Hi friends!

It's March, there's still like 2 feet of snow on the ground here in Massachusetts, and I have officially started taking it personally, even though I should be used to this as a lifelong New Englander.

Winter looked me dead in the eyes, saw everything I had going on this month, and said you know what, let me add to this.

WHERE IS SPRING, GOD DAMMIT?! I said it. It needed to be said.

Any hooters... here's what's been going on this month at Chronically Chic.

The thing nobody tells you before you try to sell your house is that it is somehow more stressful than buying one, which makes no logical sense until you're in it, and then it makes total sense.

When buying a house, you're the one with opinions. Selling a house, strangers file through your actual life and form strong opinions about things you have literally never thought about in the years you have lived there, and then you just have to sit somewhere else and wait to hear their verdict.

One buyer this month rescinded their offer because our bottom stair squeaked. Our bottom stair. To the basement...

Another buyer signed the offer, went completely silent, and ran out the clock. Never heard from them again... but we did get to keep the deposit, which felt like the universe finally throwing us something small after weeks of nonsense, so I'm choosing to accept it as that.

Then, during an open house, someone robbed us, the police showed up, and the cop was someone I went to high school with, which, honestly, of course, he was. My first thought wasn't even about the theft, it was that I probably looked completely insane trying to explain what had just happened, standing there in fluffy Skims and mascara-soaked tears.

Also, the same day as the home inspection for the offer that ghosted us, a house down the street literally exploded. EXPLODED. So that's the backdrop for everything I'm about to tell you.

Meanwhile, on the internet...

While all of this was happening IRL, I kept seeing the same thing online: people posting confidently that the influencer era is over, that creators are done, that content is dead, and everyone's tired of it.

Every time I saw one of those posts, I thought, okay, but who exactly is this for, because my audience data does not match this narrative at all.

For instance, I posted something that basically said it's okay if your life looks different from what you thought it would right now, and it got way more saves than I was expecting.

That's the thing I keep noticing: people aren't done with creators, they're done with performance. They're done with being talked at. They're privately saving anything that makes them feel less behind or less weird for not having it all figured out, and then going right back to scrolling past the threads about how content is dead.

What couldn't I get out of my head this month? Nobody wants to research or learn anymore, they just want to already be right. It's why the internet feels like everyone is performing certainty at each other constantly. Real life is just out here happening in the background, completely unbothered by whatever the discourse decided this week.

The moment that actually got me, in a good way, was a comment on my YouTube video, one of the mashups from the Lady Gaga singing challenge, where someone said my article and my covers helped them start creating again, and that they'd be starting their own version of the challenge and tagging me soon. I felt so honored!!

I kept thinking about it because I spend a lot of time feeling like I'm sending things into a void, especially during a month where the house won't sell, and the snow won't stop, and a neighbor's house explodes, and then someone surfaces and says hey, that thing actually helped me. Those moments are why I do this. It's why I wake up in the morning.

If you've ever gotten anything out of my content, I would absolutely love to know. I might even share it in the next newsletter!

In other news, I keep watching people make their lives harder than it has to be. A lot of people are switching to cleaner beauty products right now — which, good, great, I'm fully in favor, kinda my whole thing here lol — but the way most people do it almost guarantees they'll feel confused and overwhelmed and spend more money than they needed to.

The mistake is changing everything at once. You swap the skincare and the makeup and the shampoo and the laundry detergent all in the same month, something starts breaking you out or giving you headaches, and now you genuinely have no idea what caused it because you changed six things simultaneously.

The whole process starts to feel chaotic and expensive, and you're no closer to answers. What actually made it manageable for me was switching one category at a time, in a specific order, so I could actually see what was helping before moving on to the next thing. I wrote the whole sequence out here if you want it: The Non-Toxic Beauty Swap Order.

Quick tip while we're here: this applies to basically anything you're trying to change. Routines, products, habits, whatever. The moment you change five variables at once, you lose the ability to figure out cause and effect. One thing, give it a week or two, then move on.

The Small Stuff

On a lighter note, Jon and I have been laughing more lately, which I'm mentioning because last year was hard on us in ways I don't need to get into right now, but if you've been following me a while, you already know it was a rough one for us.

This year already feels lighter in the small everyday moments, even when nothing is technically solved yet: the house still isn't sold, opportunities keep almost appearing and then disappearing, people keep announcing the death of the industry I work in, etc. But we're laughing more. Sometimes that’s genuinely the only thing that matters.

Things I loved this month:

Lady Gaga's soft and romantic "Blade of Grass." I listened to it approximately a thousand times while the snow kept falling and everything else was driving me nuts. I even ended up covering it for Jon for Valentine's Day, which you can listen to here!

The Gaga article is still finding people months later, and it makes me a little emotional every time, because creative work moves so much slower than everyone implies it should, and then one day it just starts working.

Question of the Month: What's one thing going on in your life right now that feels chaotic but is also kind of funny when you actually step back and look at the whole picture? Reply and tell me. I read every single one.

If this made you think of a friend who's also had a month that felt like a lot after a year from Hell, forward this to them. Sometimes the most useful thing is just knowing you're not the only one.

If you've been meaning to actually start switching to cleaner products but keep putting it off because you don't know where to begin, I ranked the swaps so you don't have to figure out the order yourself: Clean Beauty Swaps, Ranked.

Talk soon, and please everyone just collectively manifest some above-freezing temperatures for me, I'm begging.

Love,

Kacie