Letters from the Joyful Rebellion
Essays on systems, culture, work, and belonging.
Published every Tuesday and Saturday.
The systems we inherited are breaking down. Economic models built on extraction. Institutions that no longer match how people actually live. Leadership frameworks designed for a stability that doesn't exist anymore.
You feel this in ordinary ways. At work. In money decisions. In the exhaustion of trying to perform coherence while things quietly unravel.
Here's what interests me: our personal experience of these shifts isn't separate from the systemic one. The way work stops making sense. The way social contracts fracture. The way familiar narratives fail to hold. These are not private failures. They are structural ones.
I write essays that trace those connections. Between what you're experiencing and larger patterns. Between what feels personal and what is political, economic, and cultural. Between the small irritations of daily life and the deeper questions they point toward.
What You’ll Find Here
I publish essays every Tuesday and Saturday. Each piece follows a line of inquiry rather than a predetermined theme.
Sometimes that inquiry begins with a conversation, a headline, a book, or something I notice while trying to build a life and a body of work in a changing world. Sometimes it begins with my own missteps and contradictions.
The writing often moves through three overlapping territories:
Personal experience as data. Not confession, but observation. How work, money, belonging, and power show up in ordinary life.
Systems under strain. How economic, political, and organizational frameworks reveal their limits in real time, and how those limits are felt by individuals.
Creative and regenerative possibility. What becomes possible when old scripts loosen. How people and systems experiment, adapt, and create without relying on extraction or constant urgency.
These essays are not instructions. They are invitations to see more clearly.
Why I Write
I’m Heather. I’ve spent over twenty years in strategic communication, consulting, and leadership work. I’m good at noticing patterns, especially the ones people feel but struggle to name.
I studied political science. I pay attention to power. I care about language. Writing is how I make sense of what I’m seeing, and how I test what I believe.
This writing shapes everything else I do. The organizational work. The retreats in Italy. The way I think about trust and integrity. The essays are not commentary on that work. They are the ground it grows from.
They are where I slow down enough to understand what is actually happening, and what kind of response it calls for.
The Tuesday and Saturday Rhythm
I publish twice a week, every Tuesday and Saturday. This rhythm is intentional.
When I was eighteen, Anna Quindlen’s New York Times column taught me that you could write politically without losing warmth, personally without losing rigor. That the everyday was a legitimate place to think seriously.
This schedule is my discipline. A way of staying in conversation with the world as it is, rather than waiting for clarity to arrive fully formed.
Recent Letters
Essays tracing the connections between personal experience and systemic strain. Heavy subjects, yes. But also humor, sharp edges, and the relief of realizing that what you’re struggling with is not just yours.