01: Welcome to the One Hollow Leg Substack

Writing again.

An Instagram post about this newsletter negated all the things that 5,000+ followers have come to enjoy about my account: my baking, my pizzas, and my food porn-y photos that found their way to Explore pages and had people from all over the globe find my page.

But that’s not who I feel I am. Becoming passionate about sourdough baking the past three years was how I coped with being extra unhappy. I felt my career had reached a dead end. My love for eating out in restaurants was completely stifled by safety concerns regarding a global pandemic. My tolerate-dissatisfied relationship with my hometown went back to dissatisfaction. Hate is too strong and love will never occur. I felt constipated with how to have a life.

(I don’t believe in searching for happiness, but…) Teaching English in another country became a secret plan to break free of it all and to try a new life with lots of difference and lots of difficulty. I live for convenience and comfort on a daily basis, but I want My Life Philosophy to be one of growing and learning through struggle.

And so I am here now to try writing again on the internet from my new home of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. I’ve been doing it off and on for nearly 25 years. When I was 17, I wrote TV recaps of an Australian high school drama for a fan site in the UK. I wrote a Xanga blog in the mid-aughts to ultimately learn how amazing interweb communities of strangers can be. I started a food and cooking blog with a bestie a few years later and then went solo a few years after that. Feeling like I was talking into the void is why I always stopped. Who is reading? Who is caring? But I always come back because it’s the process that I crave. And getting all the things out. I love getting all the things out through words.

I’m hoping that with knowing that something is getting delivered to an inbox, that with the action of someone signing up, I will feel more like that there is a Who reading and a Who caring. I’m hoping that will help me keep it up.

Let’s see?