Your therapist is a social media star. What would Freud, Jung, Adler, Winnicott, and Klein say?

Hello there. It is good to see you again. I need to talk to you about something important before letting you read today's edition.

I have not written to you since Feb 19, almost a month ago. Sitting down to write this today also took out a lot from me. I almost gave up. This... has never happened before. Sanity was the product of a pandemic and sudden unemployment. It has survived my most life-threatening bouts of mental illness and personal storms. I don't like the word, but Sanity was born resilient. Barring maybe once earlier in these 4+ years, I have never even thought of skipping writing to you multiple weeks in a row.

But for a while now, I have struggled with motivation. I have felt lost and burnt out. I have taken to wondering what purpose Sanity is serving in your life, in my life, right now.

When I started writing this newsletter in the middle of Covid, the world was a very different place. There was a shared sense of anguish and commitment to one universal goal – survival as a species – that we will likely (and hopefully) never experience again in our lifetimes. Sure, climate change remains a powerful shared crisis, but mental health was the glue that held Covid-era global culture together like no other topic has done in any other period in living memory.

Today the world is ablaze with a thousand different fires. We are all still burning together of course, but there's a sense of urgency around the fires in our own respective backyards that's sucking up so much oxygen that we are left with little salve to offer to the wider world. Every fire has its own unique context that demands all of our presence. I have found it challenging to feel the conviction with which I used to tell you my stories, knowing that they were worth your presence whoever and wherever in the world you were.

There's also been the matter of sustaining this platform. Sanity's readership is growing everyday and it is getting more and more love and 'critical acclaim', which I am endlessly thankful for. But collecting subscriptions has become almost impossible thanks to broken payment technology. This means monthly and annual subscriptions – your regular support that I can rely on to help keep the lights on – are collapsing. That doesn't help with the motivation drain.

This isn't unique to me. Solo independent newsletter creators in the Global South are dying because western-created tech platforms don't care. It's a separate rant, maybe someday.

What does all this mean? It means, first and foremost, that I need to reignite Sanity's purpose. There is hardly another community on the solo, indie newsletter internet that has the heart and sense of mission we have here on Sanity. I am not stopping. But I need to find a way to keep fighting this battle without self combusting. What that might look like exactly, I don't know yet. Over the next few months, I will reach out to some of you to work out a roadmap.

For now, I am hunkering down on one idea: service.

I will be pivoting towards a service orientation more intentionally, creating content and spaces where I can offer you concrete outcomes. I will keep writing. But I will also teach more and facilitate more realtime conversations with experts from diverse fields. These will be conversations on stuff that no one else is talking about, because that's always been Sanity's DNA.

It's going to be a helluva lot of work. But hey, so is going to the gym for the first time in your life at 42, and I am doing that am I not? And I have kept up for a whole week, have I not, even though my body feels like a few baby elephants used it to learn walking on?

Meanwhile, would you please support my work from India?

Or from wherever in the world you are?

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