Welcome to the hard launch of the soft life
To bear witness to the beautiful is not to be conflated with escapism or naivete. It is a deep form of survival inherited from our ancestors.
In a time when we have more access than ever before to the traumas of this world, how will you resist the tide of despair?
Let beauty be your anchor.
- Cole Arthur Riley
Clenched tight by a fist, squeezed into a life so fluid, seeds and sap seep all over, flowing into the cracks.
There is salvation among the squeezed, ripped-open flesh.
A new form rendered.
I did not anticipate being both single and childless in my late 30s. I did not see this life coming for me.
But this life saw me across the room…and it really digged my vibe.
Slowly I bloomed into myself. I grazed from the platter of abundance. Popped prosciutto into my mouth with Prosecco bubbling on my tongue, zesty green Sicilian olive or two chucked in while I’m here. Splurged on accommodation that would cocoon me like a sanctuary. Hopped on motorcycles with mad men. Kept calling the airline via my Godfather (their employee) to extend my trip. Why not? Who can stop me? What’s waiting for me back home?
Smashed my heart. Found my voice. Stepped into my power.
What if life hasn't worked out how you expected?
What if it could be better?
Substacks are fascinating to me in that I rarely ever feel compelled to read them. What are they even ABOUT? Are we all just navelgazing into a void? Substack, more like subparstack! (Don’t kick me off yet I’ve only just begun).
But I have so much to say. And so it’s important for me to make a Subbie that people actually want to read. That is my first priority. Which is why this one has taken me so long to launch. I needed to wait until its raison d’etre became clearer to me, until it flowed from me, almost against my will. Until I worked out why it’s “reason for being” had to be in French.
What is it all about?
Telling stories, musings and giving advice and guidance around the questions: can a wild, extravagant, ecstatic and joy-filled life be the antidote to the aching absence from a life we have been sleepwalking our way through, only to find ourselves walking off a cliff, unconscious, unknowing, palms open to the sky in free fall?
How do we cushion the fall?
How do we go on when we can’t go on anymore?
How do we find our way back to ourselves?
I want to gather people together who understand: life is for living. You have permission to enjoy your life. You can always choose a better life, a better way, a different path. I want to hasten and shake those of us who spend our days in a reverie, saving their life for later. Your time is finite and precious. It’s the only thing you can’t get more of. Do we want to waste our days away in cycles of stress and conformity? To live in a way that doesn’t align with what we really want and with our core values?
If you don’t feel truly reflected in the media you’re consuming, or if you feel unsettled and have lingering questions and curiosity about what happens in your 30s when you end up where you didn’t expect to, then this is the place for you. There is so much for you here. Let’s take all of it, in all its beauty, glory, awe, loneliness, grief, wonder, pain, sorrow, bedazzlement, lightness, laughter and aching.
What it will feel like
When I first set this up, I promised it would be a behind the scenes, tell-all of my adventures in Tomato Europe - IYKYK….not to be confused with my archnemesis Potato Europe (STARCHNEMESIS?!?!?!) - and my ancestral homeland in Lebanon.
The truth is I felt stuck on my last trip, like a clogged artery. This was season 2! That followed season 1! What was going on! I struggled to record my experiences regularly, to convey all my feelings, the loneliness and the stark reality behind the glitzy facade. The fact that your life just goes on, even when you are running away from it. I couldn't write it then, because I was too busy living it, suffering it, basking in it, scorched skin like terracotta. Now as the northern hemisphere summer returns, the peaches roll from the fruit bowl, across the table and falls ‘plomp’ into your lap, and as the spaghetti strap slips from your biscuit-bronzed shoulders, it’s time to curl up and relive my past summers, the ones that have been awakening me to my core, factory resetting me back to life.
I will be here in the dregs of winter, broke, browbeaten, but relishing the hermitic time to finish writing the great book of my life (mostly from years 30-36). I will be posting once a fortnight, to start. I hope it feels like we are sitting around a table drinking Lebanese ahwa, searching for our futures from the congealed grounds at the tiny cup’s base, makeshift shapes forming, demons and eyes, mountains and the Virgin Mary appearing. Let us tip back our heads and laugh so hard it hurts, followed by whispers in fevered frenzy, sharing salacious secrets.
Each edition will toy with various recurring column themes. I am flirting with these to start:
Men on motorcycles: all the sexy (and sometimes scary) yet stunning “stories behind the Stories” from these odyssey-like trips around Tomato Europe and Tomato Middle East (it’s the Levant, isn’t it? Everything the mediterranean hits Simba, is our kingdom). Epiphanies and revelations. Struggles and tribulations. All the goss.
People, places and plans: moving to Marseille or making the most of wherever you are? What about community? Family? It takes a village? The value of working to live or living to work? (I do not dream of labour!) This explores how to live a big life, to hop off the train of routine, mediocrity and obligation - to truly liberate yourself.
Lover girl: everything I’ve learned from resisting modern day dating and the revival of romance. I am here in the trenches with you. Let me be your humble guide. Learn from my mistakes. Let us soar towards softness and love and valuing ourselves in an apathetic world!
‘Drop the skincare routine’: all the cute advice I have received and discoveries along the way on what keeps one content, olive-oil-plump, fulfilled and glowing. It’s giving ‘resting joy face’.
Story peekaboo: fun occasional sneak peeks into stories I’m writing.
Welcome, thank you for being here and let’s do the good thing.
I also have a Patreon…because why do one thing well when you can do 5000 things?
Recently a friend of mine said he really enjoyed my writing. I asked him where he had seen my writing and he said, I shit you not, “your Instagram captions”. As funny and as flattering as this is, it made me think about why I hadn’t been writing as much lately outside of social media.
For more, head to my Medium post here explaining why I have set up the Patreon.
You can also follow me here and here. But that’s it…LinkedIn scares me.
More about me:
Sheree Joseph is an Arab-Australian writer from the lands of the Wallumedegal and the Darug peoples in Sydney’s North West. She was the former editor of The Vocal, an award-nominated solutions journalism publication at Fairfax. Sheree has also worked as a social media, campaign and marketing manager for Groupon, Roadshow Films, Junkee and NSW Education. She has written for the ABC, SBS, The Lifted Brow, The Sydney Morning Herald, Daily Life, Junkee and Metro Film Magazine. Sheree had her fictional debut in the Sweatshop Women: Volume Two anthology.