That’s all from Misseducated in 2024!
Our Top 5 articles were…
Hello Wonderful Readers,
I’m writing to you from Santa Fe, New Mexico. (Well, actually, I got Covid, so I’m secretly finishing this a week later back in Mexico City. Please forgive me.) I’ve just finished a week on a remote ranch in The Land of Enchantment. In the desert, I went on lots of reflective walks, looked up at the sky, and cried into the mountains. Yes, it was very dramatic and revealing, and I’ll share some of those lessons below. This retreat has helped me gain so much clarity. I got to work with the sensational brand strategist Robin Fisher Roffer, and I now have 20 new female friends ( and three male friends) about age 60.
Despite my Covid fatigue, I’m revving like an engine to reveal all my exciting plans for Misseducated next year with you. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that I’m terrible at keeping secrets. I’ll share what I have in store for Misseducated in the coming weeks (hint: more workshops!). Still, I have not forgotten my promise to tell you the story of how I met Todor or how he found me, but that will have to wait until the New Year. Next week, I’ll be offline because Friday, January 3rd, is my 30th birthday. I have planned to spend it frolicking with friends in a place I like to call “the hippie Hamptons of Mexico City.” Before I head out, it’s time to bask in the best of Misseducated in 2024.
Here are the top 5 articles. Drum roll, please…
Misseducated Top 5 Articles in 2024 🥁
I hope you enjoyed reading these pieces as much as I loved writing them!
What The Desert Taught Me 🏜️
Here are the three biggest lessons I can offer you after wandering around in the wilderness:
Keep Going 🚀.
Last year, I achieved my childhood dream of publishing my first novel, and this year, I celebrated my 1st Author Birthday. I learned that achieving your dreams is really hard! Not just because it takes so much to change everything in your life to accomplish them, but because once it’s all over, you’ll be left with the looming question: what the fuck am I supposed to do now?
This year, I struggled because I didn’t have an answer to this. Still, I just had to keep going. I kept writing Misseducated every week. I kept doing things that inspired me, like working with my writing teacher, Ann Randolph, and starting to write my second novel, still terribly titled “Rainbow Lake.” For many months, it was an act of faith. But I just had to trust that at some point in the future, I was going to figure out what the fuck I was doing.
On my way to the ranch, I caught a couple of astounding words from Seth Godin on Lenny’s Podcast. He said,
“…the thing about projects is when you run out of time and you run out of money, the project is over. Don't run out of time. Don't run out of money.”
I might not have all of my ducks in a row yet or know exactly where Misseducated is going all the time, but I still have time and money! So, I’m going to keep going, and I’m not going to give up.
Have a little courage 💪.
“Courage is the most important of all the virtues. Because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.” – Maya Angelou.
I’ve shared Maya Angelou’s quote on courage many times. It’s even the epigraph of my novel, These Perfectly Careless Things. As I worked with Robin during the retreat, I felt like I was standing on the fence between my old life in the last three years and a new life where I take my sex writing teaching seriously, and I really try to build Misseducated as a business around my new mission. Yet, a big part of me wanted to continue to wallow in self-doubt, inadequacy, and the plain comfort of living a smaller, quieter life.
There was one woman on my retreat, Jane, who had been toiling with the specific wording of her mission around her client business for days. But then, when we did the exercise of “A Perfect Day In Your Life,” she stood up in front of the whole group and said, “I wake up. I drink my coffee in my sunroom. I no longer have clients!”
Wow! She went on to share that she had been so inspired by the courage of the other people in the group that she decided to dig deep and discover what she really wanted: not to have any clients at all! She planned to off-board her clients as quickly as possible and wrap everything up in the next six months. Yay, Jane!
Jane’s revelation honestly shocked me. I wondered if I could take a dash of her courage and the courage of the group as well. Once I remembered that courage was all I needed, deciding to take this evolved version of my “career” seriously was easy. I was already on the fence. I just needed to tip my balance and let myself fall forward.
So, with 2025 around the corner, I hope that whatever you’re toiling with, you can take a bit of Jane’s courage through these words, tip your own balance, and fall forward into living your more exciting, bigger, and better life.
Be present🧘♀️.
My mantra going into my retreat was to challenge myself to be present. I’m not going to lie: 2024 was a year of a lot of uncertainty for me. I didn’t sell as many copies of my book as I expected to. I’ve tried over and again to build my social media following organically. My head and my energy have been constantly spinning. How could I keep moving forwards when there were so many things that I sucked at? In these last few months, I’ve felt weighed down by all my little failures that had accumulated over the last three years.
Taking time away to go to the desert changed all of that. On my second day there, I went wandering off on the land and stumbled across a very creepy little shed that turned out to be uninhabited, thank God (it was private land, after all). Inside was an old rocking chair with a plaque and a quote from Terry Tempest Williams on it. Now, I had learned about Tempest Williams as a writer and environmental activist from a landscape architecture class that I took with the great Professor Frederick Steiner, Dean of the Design School at the University of Pennsylvania. Stumbling upon this quote screamed all kinds of synchronicities to me. This is what it said,
“It’s strange how deserts turn us into believers. I believe in walking in a landscape of mirages, because you learn humility. I believe in living in a land of little water because life is drawn together. And I believe in the gathering of bones as a testament to spirits that have moved on. If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self.” – Terry Tempest Williams.
A pilgrimage to the self, indeed. I later learned that the quote had been placed there by Lee, the gentleman who cares for the land on the ranch and who teaches “wrangler yoga” to guests like me. He spent a couple of years living in an ashram in India, so he’s a great meditation teacher as well.
Attending sessions with Lee forced me to be present, which meant letting go of all my itchy failures of the recent past. To be honest, I hate meditation and yoga, partly because other people always tell me to do them. But once I decided to challenge myself and be present, I could finally clear out the clutter of whatever was going on in the back of my brain and let it go. Let it all go, baby!
So, wherever you are in the world, I hope that you are taking a moment to be present and clear out your mental clutter, too, so that you can start your new year afresh.
Celebrating Wins in 2024 🏆
Writing for you this year has been an absolute treat for me. I’ve loved incorporating more read-along podcasts into my work, and I see the numbers tick up each week as more of you want to hear the spicy stories (and there is plenty more spice to come!)
This year, I published 46 pieces and 16 podcast episodes. If you are curious, Misseducated currently has 469 readers, up from 311 at the beginning of the year, so we grew exactly 50% in a year. A lovely 36 of you are paying to read my work (I’m so grateful!), and my posts average 400-800 views each week. Not bad for a burgeoning newby author! Also, we’re currently at 4,749 podcast downloads, up 80% since the beginning of the year.
At least 60 of those downloads were all thanks to my newest, biggest fan, Patricia, my grandmother, who finally got Substack to work on her iPad and who is also featured in the article, Three Generations Going on 30. She is adamant that I have a natural talent and the perfect voice for podcasting, and she says, “I can say that because I listen to a lot of crap on YouTube.” Thank you, Nonie. I’m so glad you’re here.
What is even funnier than these numbers is that I get sent reports from Google Search on how the Misseducated Substack is performing. As an SEO and data junkie, I know that not all of my work is optimized to be searchable on Google. But here is how people found out about Misseducated from Google Search in November 2024:
Yes, our top article on Google Search was “What is it like to orgasm on psilocybin?” with 134 clicks, followed by “How To Host A Naked Party” from 2023, with 119 clicks. Misseducated ranks in the Top 5 Search Results on Google for the term “masturbating on shrooms.” Haha. I hope my mother is proud of me! Quick shoutout to the amazing team at Lioness, the smart vibrator company that I used to write that cornerstone piece, as well as The New Era of Orgasm Data.
Misseducated in 2025 🪅
So, what can you expect from Misseducated in 2025? Well, this post is already way too long, so I’m going to save the full updates for the new year!
Firstly, I just want to thank my paid subscribers for sticking with me through the muck of 2024. I am sorry for neglecting you all, and I am putting together some paid-subscriber-only offerings this upcoming year that I am super excited about! I’m starting with new sex writing workshops. Paid subscribers will get 50% off every workshop with a discount code that I will leave behind the paywall at the end of this post. I cannot wait to share the monthly themes with you and hopefully see as many of you in a workshop as possible!
For the rest of you lovely people, it seems that people quite like the spicy stories about my love life (although there’s plenty more spice where that came from!) These spicy pieces are quick but super fun for me to write, and I plan to keep doing my read-along audio for fun, too! You should keep expecting these Friday, and regrettably often Saturday, emails. This coming year, I’m going to be doing a lot more partnerships and writing longer pieces throughout the week.
In terms of what else I’ve got planned, I’m working on my second novel, a number of Sex Writing materials for my website, and TikTok. My goal is to also sell 1,000 copies of These Perfectly Careless Things by the end of 2025. Thank you to everyone who has bought a copy or two and supported my work!
Lastly, in addition to my family and friends, I’d love to thank my communities in ACA (Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families), London Writers’ Salon, and UnMute with Ann Randolph. Thank you also to Lioness for making the coolest smart vibrators in the world and for supporting my work through our partnership. Finally, thank you to all of YOU for making it possible for me to live my dreams and for helping me change the world, one spicy story at a time. I am so grateful.
Together, we’re helping the world be shamelessly sexy!
Lots of love and Happy New Year,
Tash
💌 ✍️
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Misseducated by Tash Doherty to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.