A House Tour of Adaptive Daydream
Introducing sections, intentions, and back stage slow food writing processes
Entryway
Welcome to my Substack, Adaptive Daydream. In this publication, I endeavor to reclaim domestic life from the clutches of the culture war and explore the unlikely love story between fantasy and reality. If you subscribed to my Substack through my housekeeping work, you might be surprised by some of the denser intellectual pieces and/or erratic erotic autobiography infiltrating your inbox.
Because I am a human being and a writer, rather than a “brand identity” and a “content creator,” I do not have a cohesive body of work so much as a chaotic collection of rough drafts about a range of topics and interests developing in real time. This is in part because I am still finding my footing as a writer, and in part because that’s normal. Humans are not brand identities.
That being said, I do recognize my ongoing branding issue, and have made sections in Adaptive Daydream to account for the fact that I am attracting very different audiences through very different kinds of writing. The cool thing about Substack sections is that you can unsubscribe from individual sections and still receive everything else. So if you came here for Holistic Housekeeping articles, you can subscribe to just that one page. And if you came here for erotic autobiography, you can unsubscribe from the housekeeping content. And if you are related to me or knew me when I was a kid and have no interest in reading about my sex life, you can unsubscribe from those posts. So on and so forth.
Below you will find a tour of each section, and a tease of some of the writing projects in my pipeline. I’m about to go on a break from weekly posts while I figure out a more sustainable way to approach my creative process. Not only am I experiencing burnout from the constant pressure to produce in the attention economy, I’m finding that the quality of writing I churn out is rarely something I can feel proud of anymore, because there just isn’t space to research, think deeply, and re-write. I’ve also lost a lot of the magic of social media driven dialectic emergence as I’ve tried to prioritize consistency, which pretty much every marketing expert and writing coach says is of the utmost importance while building a relationship to your audience.
In Holistic Housekeeping, I teach my clients to aspire to become “inconsistently consistent” if their neurology simply doesn’t bode well with maintaining the exact same structure and routine over a long period of time. So I’d like to offer myself this same grace and self acceptance as I dial in what works best for me and my life circumstances. I also want to work on integrating what I already know I value and my readers value: quality over quantity.
For me, being inconsistently consistent (aka working downstream with my ADHD) usually looks like going through cycles of writing a ton, and cycles of seemingly “doing nothing” where I am recovering, digesting, watching. So although the algorithmic gods will not shine in my favor, you will probably receive an onslaught of new writings followed by a period of crickets where you kinda forget that I exist for a while, until I cycle back into creation mode again.
Living Room
The Holistic Housekeeping section is the living room of this online home. It is where I share writings about addressing the root cause of mess, getting your literal and metaphorical house in order, and practical magic like cleaning and organizing tips, habit building methods, and all the fascinating lines of inquiry weaving through our relationship to home.
Study
The Ethnography of Domestic Bliss section is the study. Here, you will find a collection of creative non-fiction essays on evolving fantasies of domestic bliss, where I explore how we must negotiate our ideals with our values and compromise the limitlessness of our desires with the limitations of the world as it is.
Bedroom
The bedroom of this home is the section titled Mad Girl’s Love Song. This is where I share all of my most intimate writings (usually pertaining to eroticism, sexuality, intimate relationship trauma, and desire). I would like to try my hand at romantic fiction at some point, and those pieces will live here as well.
Attic
There is an archive of all my older writings that you can access by becoming a paid subscriber. I will also be re-releasing complete essays of the multi-part pieces for paid subscribers so you don’t have to dig around for the correct sequence of the story.
Kitchen
Here’s what I’m cooking up in the next year or so, and why there will be a pause in writing for a few weeks. Firstly, I am Officially Overthinking This. I am returning to a place where writing is a pleasure.
Holistic Housekeeping pays the bills, but I have lost half my income since Trump took office. I’m not bringing in new clients very often, and I have to take on a fourth job to compensate. So it feels even more foolish than usual to pour my energy into this publication or finally finishing my first housekeeping book, but it’s where my energy wants to move. I started Holistic Housekeeping on pure impulse (and yes, years and years and years of domestic skill building, learning, and experience). Now, my impulse is to go all in on what people have been telling me for as long as I can remember: If I wrote a book, they would read it. I probably won’t make money from this, but it’s on my Bucket List, you know? Book writing and self publishing is by far my most pervasive, persistent daydream. And, ultimately, I am in the business of courting, seducing, and actualizing daydreams.
I do not want to produce fast food content. I want to create slow food writing.
Here is a preview of what I’m working on for Adaptive Daydream as I rearrange my entire life to center book writing and slow food writing:
My first podcast, Dishes Meditations, is a mini series designed for you to reflect upon commonly misapplied folk wisdom, glittering gems of everyday insight, and impassioned philosophical tirades about the dishes…while you wash your dishes. Each episode will dissect a commonly espoused colloquialism about the dishes-as-metaphor or a fractal expression of existential, personal, and interpersonal questions.
Ep 1., Part 1: “Everyone wants a revolution but nobody wants to do the dishes.”
Ep 1, Part 2: “Everyone wants to do ayahuasca but nobody wants to wash the dishes.”
Ep 2: “In order to wash the dishes, you have to wash the dishes.”
Ep 3: “The dishes will wait. Life won't.”
Ep 4: “Wash the plate not because it is dirty nor because you are told to wash it, but because you love the person who will use it next.”
Ep 5: “Thank heaven for dirty dishes, they have a tale to tell.”
Ep 6: “There are two ways to wash the dishes. The first is to wash the dishes in order to have clean dishes and the second is to wash the dishes to wash the dishes.”
Ep. 7: “Washing the dishes is the anecdote to confusion.”
Ep 8: “The best time to plan a book is while you're doing the dishes.”
Ep. 9: “I want AI to wash my dishes so I can make art, not make art so I can wash dishes.”
Ep. 10: “When men do the dishes, it's called helping.”
Ep 11: “It all comes down to who does the dishes.”
Ep 12: “If this sink can become a place of contemplation, let me learn my constancy here.”
Ep 13: “I find myself dreaming of doing normal things, like staying home and washing the dishes.”
I’ve always wanted to try my hand at audio as a medium, and I definitely don’t expect this series to be highly produced, given zero experience, zero budget, and zero collaborators. But I hope that it will ease me into providing audio recordings of future writings, and allow me to stretch my capacity for people hearing my speaking voice.
The first book for the Holistic Housekeeping collection will be the Bible of decluttering, basically.
This is where I will share everything I know about the foundation of reclaiming our home from clutter and mess. It’s a book about grief, ritual practice, and the power of merging the magical with the mundane.
If you are unable to become a paying subscriber but would still like to support my work in this awkward irresponsible in-between stage, you can buy me a coffee here.
As for the currently empty Ethnography of Domestic Bliss section, I have been focusing mostly on homesteading. I conducted a series of interviews with lapsed and disillusioned homesteaders back in 2023, but I’ve had to pause on my sociological and historical research while I complete Holistic Housekeeping offerings and other projects for Adaptive Daydream. I think this piece is still happening. It feels like it’s still breathing. I hope you’ll hang in there with me. Because I have never written about this topic before, I have no way of knowing if anyone cares but me. So we’ll see, we’ll see.
Finally, I have been interweaving daydream work into my Holistic Housekeeping practice, and I will be releasing a Field Guide to Daydreams…eventually.
In the meantime, you can learn all about the importance of working with your recurrent fantasies as a beacon on your path of personal fulfillment by signing up for my pay-what-you-can teatime sessions here. I write about grief and clutter a lot, but unfulfilled desire is entangled with our clutter just as much as loss is. Unlike loss, though, some of our desires still stand a chance at fruition.
In a consumer culture, we internalize the behavior of never ending input with little to no output, consuming without ever creating. It’s very common for our home to become overburdened by this imbalanced cycle, haunted by objects of inspiration, burning ideas, and unfinished creative projects. By combining home organization, housekeeping, and daydream work, you can create a life that feels like your own, even if things didn’t turn out the way you imagined they would.