Birthing Ideas In The Length of A Limit

7 Things I Am Doing Right Now, Wore, And Places To Be

If you’re reading this letter during this time, thank you. In January, I kick off the winter session of Storytelling Through The Season which is an intimate workshop guided by me for three weeks. I first began the workshop in 2020–hundreds joined. We picked them up again this fall. A few said the course changed their life, even if it is virtual We learn. We grow. I take years of storytelling online and in the books I’ve written alongside my teaching. We create. We commune. We do work. Early this month I had reopened registration and realized I hadn’t released more spots for folks to join on the back end of sign-ups. I’m sorry! I just opened a couple more spots. If you need some time to pay, please use code WINTER2025 to secure your spot for 50% of the cost (you can pay the other 50 % mid-session). If you’d like to join us and can only afford half of the workshop ($125), please shoot me a note (no questions asked) latonya@latonyayvette.com.

join right here.

Hello friend, It is raining again in Brooklyn and the kids have been gone for nearly 48 hours and the measurement by which I have successfully done anything is knocking on my door first thing in the morning. I have been trying (but failing) to do a round-up on Instagram of the year. One way or the next, I find it hard to say this year was difficult (it was). And too, the lack of bandwidth to explain that so much happened that I am endlessly proud of, which made it truly astonishing. I published a new book. It wasn’t easy, and it is just arriving in the world. Can we hold gratitude and grief in the same hand?

I realized months ago—no, years ago—despite 13 or so years on social media, I had grown accustomed to the anxiety that sets in when I try to collapse a personal narrative into a post. Last year, I found great pleasure in posting museum dates, weekly outfits, and home stuff mostly—things I loved that had no bearing on how I felt. A feeling that could be kept within me, translated into a series of photos. That’s the key for writing these days on this end; allowing others to receive a piece and have it translate to them in a way that I am forced to release all control. It is a situation in which we are both free. When I did write at length on social media, there was a sense of urgency to make sense of something in 200 characters. In that urgency, I was also free. It was strange. As we know, urgency typically trumps fear that is often induced by the complications of a drawn-out thought process. Constraints have a peculiar way of squeezing the best out of someone.

This isn’t an announcement of a departure from social media, rather, I am putting language in a space that maybe I’ve lacked—there is so much to not only worry about and for, but to also consider in this world (the difficulty and fear of being human to name one), that social isn’t (or shouldn’t be) one of them. I suppose, what I had amassed in those earlier years on it felt more authentic? As in, possibly, the anxiety that I lived with (or didn’t.. I am open to changing my mind) in posting. I am not certain what is on the other side of this thought. Still, I am sure some of it is only offered by the sheer fact that I begin a full-time job next year in a senior position (that is made up of the last 13 years on social and in this letter), wherein I can look upon not only my actions, but the place of it all in my personal and business life with some degree of separation.

At the closing of each year I take an inventory to get me grounded and to also guide the year ahead. It’s a way I can be sure I’m showing up for the people who held me together, as I hope to do for them. I like to keep this inventory close to the chest. However, I am sitting in gratitude for “making space” next year, and have had space made for me in 2024. If you need something to do during these final days of the year, may I suggest it. In the meantime…

7 Things I am Doing Right Now