Thanks for reading, and on what's next
To all those who read, who visited this site, and championed it in any way at all: thank you. This website will continue to live here, but I will no longer be updating it.
When I started thinking about The Tonic, now, oh god, so many years ago… I had no idea why or what I was doing. All I knew is that I wanted to talk and write and read about wellness and self-care but I wasn’t able to find a place for these conversations. Truth is, I still don’t. The wellness industry has boomed and boomed and boomed some more, but I still struggle to find my people. The ones curious about Ayurveda, but not wedded to it. The ones who acknowledge the benefits of meditation, but also that of weed. The people awe-struck by India’s rich history of ritual and practice, but also by China’s.
The most diligent of The Tonic’s followers will likely have joined the (now defunct) Tonic Lab network. Thank you, but in time I had to acknowledge the challenges of bringing followers over to yet another social platform. That mountain is one I just didn’t have the bandwidth or tenacity to climb.
But I’ve come to a bigger truth. I’ve spent a lot of the last 6 or 7 odd years feeling guilty about not making The Tonic something else. Monetising it. Thinking about scale. About partnerships and collaborations and all the rest. For no reason at all, I’ve felt either guilty or silly for not having the vision to turn this into something else, but the truth I finally made my peace with earlier this year is that my creativity is equal parts retreat and spiritual practice. My creativity is play, not a brand.
Every time I’ve tried to think about committing to a content calendar for The Tonic, tweaking tone for digestibility, or thinking more about how a piece will be received than how I want to write it… I’ve chipped away at the joy and pleasure this space provides me. We live in an attention economy, and at my day job, I’m acutely aware of this fact. In this digital age attention is both highly fragmented as well as highly valuable. I work with a team whose focus is entirely centred on how to capture this attention. But here? I don’t do that here, and I don’t want to turn the pleasures of creative play into a content stream to entertain observers.
What’s next?
Why thank you for asking.
I used to LOVE email. When I was at university, my gang of girlfriends (dotted across the world at the time, no two of us in the same city) and I used to have these long, meaningful, meaty email correspondences. We filled each other in on our lives, dished on our twenty-something college lives and new loves.
I filed a lot of those away and wow, we wrote a lot.
We don’t anymore.
That entire way of communicating has gone. WhatsApp groups have taken over and, to give them their due, have allowed us the sort of immediacy in our chat that only proximity would previously allow. This daily back and forth is, obviously, shorter. Our messages now are more transactional. Maybe even… perfunctory? Plus, if I really want to get a full in-colour sense of someone’s life, I’m much more likely to check their Instagram than email to ask for an update.
Even so, what’s next is a return to email, but not like I knew it in college.
TING! is coming, a monthly newsletter that will slide into your inbox complete with some of the content you’d read here, and a lot of other little bits that you would not. From playlists and art and design finds to the wellness and self-care practices currently in my arsenal and so many other bits of random delight that didn’t slot neatly into The Tonic.
Plus another delight of email: have a thought? Just hit respond and hit me with it. I’m looking forward to having conversations with you guys instead of just beaming my thoughts out at you from here.
Have you signed up? The form to get on the list is just below.
