HeyJaredThe Second Act Studios
Writer + artist in my Second Act. I help women 50+ build a creative practice that steadies the nervous system and tells the truth. Prompts. Essays. Resistance.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 8
- Latest publication
- Aug 30, 2026
- Audience
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 12, 2026
Latest issues
The Summer I Didn’t Rush (opens the original)
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This morning, while I was sitting on the deck writing, a hummingbird came to visit me.Not in the general “I saw one pass through the yard” way. In the direct way. She flew right up to me, about a yard from my face, and hovered there like we had an appointment. She chirped, suspended in place for a few seconds, then turned and flew back out the way she came.It felt like a punctuation mark.<a class="image-link image2" href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!wiU9!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progre
Wet Paint, Clean Edges (opens the original)
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Hello Friend,All summer I’ve been in the garage getting ready for the Camas Vintage & Art Faire. Sanding. Painting. Layering. Waiting for coats to cure. Making decisions about when to stop, when to add, when to simplify. Learning, again and again, how to let a piece become what it wants to be instead of forcing my go-to formula onto it.<a class="image-link image2 is-viewable-img" href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!9I_d!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-po
Giving It Away for Free (opens the original)
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There are three more weeks until the Camas Vintage & Art Faire, and this week I was reminded how much invisible things can run the show: The air.Not the metaphorical air. The actual air.Oxygen isn’t free anymoreThe fires are hundreds of miles away, but the smoke and ash showed up anyway. For days the sky looked embalmed, gray on gray, until you couldn’t even call it “sky” anymore. After about half a mile the horizon fuzzed out, as if someone had smudged the world with a dirty thumb<a class="imag
In Between is a Place (Not a Problem) (opens the original)
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Hi friends,This morning I read the August 2nd meditation from Melody Beattie’s The Language of Letting Go and felt my whole body go: oh. That’s where I am.Not “stuck.” Not “lost.” Not even “in limbo.”In between.Beattie calls it that uncomfortable transition phase: letting go of the old and familiar before the new has arrived. It can show up in big external transitions and small internal ones. Between jobs, between homes, between versions of yourself, between the way you used to cope and the way
An Archaeological Dig through My Own Substack, Featuring: layers, sabotage, receipts, and one very stubborn second act. (opens the original)
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Hell Dear Reader,Yesterday I had breakfast with a friend and did what a lot of us do when we’re trying to be brave in public: I talked around something tender in my personal life while pretending I was just “catching up.”We ate. We talked. We walked. We headed toward the parking lot.And then my friend casually mentioned a post I wrote about knowing when to stop, when am I done? It wasn’t even in the context of my relationship stuff. It was just… a thing she remembered. A thing she’d carried.But
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