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a love letter to my first 1,000 subscribers

For the 600 new souls who found their way here over the weekend, and for anyone wondering what exactly they've stumbled into: I’m Stepfanie—hello, welcome, I’m so glad you’re here ツ

Wild Bare Thoughts now has 1,000 subscribers, and wow, I am over the moon!

I'm sitting here on a Monday morning, trying to figure out how to introduce myself to one thousand people I've never met, and honestly, it feels a bit like being asked to explain the color blue to someone who's never seen the sky. How do I compress an entire inner world into a few paragraphs that somehow convey not just what I write about, but why it matters, and why it might matter to you?

The truth is, I never intended to become someone who writes publicly about the small revolutions of paying attention. I started this newsletter because I had thoughts that felt too large for my own head and observations that seemed to demand witnesses—and apparently something in that resonated. Maybe we're all secretly hungry for permission to find profound meaning in profoundly ordinary moments. I know I am.

what you’ll find here —

I refuse to box myself in by “niching down” so this has become a space for thoughts that don't fit neatly into categories. If you want to get a sense of what happens here, these are some pieces that feel representative. I write about:

The art of being present in a world designed to steal your attention. Not in a wellness-guru way (I'm definitely not qualified for that), but in the way of someone who's slowly learning that the most radical thing you can do is actually be where you are when you're there.

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Notes on Human Transformation. How we change, why we resist it, and what it means to author your own existence. While I don’t have a niche, this is a theme I revisit regularly.

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History as a collection of people who were just as confused as we are. I love finding the human moments in historical accounts, the places where you can see someone three hundred years ago struggling with the same basic questions about how to live a meaningful life.

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The intersection of intellectual curiosity and emotional honesty. I'm interested in ideas that change how you see things, but I'm more interested in how those ideas feel when they're living inside an actual human person trying to figure out what to have for lunch.

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And of course, TASTE. The piece that brought most of you here over the weekend—something about remembering what moves you beneath all the noise and algorithms. My first essay to cross 1k likes, which still feels surreal and wonderful in equal measure. There's something deeply reassuring about discovering that this particular fumbling toward clarity resonated so widely. It's reminded me why I write: not to have answers, but to ask questions that might help us all remember who we were before the world taught us what to want.

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a few things to know —

I don't write on a schedule because inspiration doesn't work that way for me, and I've decided I'd rather send you something that genuinely moved me to write it than meet some arbitrary publishing calendar.

I ask a lot of questions I don't have answers to. If you're looking for someone who has life figured out, you're in the wrong place. If you're looking for someone who's willing to think out loud about the beautiful, confusing project of being human, then welcome.

I believe in the radical potential of small moments. Not every essay here will change your life, but my hope is that they might change how you see your Tuesday morning, or what you notice on your walk, or how you think about the particular light falling across your kitchen counter right now.

an invitation —

So here's what I'm offering: irregular dispatches from someone who's deeply curious about what it means to live well in a strange time, who believes that the personal is philosophical and the philosophical is personal, who thinks that maybe the answer to "how should we live?" is hidden in the texture of ordinary mornings.

If that sounds like something you want more of in your inbox, then I'm glad you're here. If not, no hard feelings—there are infinite ways to spend your attention, and you should spend yours on whatever feeds whatever part of you most needs feeding.

For those who are staying: thank you for letting me think out loud in your direction. Thank you for bringing your own inner worlds to meet whatever I'm puzzling through here. This whole thing only works because of that mysterious alchemy between a person writing and people reading, the way meaning gets made in the space between minds.

I have no idea what I'll write about next—but whatever it is, I'll try to make it worth the few minutes you'll spend with it.

Thanks for stopping by. I'm so glad you're here. xo

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PS: If you want to make sure you don't miss anything, you can adjust your subscription settings here

And if something resonates, I always love hearing about it—just hit reply. I read everything, even if I can't always respond.