w e l c o m e

I had a hard day last week and I wanted to share some of it with a friend, but didn’t know how or who to share it with, so I kept it to myself and started scrolling through my phone for a dopamine hit. I remember thinking: “I am surrounded by content and I feel completely alone.”

We are not lacking for ways to connect right now. There is a podcast for every niche, a newsletter for every mood, a comment section for every opinion. I have learned things from strangers on the internet that I think about for weeks after. But somewhere in all of it, the actual back-and-forth — the "I've been thinking about what you said last week" kind of conversation had quietly disappeared from my life.

I’m deep in the trenches of parenting two small children and it feels like my conversations with other parents going through something similar are scattered and/ or competitive. What milestones is your kid hitting? What preschools are you considering? Where are you traveling for summer adventure? And at the same time, realizing it’s a hard time to allow for new friends to organically drift in, while watching other friendships just drift away.

So it’s weird all around. That's when the idea for Summer Buddies started to take shape.
The concept is simple, I match you with someone, and you write to each other. Over email, over actual letters if you're feeling romantic about it, at whatever pace works for your life. Once a week, every other week, whenever the spirit moves you. You pick topics you care about — books, parenting, big life questions, the show you’re obsessed with — and I try to match you with someone who'll actually want to go there with you. But there were 13,000 of you that are seeking a pen pal and one of me, so I might not get all the matches right. If that happens, email me and I’ll help you find another.

Now, about this blog. I have an (outdated) Substack. I like Substack. There is a lot of genuinely excellent writing happening on Substack and I would never tell you not to go there. But here's the thing about content platforms, all of them: they're someone else's house. The aesthetic is theirs. The algorithm is theirs. The experience of reading there is shaped by a thousand decisions made by people who are not you and not me, optimized for things like trending keywords.
Sometimes I want to read something on a website. A plain, simple, this-is-mine website, like the tumblr years. No recommended posts sliding in from the side, no notification that someone you follow just published, no subtle pressure to subscribe or upgrade or share. Just a page, and words on it, and the particular feeling of having gone somewhere specific to find them. That's what I wanted to build here. A place to think out loud about connection and community and what it means to actually know someone. A place that feels, in its own small way, like a letter rather than a broadcast.

So… W E L C O M E! I'm glad you’re here
<3
em-j