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Happy birthday to Speak Now Regret Later!
You are now reading the 53rd installment of this Substack, which means we just passed the one-year mark of this little corner of the internet. Happy anniversary to all those who celebrate. If you’ve been with me since the beginning, my condolences. There are over 3,000 of you now.
When I decided to start the Substack, I didn’t really know what to expect. I mean, I knew a few things: I had opinions that I wanted to share and I generally enjoy writing. But, to write a new post every week for an entire year? That seemed—and in fact was—a lot. But I had a yearlong sabbatical ahead of me and made next to no plans about what to do. So, writing a weekly Substack was my major sabbatical goal. My other goal was to start playing pickleball, and that too was gratifying, though in ways that were truly unexpected. But really, my sabbatical was mostly about writing.
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My sabbatical is now done, which means that a lot more of my time will be taken up by teaching. This new chapter will entail changes, including to this Substack. I’ll get to those in a minute, but first let me remind you of the ground we’ve covered these past twelve months, including what you all seemed to like and what I was especially proud of. These are not the same.
Before this Substack, I rarely wrote about my personal identity, keeping my writing professional and mostly about psychology. Here, though, I brought more of my full self to the office. I am especially happy with my essays dealing with my Jewish and Mizrachi identity. I have not always been comfortable talking about this side of myself, but I finally opened up about this side of myself more than a few times here, including asking why Jews are considered white.
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The post that I was most worried about publishing, but also the post closest to my heart, was my post on how I felt about a small number of psychologists gaslighting the Jewish community, denying our experience of Jew hatred. I had more than a few psychologists personally thank me for this post, including several graduate students. Being a voice for young people dealing with the invalidation of their experience meant a lot to me. I also received one angry email and perhaps lost a close friend. And as painful as that last bit was and is, here is a decision (finally) that I do not regret. I plan to return to this topic soon, including a post on what it means to me to be an October 8th Jew.
