One year of being where I am

My baby newsletter turns 1.

For some reason, I find this photo quite festive.

Today,

Being Where You Are

turns 1. Happy birthday, newsletter. I love you.

This whole thing started as a way for me to find my voice, to work through the ideas swirling around my mind, and to realise that it’s not just when lightning strikes that I can write something worthwhile.

It’s given me the space and the framework to sit down at my desk with the finest threads of an idea and to end up, a few hours later, with something that I’m happy to send out into the world. Most of all though, it has allowed me to connect with people in a new way and shown me that lots of us are often grappling with the same things at the same time and maybe we should all talk about them more.

So, thank you all for being here with me! This little corner of the Internet has become very precious to me and I can’t wait to see how it continues to grow and evolve.

If you think someone you know might enjoy Being Where You Are too, I would love for you to share it with them! You can do that by clicking this nifty little button:

And if you’d like to be a real Fairy Godmother or Father, you can become a paid subscriber below. You’ll get ~eXcLuSiVe~ content in the form of extensive recommendation lists from the wonderful, inspiring, amazing people that I interview every other week, and I am currently brainstorming other ideas for paid content, so if you have any wants and desires, please let me know and I will try to figure out how to make them happen.

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Another kind of festive snap

For nostalgia’s sake,

here are a few favourite “stories”, as my grandma calls them, from the past year.

• A question of taste: untangling from the algorithm

• Rituals and reading: and reading as ritual

• A trip into the mirror world: making sense and finding meaning

• Unreal estate: A stream of consciousness stream of property, both real and imagined.

• An orange January: as in the opposite of blue

I have also loved all of the interviews that I have done so far. Some of them were partially behind the paywall, but I have decided that they are too good not to share in their entirety, so now it’s just the reading lists and recommendations that are for paid subs.

• You don’t always need the perfect words:

  Cat Sarsfield
  on heritage, language, family, food, and love.

• Two women named Sophie: Sophie McComas and Sophie Roberts from

  Highly Enthused
  on new homes, motherhood, grief, and a good kitchen.

• Watering and Composting: Linsey Rendell on allotment gardening and cultivating ideas.

• Finding quiet spaces: Maria Farrell on imagining tech futures and living with a chronic illness. I would highly recommend going back and reading this one because I just removed the paywall from the part of the conversation where we talk about living with a chronic illness and realising the superpowers that come from that and it’s such a gorgeous chat.

• I am nature and everything around me is nature: Kalpana Arias on finding roots, connecting with nature, and the ups, but mostly downs, of COP28.

• I should probably ask more questions: Jay Amin on heritage, filmmaking, teaching, and writing poems in the underground.

• Following your eyes: Britt Berden on being more than your job, finding new perspectives in nature, and moving back to the Netherlands.

Thanks again to all of you for being here and I can’t wait for another year sitting down on Wednesdays to write this thing.

Lots of love and see you in the next one,

Annabel x

Saved the most festive till last — from my 26th bday back in 2020.