I never meant to write a newsletter.

To be honest, I'm overwhelmed by the sheer mass of posts, long-form reading and email in general. For a long time I resisted writing on those platforms, though I tried a few times. Many see email as the ultimate way to bring their voice directly to the people they want to reach.

For me it symbolised ever-growing heaps of unnecessary information. I don't read much of them myself, so why would I bother others with it? I thought it would be much easier, more direct and more open to host monthly sessions online where we all share our news with strangers and friends alike, through sound and silence, seeing each other as we share our raw thoughts and make sense of them, while appreciating the incompleteness of ourselves.

That longing to be outside the bubbles has stayed with me since.

Yet I still compared platforms. Not LinkedIn newsletters, not Substack (I have a strange feeling about that platform), not another rented platform, not more news. And along the way I stopped searching…

Back in July I'd been mapping where the leaders I work with go to feed themselves: the consciousness, leadership-development, teal and regenerative ecosystems. Then a layer of "embedded in real life worlds”: cultural-intelligence media (Service95, The Browser, Air Mail, Noema), members' clubs and salons (The Conduit, Interintellect, Salon London), and the intelligent-generalist writers (The Generalist, The Honest Broker, Feed Me).

Both maps were useful. Yet both mapped consumption. What neither named is what happens after the consumption. The registers don't integrate the person. That is the thing. Service95 feeds the cultural appetite. The Generalist feeds the intellectual one. The liminal web feeds the meaning-hunger. The somatic and spiritual spaces feed the body and the soul. Each register is real and each one is nourishing, but they are all consumed separately, in parallel, from the outside.

Complex leader move across all of them, intellectually overstimulated, brilliantly fed in fragments, and none of it does the one thing they actually need: to be integrated as a person who holds all these registers at once. They can zoom in and out across every field.

What they cannot find anywhere is a place that receives them doing that. So they consume more, seeking the integration in the next article, the next salon, the next practice, and it is never there. And in some of those places depth is worn as identity. It becomes the whole personality and works like a filter bubble. You belong once you speak the language.

The leaders I work with carry depth differently: as a capacity, something they use, not something they are. Their identity is organised around being in the world, not around inner development as a personality. They move through boardroom, studio, kitchen table, and now the machine. Some of them search, but never left real life. Some read the world from every angle, the way a flâneur walks a city.

Most of them translate, carrying meaning between worlds that don't speak to each other. Usually all three, in one person. They are stitchers of worlds.

Around that time in July it came to me: the antibubble. In physics, a bubble is air held in by a thin skin of liquid. An antibubble is the inverse: a drop of liquid held by a thin film of air, inside liquid. Substance, held. Not enclosed. And because both are liquid, they share the same physics of pressure and flow.

Instinct, because it comes before words. It's what most leaders don't practise yet, but sense it should be. (untitled), because it could be many things: a group, a movement, whatever it becomes.

For now it's my writing, the way I feel and see things, as real as I can be with you. It isn't about me alone, though.

What I'll try to do: every two weeks or so, I take one thing from my worlds, a sentence someone said or a signal most people scroll past, and read it slowly. What sits underneath. How it connects. Plus one connection, a person or a text worth meeting. I expect Antibubble to change as I write, and as it meets the people who read it.

I don't have the whole answer, or a map.
I have this start: practising the stitching of worlds.

Next time: what happens after all that consumption?

Until then,
Tess

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