Reconsidering quiet

March 12, 2025

'I think we've all been going through it'

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Long time no see, Reader.

A couple weeks ago, I’d just finished listening to a guest speaker at Ad Club, a group for students interested in the advertising and marketing industry at the U. of Minnesota for which I'm the faculty advisor. It's a student-led club that mostly serves to bring in professionals from the field each week to give advice, discuss their work and talk about their career journeys. I was thinking about the recently-retired Ad Club faculty advisor who posted timely thanks to every speaker on his LinkedIn page, bringing greater visibility to the group and nice PR to our school.

Thinking about his prolific posting made me feel guilty. I hadn't captured any photos of the guest speaker. I haven't felt like posting on LinkedIn at all lately. I haven't done much of anything there in 2025, actually. Even easy "thank you for talking to these students" posts have challenged me for some reason.

As I helped the Ad Club officers clean up and put away the chairs after the event, I apologized to one of them about my recent lack of LinkedIn presence on the club's behalf.

“No worries," she responded. "I think we’ve all been going through it lately.” She said she had certainly been, and though neither of us named what “it” was, we both understood.

Upon reflection, I think I've been in a needed and understandable season of quiet. Winter has been especially dark, harsh and frigidly cold this year. The political situation since November has been grim and growing increasingly grimmer by the day. Our sweet old cat, Max, passed away over MLK weekend; he’d had a really good, long life with us, but we’ll miss him, and it’s felt like kind of the end of an era and a tough way to start the new year. So I've most definitely been going through it.

On the better end of the quiet spectrum, I’ve been deep into work – teaching three different classes (including one new prep to nearly 60 students) four days a week plus advising the aforementioned Ad Club one night a week. I've also been working with some terrific consulting clients with projects that are keeping me grounded in marketing strategy, and the combination of teaching, advising and consulting is gratifying and engaging. The teaching part has especially given me good energy (though at the end of the day after all the interaction and being "on," I'm basically a zoned-out zombie).

But I haven't felt like sharing or posting or emailing or conversing (of course, beyond conversations over martinis and fries with a select few friends or my husband). I just haven't felt like I had much worthwhile to say. Granted, I have a bad habit of not wanting to share things (on social or in real life) unless I think it will really make a difference to the conversation. I get annoyed by all the hot takes and conversational clutter – especially on LinkedIn – and have been taught that if you don’t have something worthwhile to say (or an SEO strategy to maintain), keep your mouth shut. So there's also that.

The issue with staying quiet, though, is that you miss opportunities for things like community, culture and collective action, which is exactly what we shouldn’t be doing right now. After all we're all going through it — not just me. Although expressing gratitude doesn't require a carefully crafted social media post and flattering photos, social media does offer an easy way to say thanks where you know the person being thanked and their network will see it. Aside from quiet, private thank you notes, I haven't been doing that and feel a mix of guilt and missed opportunity for the feel-good connection that comes from those posts.

Additionally, I started rethinking this newsletter… This newsletter is about advice. What does it look like if I don't feel like advising or have anything "worthwhile" to share? Should I double down on one of my passions/areas of knowledge – battling ageism and sexism, girlhood studies, music, progressive politics – rather than focus on marketing and personal branding advice? I'm not sure. I wondered, too: Should I move to Substack? (Now that I’ve learned about this, I think that answer is no.) It seems that in drifting away from regularly publishing the newsletter, I also have become a little too stuck in "what's next" for the newsletter. In the end, I basically just decided, screw it. Write and send whatever you want, and here we are today.

And in this unquiet act of publishing, I feel myself slowly ascending out of my season of quiet. I recently read a friend’s reframing of quiet times as times of needed rest, renewal and opportunity for creative idea incubation (shout-out to Holly Hilgenberg and her newsletter/podcast/consulting for artists and creatives – you can subscribe here). That resonated, as did her advice not to be too hard on yourself for taking time away from all the noise.

Honestly, it's been feeling a little more like spring around here, both literally and metaphorically, and that's heartening. In any case, if you’ve also been going through it, I hope that you soon find your way to a little light, warmth, friendship, creative energy, and (if you’re rested and so inclined) protest and resistance.

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Maybe you are still in need of a little marketing and careers advice, in which case I'll just leave these right here for your consideration:

✏️ How to give better feedback on writing (and keep your writer from quitting)

🕵🏻‍♀️ Finding a job when you're already working (be stealth!)

🐥 Unmotivated to write? Here's how to get it done (I took this advice today)

🏴‍☠️ An age-old workplace behavior that needs to die (now more than ever)

📊 Easy ways to use data to engage customers (look for low-hanging fruit)

Thanks for reading, and I hope to see you again soon!