to get in the next four years, what I keep coming back to is a song I sang to my daughter in my earliest days as a mom called “So Glad I’m Here” by Dan Zanes and Elizabeth Mitchell with You Are My Flower. Elizabeth (aka Liz) was/is in the band Ida, who are one of my favorite bands (check out my Gothamist interview with them from many, many years ago), and I’d known of her children’s music for a while but didn’t really have a reason to listen to it. But when I was trying to get my baby to calm down, hers was the first music I sought out.

Some of the lyrics go:

Joy brought me here
You know joy brought me here
Joy brought me here, here today

I'm so glad I'm here
So glad I'm here
So glad I'm here, here today

During the height of the Covid pandemic, I did a lot of soul-searching. I asked myself: What are you doing with your life? Are you using your skills and interests to be of use?

Much of the time, I didn’t like the answers I got. I had started to hate the cycle of book promo that made me feel gross and slimy and also like it didn’t matter, or that I was terrible at it because I was spending a lot of time and money on something my heart was no longer into. Editing erotica anthologies and feeling utterly alone in my promotional efforts drained my time and my love of words and started to feel pointless. Not that the genre as a whole is pointless, or that book promo is always pointless, but for me specifically, the passion I’d had at 23 when I first got published in the genre had drained away over time.

When I started Open Secrets in 2023 after the closure of several online essay publications, I felt the opposite. It was scary to anoint myself an editor and publisher with the click of a button, and often still is. I didn’t go to school for those things, and being a law school dropout is still something I feel weird about 26 years later.

But even though I had impostor syndrome about being in charge of such a sprawling endeavor, hadn’t used Substack much, and had no idea if anyone would read the essays I was commissioning, as I dove into the work, I felt at home. I enjoyed all the bits and pieces, from the creative work of planning topic categories and researching writers in my network to seek out to the actual editing, and eventhe more boring admin work of drafting posts and scheduling them and paying people, which did make me feel like I was putting something positive into writers’ wallets, at least.

Social media still felt like a slog, but a slog worth doing, and one whose impact I could immediately see. With book publishing, there was no way for me to see the impact of my actions in any calculable way, which made it hard to learn which of my efforts had worked and which hadn’t.

As Open Secrets Magazine’s second anniversary approaches in April 2025, I still enjoy the work, which feels even more important now. I have more demands on my time and energy than I ever have, and am working hard to figure out how to make Open Secrets financially sustainable, which right now it’s not, but I still have that spark of creative and professional fulfillment.

I love that I took another leap and am planning a big event and and a podcast, even though I’m terrified I’ll do great interviews that I’ll forget to record. I love that I’m launching new columns this month. I love seeing people leave comments that show thoughtful and close reading that respects the vulnerability our authors show in their work.

I truly love all of it, even though I don’t know exactly what the outcome will be. I have to juggle Open Secrets work with my paying work and being a mom and that’s hard sometimes, but when the world is literally on fire and every moment there’s something to be infuriated about, I’m grateful that I no longer feel like I’m just taking up space on this earth, counting the days and watching them idly pass by. I feel like I’m doing something useful with my skills and that helps me get up in the morning on days I’d rather not.

Yes, some of that work-related new relationship energy is an ADHD thing. So many patterns of how I operate personally and professionally are related to ADHD in ways I never suspected. I’m figuring that out as I go and will be writing about it.

But as we enter the early days of the 47 era and I’ll hear our old/new President’s name on the news every day, I wanted to honor and highlight that pride, that sense of purpose. I didn’t pick a word of the year for 2025, but I guess I picked a feeling, or it picked me. I’m grateful for that, and hope you’ll join me in subscribing to Open Secrets if you haven’t already. Even though there’s a lot to be furious about, I’m truly so glad I’m here, sitting in my baby’s nursery while she sleeps in the adjacent room, with words waiting to be written and edited and dreamt up. As an Instagram post I saw recently said, “Art will save us.” It’s not the only thing that will, but it’s certainly part of how we express ourselves and bond with our fellow humans.

I’ll close with another Elizabeth Mitchell song, a cover of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” something I think it’s important to remember at this time when greed and corruption are trying to take over so many aspects of our country.