Finding our own rhythm and respecting ourselves as creators
Taking the first step is considered a milestone: a necessary evolutionary moment for a child to learn how to walk, to move towards independence, to develop into adulthood. As the mother of a toddler and the journalist creator of The First 1,000 Days, a newsletter that focuses on childhood, I know a lot about milestones. And I also know they can be pretty arbitrary.
Milestones suggest there is one norm, or reality, that applies to all. But there are so many realities. Children learn to walk any time between ten months and two years of age, depending on their genetics, predisposition and body — as well as the communities they live in and their geography. Milestones not only focus exclusively on able-bodied people, but they also completely ignore the cultural context, as I wrote recently.
Milestones turn into marks to hit in a seemingly horizontal timeline, a progression of firsts we need to anxiously check for, expect, stimulate and then show off. Objective charts and metrics become the basis of our expectations, and when these expectations go unmet, we feel anxious. Not hitting certain milestones “in time” can quickly feel like a failure, like lagging behind.
When it comes to learning how to walk on my own entrepreneurial legs, I quickly fall into the milestone trap. I launched my project six months ago, and I want to be a household name already. I want new readers to sign up every day. I want to have as many subscribers as Katie Hawkins-Gaar of My Sweet Dumb Brain, as many Twitter followers as Rana Ayyub or the social skills abilities combined with the truthfulness of my friend Tanmoy Goswami. If a week goes by without a new paying member, I sometimes consider myself a failure.
But I have signed up for a marathon without having fully learned how to walk yet and I am unfairly comparing my performance to that of (very inspiring) journalists with a very different path and trajectory than mine.
Entrepreneurial journalism
I must admit I had no idea what an entrepreneurial journalist was until I applied for the Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators programme at Newmark Journalism School. For close to two decades of journalistic work, I have mostly been independent, coming up with schemes to maintain myself when the assignments were scarce (researching deeper features and applying for grants) and frantically producing piece after piece for continuous sleepless days when breaking news hit.
After freelancing for over a decade — mainly as a foreign correspondent for the BBC, The Washington Post, The Guardian — being picked among 2,000 as one of five staff writers for member-funded transnational media platform The Correspondent was a dream. I could finally dedicate myself to my passion: the first 1,000 days, the foundational period of our lives that we often overlook.
But the dream was short-lived. When The Correspondent announced it was shutting down in January 2021, as my household’s main breadwinner, I needed to make sure to choose something that pays the bills. But from a journalistic perspective, I didn’t want this experiment to be wasted. So I launched my personal newsletter, The First 1,000 Days — and shortly after I applied for this course.
The First 1,000 Days is an ad-free, member-funded, weekly newsletter. I put kids’ perspectives at the forefront to help parents, carers, educators and policymakers understand the importance of the beginning of life. Away from the noise of parenting blogs, my newsletter provides a science-based, advice-free, international perspective of how children develop and how we adults can support them.
I have 450 subscribers, of which 140 are paying members, with open rates of over 70% among paying members and over 45% among non-paying subscribers. (The average in the media industry is around 20%.) I involve readers throughout the whole process: they give me input when it comes to story ideas, I often interview them or ask for their advice if they have expertise in the field I’m covering (check out this story I did with Yoshie, one of the other journalists in the cohort, as an example!), and they even proof-read my work. (I give them a shout-out at the end of each story.)
Uncaging yourself
In many years as a freelance journalist I learned that we can sometimes build some awful cages for ourselves, if we don’t feel entitled to roam freely. Why shouldn’t I take a Wednesday morning off, if I wish to do so? As long as you are reliable, nobody will come after you. Because that’s the beauty of not having a 9 to 5, if you allow yourself to do it.
In the same way, we can set the tone and assign ourselves tasks. So, who says that we are behind? Behind according to whom? “You are not behind” is something that instructor Dan Oshinsky (Inbox Collective and Not a Newsletter and former newsletter editor at BuzzFeed and the New Yorker) said in the course that resonated hugely with me. “Direction is more important than speed,” he added.
This course helped me realise that I already have a business and a diversified revenue model, and engage people with memberful routines. So, who says at what pace I should grow? I need to set that — taking into account the rest of my life too.
My newsletter is intertwined with my personal life. I have had a tough year — beyond the coronavirus lockdowns, lack of childcare and losing my job, I also experienced two miscarriages. When my life becomes also the subject of what I write, I need to establish clear boundaries and respect my own space to avoid losing sight and burning out.
The irony is that I am actually writing this post past its deadline. I am not suggesting we become unreliable. I am suggesting we keep all parties involved in the loop and we understand when we can’t do something, we learn how to say no and we learn how to take the time and space we need.
We are creators. We need to respect our creative process first and foremost. We need to surround ourselves with inspiring, thoughtful people that make us feel safe — and this course’s cohort and instructors helped me with this too. We need to respect ourselves and the things that do us well. In early childhood development, experts talk of “eat, play, love” as fundamental to growing. We can apply the same to our creative life.
I went into this programme with a different idea of what I would come out with: skills to understand how to grow, how to create a business plan and a minimum viable product. Numbers, techniques, measurements. But I now know that before growing and focusing on numbers, I need to understand and respect my own rhythm first and stop following self-imposed or externally-inspired expectations.
P.S. I started a Twitter thread that I was unable to do in real time. Talking about rhythm, I am more of a #LaterGram person. I found out about it after years of covering breaking news and struggling to keep up. As I go back through my course notes, I will be adding to my Twitter thread, so you can keep checking in.
