The end of the world is such a mood!
But, I believe we can all grow something new, meaningful, gorgeous from the seeds of what used to be.
If you poke around it may not be immediately evident that Postapocalyptic People was born from loss.
I was in it deep. I was stunned by life then spent some time balled up in my own little hidey-hole of grief and burnout in the aftermath of a time of deep, substantial, cumulative loss…
I owned a cute little bookstore in a coastal village… what a dream.
It closed.
I was an active member of a vibrant, affirming, contemplative church community for ten years.
It closed too—just a month before the bookstore did.
In that same season, six of my very best friends moved away. Six.
Not only did I lose my dream business and my actual livelihood, but the community I loved was just gone. Poof!
All gone, all at once.
And, just months before the closures, two decades of family life evaporated when both kids grew up and moved away for school at the same time, just two years after a shockingly brutal divorce. Wife-and-mother had been so much of my identity for so long. And then I was alone.
(Spoiler alert: I grew to love being alone much more than I expected, and then I found new love and I’m elated. But…)
As 2022 rolled into 2023. It was all gone.
Gone.
Successive waves of failure and loss kept coming, all with the pandemic raging on in the background. Climate change. Humanitarian horror. Geopolitical choas. The bookstore was the last of my little worlds to come to an end. I was feeling doomy, to say the least.
With the bookstore and the church closed, I had literally nowhere to go each day, so I just quietly climbed into a private cave of my rental apartment and sat there alone. In the quiet. It felt like a little pocket of the universe where I was safe to just be. I turned off the news, canceled everything, ignored everyone online and my neighbours in the elevator as much as possible. I boxed up everything I thought my life meant and stuck it in the basement storage room.
I took time for silence and healing. For myself. To just exist and not serve, not hustle, not prove, not earn. I took time for books and movies, for staring out the window at the clouds, for thinking, for shrooms, for hiking, for lots and lots of tea. I took the time for asking God a million variations of WHY. I mysteriously started to learn how to self-care, which was, frankly, new to me.
It was a hard year, but it was good. I needed that time, but then God reminded me that to be alive is to be in a continual process of renewal. For me, that meant I needed to keep creating. So I started to write again, and Postapocalyptic People, this Substack project, is where I do some of that. I’m also working on a book :-) or two.
Anyway, that is the story of my little apocalypse and how this project came to be.
Maybe you’ve been through your own loss.
Maybe you’re going through it now.
Maybe you're questioning patterns that once felt certain. Maybe you're navigating a major life transition. Career change. Relationship evolution. Family life. A faith that's shifting in ways that surprise you. Maybe you, like me, are wondering how to make your creative talents work for you sustainably without selling your soul to a billionaire.
If you're the kind of person who wants to create a hopeful future in a constantly changing world that will never again be what it was before, welcome! Let’s be friends. I feel like we already are.
If you've endured any event that felt like the end of the world and are finding the vitality to ask "what now?" you’ll like my emails.
If you're currently existing amidst your own catastrophic disaster—interior or exterior, personal or communal—and still somehow look toward the future with hope… keep going. You’ll come through the other side.
The bad thing happened. You sat in the dust for a minute. Now consider: what can you build from here? Even better: what can grow?
These are the kinds of questions I explore. I also write about books, about writing, about my life, about my dog, about AI. (✨ About my fiancee ✨) The topics change all the time, but that’s the vibe.
This newsletter is a hopeful space.
My name is Danica. I'm an MFA graduate, former bookstore owner, and current freelancer (call me) who's figuring out how to make a creative life sustainable.
I believe creation outpaces destruction, that love’s light outshines hate’s darkness, and that any kind of death or loss is simply transformation.
Let’s hang out.
xoxo Danica
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