Making Lemonade
A weekly newsletter for people wanting to squeeze the most out of this thing we call life; lemons and all.
Hey! I'm Cassie.
I’m a writer, creative mentor, recovering wanderer, long-distance caregiver, cat and coffee lover, and barefoot table-sitting journaler.
Welcome to Making Lemonade, a home for creative and curious internal and external explorers, dreamers, and humans looking for connection, community, and bright stars to help lead the way on dark nights.
While it touches on some big topics, including being human, grief, loss, death, and dementia, Making Lemonade is also an ode to creativity, seeing the light, truth, and wisdom in all our stories, and exploring what into what it means to be who we want to be in the world today.
I’m so glad you’re here.
What is Making Lemonade?
Born as a creative experiment from the ashes of a real tough time, Making Lemonade is a weekly newsletter about love, life, and lemons - and how we can learn to love the lemons life gives us.
After spending 11 years working as freelance writer for big publications, I realised there was something big missing: connection.
I wanted to be able to actually talk to my readers; not just feel like there was this big insurmountable wall between us. Especially when we're going to hard places or going through hard times.
Having been on a wild journey myself these past few years, I've realised that's when we need each other most: even if it's just a reminder we're not alone.
This life can be tough and bitter - but in the same breath, beautiful and sweet; just like lemons and lemonade.
I've also found through my work as a creative mentor that we often already have a lot of the answers we seek inside ourselves. Sometimes we just need to find the right key - or question - to unlock them.
Making Lemonade is my little way of bridging that gap, sharing the stories, asking the questions, and building a creative community full of incredible folks from all walks of life and all over the planet.
And, although I have big dreams for this space and how it can grow, for now, I'm starting small.
I like to think of it as more like a more personal, choose-your-own-adventure type place where each week, I share stories, observations, and realisations from my life, and invite you to come along for the ride through creative mentoring-style reflections and comments.
Read more about Making Lemonade.
Why subscribe?
Every Friday, I send a free post from my little bush home in Western Australia straight to your inbox. These posts are on a variety of topics, but all include personal stories from my own life, prompts, photos, and reflection questions, so you can explore how these ideas land and sit with you.
If you want to share what comes up, you are always welcome to join the conversation in the comments. I'm always overwhelmed with everyone's generosity in sharing and the ways we can all see snippets of our own lives in one another's stories and how we can use that to learn and grow together.
Of course, if you don’t want to share publicly, that’s fine too - I still love to hear from you. Just hit “reply” on your email and you’ll find your way to me, too!
Paid subscriptions
At the moment, all my posts are free. However, they take a long time to write and put together, and so I am very grateful to my paid subscribers for supporting me and my work and helping me show up week after week. You are incredible!
Down the line, I have big dreams about how I can bring together my work as a creative mentor and writer here, including running workshops, meet-ups, creative business Q+As, creative wellbeing sessions for caregivers, and more.
However, as I’m currently in the depths of living the grief as I lose my mother to late-stage Alzheimer’s from the other side of the world, for now, I’m going slow.
That said, I'm always open to suggestions and ideas, so if there's something you're keen on, please reach out. I love collaborations!
About me
I'm a freelance writer-turned-creative mentor and workshop facilitator, currently based on the outskirts of Perth in Western Australia.
After spending nearly seven years living on the road, I flipped a coin and ended up here in 2019, just before my world - and the world - fell apart.
Within weeks, I lost my travel writing career and the identity I’d spent years honing, and ended up stuck on the other side of the world from all my family and friends, forced to watch my mum descend into the depths of young-onset Alzheimer’s via Zoom.
Since then, I've been on a very different kind of journey. One where I've learned a lot about myself, people, nature, and the human mind, and found ways to align all the chapters of my past with my present, and find joy and hope and love amongst it all.
While it hasn't been an easy ride, it has taught me a lot about life, love, loss, and all the different ways we can turn lemons into lemonade.
Now, I'm here to share those insights and write the words I wish I'd been able to read back then.
Creative mentoring
After spending the last 12 years building a creative career - and learning pretty much every single lesson the hard way - I started up a creative mentoring practice designed to help people skip-over the sticky, icky stuff and get straight to the lemonade.
If you’re building a creative business or practice, and/or trying to navigate a tough time in your life, I’d love to help. For more info, check out my website.
You can also follow me on Instagram, Facebook, and sign up here for updates.
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