14 days of love, loss, & longing - Day 1
Introducing the February series
Welcome to the February series, 14 days of love, loss, & longing. During the two weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day, paid subscribers receive an email each day. In these letters, I explore the tender emotions and musings that emerge across the first few weeks of a new year as we get showered in hearts before the heavily-commercialized love day (which is also my birthday).
This is Day 1 of the 14-day series. This one’s free for all subscribers but if you’d like to receive these daily emails, upgrade to a paid subscription now.
For those new here, I launched the LLL series last year on a whim after subscribing to Anna Brones’ 24-day advent calendar which was 24 days of daily newsletters. Feeling inspired by the arrival of her letters that year, 14 days of love, loss, & longing was an experiment that came a few months later.
I don’t have to do this, why am I giving myself more work?
Well, because it’s not that serious.
And at the time, I needed some of that levity. I still do. The experiment turned out to be both difficult and rewarding.
My biggest takeaway: being imperfectly vulnerable was a muscle you had to strengthen and, within the recovery stretches, you could find meaning. Even though they were simple daily dispatches, the series resonated with readers (or at least, that’s what a few of you told me!).
Since publishing Day 14 last year, I’ve been saving posts on Instagram, making notes in the Notes App on my phone, dumping links in the Notes app on my laptop, and sending one-liners to myself via WhatsApp. It’s been grounding to have this quiet project on the calendar. I’ve been looking forward to its return and I’m pretty sure that the building anticipation is what led to the launch of Witchy Week in October. I couldn’t wait; I missed the fun exercise of writing within a theme. The two series are mirrors of each other yet not identical. They’re two opposing forces I feel flowing within me at all times, a gravitation to sharp angles and soft curves.
By January 2026, I had over 300 posts saved in my “Love” IG folder and I began to un-save the ones that fell flat upon revisiting. I made a bulleted list of finalists. Now, I have almost four A5 pages of thought-starters. Even with all this, the writing bit hasn’t happened yet. We’ll see if those points can become more than a paragraph and if they will have the accidental, episodic quality of last year’s letters.
→ Read the whole set, I’m biased but I loved re-reading the series last week.
Like I said in the first intro to this series, the goal is for it to be about the spectrum of love and the gray zones around and within that spectrum. Grief, friendship, land, art, growth, self, family, pets (Penny must make an appearance, obviously), romance, and enchantment.
What I can add now is, the goal is also to sit in the discomfort this daily challenge gives me and write anyway.
Each letter will end with an about last night section where I share something from the night before. Last year it was mostly about movies I watched but it could be an article or an anecdote or a question.
Like last year, let’s start with a question to sit with for the next two weeks: What does growth look like to you?
Tonight’s full moon, February’s Snow Moon (AKA the Hunger Moon), marks the time of rest and slow, unseen growth leading up to spring. That seems like a good place to start.
Today is also the 175th anniversary of the death of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein.
The Basics of 14 Days of LLL
From February 1st until the 14th, paid subscribers receive a daily letter from me. You, the reader, aren’t required to do anything. Even though this is a series, the emails are separate so you don’t need to read them in sequence or even right away. Partake at your own pace.
You can click through the whole series here.
Today’s letter is free for everyone. Previews/teasers of the next letters will not be sent to free subscribers. The only way to receive these daily dispatches until the 14th is to upgrade your subscription!
If there’s someone you know who would love a daily dose of love, you can also gift a subscription.
looking forward to reading them