Episode Details

Dylan Mulvaney didn’t change her name when she transitioned — but her one-woman show inspired me to change mine.

The name of my newsletter, that is.

Dylan briefly discusses nuance at the end of her iconic one-woman show, The Least Problematic Woman in the World. Something about hearing that word, in the context she presented it in felt like a lightbulb moment.

I was like, ‘Oh, right, nuance. This very nuanced world we’re living in.”

I really can’t tell you how I jumped from that thought to, “I should change the name of my newsletter.”

I hadn’t even been thinking about changing the name until I heard Dylan Mulvaney say ‘nuance.’

Just like I never thought about living in San Diego until I visited. (Ironically, where Dylan once lived, too.)

But like so many things in my life, the rebrand and rapid recent growth of this newsletter happened slowly and then all at once.

Back in June, I sat down to write what I called the “Wild Cozy Free 2025 State of the Union” to reflect on my two years here at Substack, and what ‘wild cozy free’ means to me now.

I first claimed my Substack URL on May 8, 2023, and published my welcome post nine days later on May 17th.

The name Wild Cozy Free came to me late one night. I had recently found out that a potential book project wasn’t going to happen the way I thought it would. I had this whole collection of non-fiction essays, and nowhere to put them, as a playwright who had formerly only published fictional dramas.

I remembered how Glennon Doyle’s writing career started, with her blog, The Momastery.

“I’d tell my shiny, happy representative self to be quiet. And I just allowed my wild, original, honest, truth self forward.

I started a blog, and it turned out lots of people needed to hear the truth like they needed air. Over time, as I wrote to you each morning, you became my meeting, my friends, the community I’d end up doing life with. Since those early days, a whole lot has changed for me… those early writings have turned into three books, the last of which was Untamed. I watched from my home this past year in awe as Untamed became one of the biggest books of 2020 and 21.

And because of that, things have gotten bigger and wider and fancier. And the bigger and the wider and the fancier it all gets, the more I miss those early days. So here we are, back to the beginning, just you and me in the early morning in our coffee and the truth. Full circle makes me very happy.

From We Can Do Hard Things: 1. ANXIETY: Is it just love holding its breath?, May 11, 2021

Looking back at my very first Substack post, it’s now easy to see how my own words echoed Glennon’s —

The day I started toying with the idea of writing a personal blog, words started pouring out of me faster than ever before. It was like my mind got the message that I could finally say whatever I wanted to, without worrying about the correct format.

I’m good at brainstorming and free writing, but all of my writing typically falls into one category: play, novel, essay, song, or maybe a poem. The only works I’ve ever widely shared are plays. I hope to share the novels one day, once I finish them. The song lyrics and poems are typically just for me or close friends. The unfiltered stuff.

The most unfiltered stuff is tucked away in my notes app. The writing that I know probably won’t ever make it into a future play, novel, essay, song, or poem. The writing that I won’t assign to a character, or fit into a dramatic arc. The thoughts I jot down when I’m waiting for the train