eek!

I need your help.

as of this morning, there are 1000 of you subscribed to this newsletter and how I feel is that it is 50% awesome 50% scary.

awesome for the following reasons:

newsletter helps me depend less on instagram for booking; I get to write into the abyss and know that it reaches at least a few people; writing is (sometimes) fun; people take me seriously and that helps me believe in myself and my work. having a substack newsletter with 1000 subscribers makes me feel a little bit like mom I made it (mom if you are reading this please do not text me to talk about it. dad too). I am hubristic enough to believe I occasionally have my finger on the pulse and it does turn out that sometimes people enjoy what I have to say about that pulse. wow.

scary because:

people actually read this thing which means that I have to take it and therefore myself somewhat seriously. but also taking yourself seriously on substack feels like the kind of thing that your friends should (lovingly) make fun of you for. anddddddd: you are all in my head! seriously! the faceless audience to whom I shout. a sea of strangers like the one in my dreams where I am on a stage and realize I am naked. scawy!! the concept of an audience, of being seen and “perceived” is wildly uncomfortable to me. I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that the presence of a perma-audience, the imprint of an adolescence spent on instagram, shifts my sense of interiority, privacy, and ability to connect with my own creative intuitions without feeling like I am trying to cater to everyone whose inbox this reaches (writing this feels insane but I am trying to imagine you all staring at me with hearts in your eyes if you were wondering).

I have tried 6 times in the last month to write this newsletter, or some version of it, always ending up in the self doubt paralysis loop feeling scared. Mostly the thing that is scary, or perhaps unsavory, is the internalized assumption that I, Sophie Lev aka Metamorphosis, have become an entity and have to write from what I imagine you imagine that entity to be. To build out my entity and defend my niche!

Someone better at setting energetic boundaries than me would light a candle, do a ritual, and write the newsletter they intended to about touching stones as a practice of communing with ancestors. Or work this shit out in therapy. But I am willfully terrible at separating the personal and professional, pretty obviously in my head about it all, and bad at marketing. It is time to peel back the curtain of the Metamorphosis show and de-entify myself in the pursuit of getting out of this silly ego loop and returning to the kind of doing that is important to me: (drawing as divination ritual; reflecting on the magic of tattooing and the body’s entanglement with environment and experience; finding traces of ritual hidden in fossils, and so on and so on and so on). To actually do these things, and inhabit the experience of doing them fully, rather than imagine them through the dissociative perspective of the perma-audience that currently lives in a corner of my psychic space.

I ultimately made this newsletter to share the “everything else” that goes into the process of drawing, making tattoos, and thinking about it all. I need this outlet in order to balance the necessary perfectionism of tattooing. It is important to me to share in this way to build trust with those of you who are contemplating letting me mark your bodies forever. It feels only fair.

I want to continue write you a monthly newsletter that fills your heart and spirit with inspiration. Something teeming with stamina to fortify you for the unfurling hellscape of chaos and grief we are ongoingly in. Full of pictures and illustrations and poems and reflections and tattoos that give you pause, help you see the world differently, etc. At one point I was that guy. I am coming to terms with the fact that in this moment, I am not that guy. I could be that guy again, but not without a little bit of your help:

inspired by Rayne Fisher Quan, who recently asked her subscribers to fill out a survey to get to know them better, I am similarly asking for you to demystify yourselves and share something with me, to make this feel less like writing into the void and more like writing to new friends. To make this newsletter only 20% scary instead of 50%.

Here’s what I propose:

you fill out this very short ✨survey✨ with some specific questions and some random questions (anonymously or not). to be clear, these are not questions about what you want from my newsletter. they are questions about you, questions I would ask close friends or someone I am wanting to know better.

You can answer as many questions as you like, or only one of them with as much or as little details as you like. I will dedicate each future newsletter to one of you, either responding directly to something you shared, or just holding you in mind as I write.

I am hopeful that this is the way through. I think substack can be both an extension of my business, where I share my bits and bobs and thoughts and sketches very awesome tattoos, and a tool for shifting the strange patterns of relating propagated by the internet. I am open to being scared of you still. I think it is good for me, for all of us, to take the risk of sharing in more meaningful ways than what is possible through instagram. But I want this to be the kind of scary that keeps me humbled instead of paralyzed. Here I am exposing myself to you, asking that you expose yourself in return. Thank you in advance. I hope it is not too presumptuous to say that I love you.

-Sophie