Oh hi, Reader.
Did you forget about me? Did two-plus weeks of silence catapult me into the void? Am I floating in space?
Different question—
Does a short reprieve from constant content creation, a blip in sending consistent weekly emails, have a meaningful impact on your readers? Or have they just been living their lives, filling their days with zoom meetings and lesson plans and client work and dinner, just like you?
I would tell any client or friend of mine this, and yet I willfully ignore it when it comes to my own writing—people are never paying as much attention to you as you think they are.
But it’s hard to internalize that. To feel okay about slowing down, dipping out of the rat race to smell flowers and daydream like Ferdinand the Bull.
Even if slowing down is the only thing that feels right.
Slowing down is the theme of 2026, for me. That, and a sort of…contracting. Casting inward instead of outward—for answers, for decisions, for the next right thing to do.
But most of all, 2026 for me is about a return to real life.
The other night I attended something called “Heavy Metal Yoga” in a bona fide rock club in downtown Asheville—complete with grimy floors, a kickass sound system, and funky, beery air. I used to spend a LOT of time in places like this.
It was awesome.
I’ve been practicing yoga on my own since the depths of 2020, either with my own soundtrack—I still have all my old teacher’s playlists—or with one of two Peloton instructors: the annoying Aussie chick who never shuts up, or the goofy, quiet dude with great music.
You wouldn’t think it would make much of a difference, right? I’m moving my body, challenging myself, sweating, getting it done. Who cares if I’m in my living room, or the weird little gym at my apartment complex, or in a yoga studio, or anywhere else?
But that night, as the floor vibrated with insistent drumbeats and guitar licks that rattled my cranium, as I moved as one with twenty other souls, as the instructor shouted f-bombs of encouragement…
I felt a jolt of joy so big, so loud, so all-consuming, I almost whooped out loud.
As much as I love exercising (or doing pretty much anything) by myself, I’d forgotten this feeling. It wasn’t about connecting with the other people in the room—although filling my vision with unaltered faces and lumpy bodies was its own kind of salve—it was the whole experience.
Leaving the house. Parking the car. Paying cash (cash!). Unrolling my mat on the scruffy wood floor. Breathing the stale-beer air. Music filling the entire space, instead of just my own earholes.
IRL, baby. It’s the shit.
I’m so exhausted by virtual life. Aren’t you? Isn’t everyone? Isolation and the made-up reality spoon-fed to us by the internet… it’s not working. It spreads us too thin; it turns us into consumers instead of creators; it makes us forget how to talk to one another and coexist in three-dimensional space.
We need real life—trees and stars and hugs and eye contact—like we need water and oxygen.
And right now, we’re starving.
P.S. Changes are afoot here at Indie Copy Studio. I’m in the process of building out the rest of my website and populating my blog with all my old writing. SEO (and whatever we’re calling the AI equivalent of that) is the only algorithm I’ll be fucking with anymore.
As an email subscriber, nothing is going to change for you, except you’ll have more control over which types of messages you receive from me. Just as soon as I figure that out.