NOTES FROM THE MIDDLE
Age, Life, Everything
November 23, 2025 Issue No. 01
A Small Hello (and a Thank You for Being Here)
Welcome.
Before we get to this week’s letter, I wanted to say a small hello.
This is the very first issue of Notes From the Middle (Age, Life, Everything), which feels both exciting and mildly terrifying, in the way most new beginnings do. The honest truth is: I don’t have a grand mission statement or a ten-point plan for your personal growth. I’m not here to offer a blueprint or a breakthrough.
I’m just here to write about the middle, that strangely tender, occasionally ridiculous, endlessly unexpected place so many of us live in now.
If you’re here, it probably means you’ve felt some version of what I’ve been feeling: that life isn’t a neat arc but a series of half-folded moments, quiet realizations, and the occasional panic about what’s for dinner. And yet, somehow, there’s beauty in all of it. Or maybe you were just being polite when you put your name forward to receive this (and I get that too).
So thank you, genuinely, for being here at the start.
Thank you for opening this email when you could’ve been doing literally anything else (scrolling, working, or eating cheese at your counter, which I fully support).
Let’s see where this goes.
No pressure. No performance.
Just a weekly note from someone in the middle of her life, trying to pay attention.
Now, here’s this week’s letter — the one that began, unexpectedly, with a mission to check something off my list and a moment of honesty I didn’t see coming.
— Danielle
A Small, Honest Moment From This Week
I spent most of this week shopping for holiday gifts from bed, which sounds luxurious until you picture the scene properly: pillows collapsing in slow motion, tissues gathering in small, accusatory piles, and a level of congestion that made even simple decisions take on an almost philosophical weight.
There is something unintentionally comedic about buying presents for other people while you yourself look like someone who should not be making decisions at all. Every few minutes I would add something to my cart, then stare at it with the mild suspicion of someone unsure whether it was a thoughtful idea or a low-grade fever hallucination.
At one point, wrapped in blankets and low on dignity, I added a very expensive bottle of artisanal olive oil to my cart. It was for someone I am not entirely sure even likes olive oil. That was the moment I realized I had lost the plot.
So I stopped. Just long enough to take a breath and reheat my tea.
In the pause, a simple question arrived.
What am I actually trying to give people?
Holiday gifts can easily become a kind of emotional shorthand. A way to say “I care” without having the energy to express the sentiment properly. Especially when your head feels full of cotton and your only real goal is to press “Place Order” before your next dose of cold medication. Because lord knows, I love to check 'DONE' beside a task on my list.
The gifts I’ve loved most over the years have never been the expensive, impressive ones. They were small and oddly specific. A book that felt like someone had been inside my head. A scarf in a colour I didn’t realize suited me until someone else saw it first. A vintage wine holder exactly like the one that sat forever on my Grandmother's dinner table.
Gifts that obviously took time to think about.
Those gifts worked because they were honest. They didn’t try to be anything other than themselves. They simply said, “I know you in this particular way.”
And I think that is one of the quieter skills midlife gives you. You start to know what feels true. You begin choosing things with a little more intention and a lot less performance. Even while sick. Even from bed. Even while Googling “best gifts under $50 for people who truly want nothing.”
So I am deciding to keep things simple this year. To choose gifts that feel like recognition instead of obligation. Shopping from bed is surprisingly helpful for that. No crowds. No pressure. No frantic soundtrack insisting you feel more festive than you do. Just you, your blanket, your questionable immune system, the sudden clarity that comes with slowing down and the small, steady intention to make someone feel seen.
The Midlife Syllabus
Lesson #1:
Sometimes the most truthful moments arrive disguised as a snack break.
Beauty, Grace & Daily Artistry
A small, imperfect pleasure:
I lit a candle this morning — not because the house was tidy or the moment was calm, but because I needed one small thing to be gentle.
It didn’t fix anything.
But for five minutes, the room smelled like bergamot and possibility.
What I'm Reading, Watching or Listening to
Reading
Malibu Rising — four siblings, one unreliable musician father, and 1983 Malibu in all its sunburnt emotional avoidance. Taylor Jenkins Reid writes family fractures with exquisite restraint. Light enough for bedtime, honest enough to make you nod and think, yes, that tracks. Perfect if you like your fiction with salt air and the reassurance that everyone’s family is a little messy.
» Read it
This Week on the Blog
If you missed it, here’s the piece I wrote about the strange comfort of peaches when everything else feels slightly unhinged:
⟶ Read more
I want to say how much I’ve loved hearing from so many of you — especially my fellow English lit majors who have apparently been quietly carrying entire anthologies around in your heads for decades.
One of my favourite messages came from Mary Jo, who wrote, “'I have measured out my life in coffee spoons…' and I felt unreasonably smug realizing this is exactly what the Crash Test Dummies were nodding to in Afternoons and Coffee Spoons".
Nothing like a well-timed Eliot reference to make you feel both nostalgic and academically superior.
There’s something comforting about discovering how many of us have lines of poetry lodged in our psyches — half-remembered, half-feral — that surface at the strangest times. This week, it happened to me with a peach on my kitchen counter. And because you’re here, I suspect you understand this kind of moment far more than most people.