The Greatest Adventure of All

bye for now, and see you soon

Sunset over Wadi Rum, March 2024.

Friends, I have the sort of news that’s best just blurted out: I’m pregnant.

!!!

To state the obvious, Nick and I are thrilled. This child is so, so wanted. We cannot wait to meet our baby; to get to know their likes and dislikes and silly personality quirks; to find out who they’ll grow up to be; to see the world through the eyes of a brand new human.

It’s also bittersweet, because it means I need to take a break from this newsletter.

Caravanserai has always been about travel and adventure. I’m about to embark on one of the most exciting adventures there is—and that adventure is going to be all-consuming for a while, leaving little space for anything else in my mind, my body, or my heart. I sense that as my life expands to welcome a new person, my online presence will need to evolve with it, but I’m not yet sure what that evolution will look like. Most critically, at this moment, I don’t feel physically or mentally capable of providing you with the valuable content you’ve come to expect. So I’ve paused paid subscriptions until I’m able to do so again.

I’ve made veiled references to health issues in my last few newsletters, and it’s been a few weeks since you’ve heard from me. By now you’ve probably gathered that all this is due to my pregnancy. You, my observant friend, are correct. There are certain discomforts everyone tells you to expect when you get pregnant—morning sickness, weird cravings, and strange twinges, all of which I’ve had—yet no one seems to mention that pregnancy actually alters your brain. For me, it’s made it damn near impossible to write. Of all my pregnancy symptoms, I’ve found the cognitive changes to be the most persistent and difficult to deal with.

I’m confident this is temporary (hence why this note is a “see you later” and not a goodbye), but I do want to explain a bit of what I’ve been going through and why I feel the need to step back.

For as long as I’ve been a conscious being, I’ve had a strong, clear inner voice that tells me what to write. It plants the seeds of ideas in my head, speaking in complete sentences and paragraphs that then become essays. My inner voice makes my mind a “loud” place, so to speak—so loud that I sometimes fear others can hear my thoughts. Often when I’m lost in listening to the voice, people will turn to me and ask what I just said as though they’ve somehow overheard it.

Just a few weeks into my pregnancy, the voice went quiet for the first time in my life.

It was like someone flipped a kill switch between my ears. Suddenly my brain was nothing but white noise. This combined with the physical exhaustion of growing a human meant I had absolutely zero executive function. Where I used to wake up at 6:00 in the morning to write and plan and jot down long-term goals, I was now dragging myself out of bed at 7:30 just to roll to the couch and spend the next eight hours hate-watching Gilmore Girls. I couldn’t even pick up my knitting. It’s not that I had writers’ block; it’s that I couldn’t write because I had absolutely no thoughts to write about. Strange, but true.

Please don’t mistake me—I’m not implying that pregnancy gives women “lady brain” or makes us any less capable of acting rationally. I’m saying that pregnancy caused a radical shift in my inner life on a scale I’ve never experienced before. That shift made any form of creativity feel like a herculean task. It was depressing and frightening, and made worse by the fact that before getting pregnant I had been on a hot streak. I was churning out newsletters like there was no tomorrow while working on a memoir manuscript, experimenting with fiction, and dipping my toes into freelancing. I was doing so great…and then, right at the critical moment when I decided to fully dedicate myself to my craft, I found I was incapable of doing so. It felt like some cruel, cosmic joke. Was this just my life now? Would I ever feel like myself again, or would I need to give up on my writing dreams?

After about two months of this unsettling silence, I emailed

Erin Shetron

—my former editor who has, over the past year, become more of a friend and confidante—about how I was struggling.

Erin responded that what I was feeling was actually common among her clients. While some experienced a surge of creativity connected to new motherhood, many found that their writing brains went completely offline at some point during pregnancy or shortly after childbirth. The good news was it didn’t last. They all came back to their creative practices in due time.

That alone would have been enough to reassure me, but then Erin did something incredibly generous: she pulled animal medicine cards for me. These cards are a way of asking for spiritual guidance to life’s big questions using symbols and ancient wisdom associated with specific animals (admittedly woo-woo, but I’m into it). Erin happened to pull the spider, the symbol of infinite possibility and “the female creative energy that weaves the beautiful designs of life.” The card was telling me to “create, create, create.”

It didn’t seem to make sense at first (not being able to create was the source of my anxiety to begin with!), but then it struck me: I am creating. Maybe more so than I ever have. Like the spider, I am weaving the beginnings of a little life.

Alongside my inner voice, there is another, more primal creative force that lives within me, but whose work isn’t visible in black and white ink. That force has gone into overdrive to bring a new soul to this earth. I am building an entire person from scratch.

That is my most important task right now, and I am doing my best to honor it. From this point on, no matter what comes next for me creatively—even if all my wildest dreams are realized, if I one day write a book that hits the top of the New York Times bestseller list, if my stories are widely known and remembered and I become a household name—this kid will be the most gorgeous thing I’ve ever made.

I want to sincerely thank each of you for reading my words and for letting me into your lives. It’s an honor and a privilege to know that more than 2,000 of you choose to receive my writing. My inner voice has yet to fully come back, but I have faith that it will, and I look forward to returning to your inbox when it does.

Until then, be safe, be well, and go grab a piece of our big, magnificent world.

See you for our next adventure,
Sam xx