Reader,

Last week I sent out a love letter (with receipts) to anyone swimming in the "nobody's working" narrative, and a lot of you wrote back saying some version of the same thing: I needed to hear this. I've been feeling bummed about the market.

The question I didn't fully answer last week is how — how do you actually keep your story from getting overwritten by everyone else's, when everyone else's is piped directly into your pocket 24/7?

I think about Christopher Reeve in Somewhere in Time a lot.

(Stay with me.)

If you haven't seen it: he's a playwright who teaches himself to time-travel by going into a hotel room, removing every object that belongs to the present, and holding his belief so completely that the past becomes more real than the room he's standing in. It works. He lands in 1912. He finds the woman. It's beautiful. And then — halfway through the love story — he reaches into his pocket and finds a single penny from 1979 that he forgot to take out. One object. One artifact from the present. And it yanks him back, instantly, permanently. No way home.

I think about that penny every morning.

Because the first thing most of us do — before coffee, before our feet have even committed to the floor — is pick up the phone. And whatever's waiting there is our penny...

• An audition you thought you crushed going to someone else.
• A friend's "just booked it!" post when you haven't had an audition in a month.
• Three paragraphs from someone you respect saying pilot season is dead.
• An email from your manager that turns out to be a blast to his entire client list, vaguely and ominously letting everyone know it's "slow out there."
• A reel of an actor from the first audition class you ever took — who also happens to be your exact type — thanking her team at the Indie Spirit Awards...

Before you've had a single thought of your own, the present has already decided who you are today.

There's a threshold every morning between the dream you just left and the day you're about to enter. It's the most porous your mind will be all day. Whatever walks through it first gets to set the terms.

Which is why I started doing Morning Pages years ago — Julia Cameron's three-pages-longhand-first-thing practice from The Artist's Way (more on this below.) It's not journaling. It's not gratitude. It's a detox. You're draining the noise out of your head so there's room for your own voice to show up before anyone else's does. It's like brushing your teeth, but for your brain.

At some point — because I'm me, and I like structure — I made myself a template that layered in a little Joe Dispenza, a little James Clear, and Cameron all at once. Morning pages, but with scaffolding. Then when friends and students started telling me they felt stuck, I'd walk them through the scaffolding one by one — which quickly got ridiculous. So I decided to put the whole thing in print and send it to them.

Since last week's email hit a collective nerve for a lot of you, and since I'm feeling grateful to have you all here, here's a free sample of the Dream. Believe. Achieve. Journal — the scaffolding I was just describing, in print. No sign-up, you're already on my list. Click the button and it's yours.

None of this makes the slow season disappear. It just means that when you walk into the room, you're carrying your story into it. Not the penny from somebody else's pocket.

Protect the threshold accordingly.

Hit reply and tell me what's on your nightstand. I'm genuinely curious. 🙋🏼‍♀️

Hot Off My Brain 🧠 & Other Good 💩: A Curated List of Stuff I'm Lovin'

Affiliate links are marked 💸. I only recommend things I actually love and use. Your trust is not negotiable for me — not for a commission, not for free product, not for anything. She said, ominously.

📖 Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way 💸 — The book that introduced Morning Pages to the universe, and the reason anything I said above works. Cameron's whole premise is that creativity gets blocked by the static we absorb — from our families, from our industries, from our own internal committee of critics — and that three longhand pages first thing in the morning is the single most effective way to clear that static out before the day starts making its claims on you. She calls it "spiritual windshield wipers," which is exactly right. It's been in print since 1992 and has quietly rewired the careers of a staggering number of working artists. If you've never done it, start this week. If you did it years ago, do it again. Your subconscious will thank you.

🪼 Axolotl Night Light 💸 — Here he is. I bought him for reasons I cannot fully articulate except to say: look at him. He glows a soft pink, he has a little smile that implies he knows something peaceful that I don't, and he has done more for my nervous system at 11pm than any wellness app. The blanket from last week was about softness. This is about softness with a face. If the threshold in the morning matters, the threshold at night matters too — and frankly I'd rather fall asleep looking at this creature than at the blue glow of whatever I was doomscrolling.

🥂 Via Carota Bottled French 75 at Trader Joe's — Trader Joe's is now carrying four-packs of bottled sparkling cocktails from Via Carota, the absurdly beloved West Village restaurant, and the French 75 (gin, citrus, elderflower, bubbles) is as good as you'd hope. Crisp, bright, dangerously drinkable. I just went to pull the link for you and discovered Via Carota is bottling a whole menu of classic cocktails — Negroni, Paper Plane, Espresso Martini — which is either exciting news or the end of my evenings, I haven't decided. Uh oh. But the 4 pack French 75 is what's at TJs now!

Ok that's all for now. Check your pockets.👖

Adria​
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P.S. Did a friend send this your way? That's not a forward, that's a love language. Subscribe here 💌