Hi! I’m Nicole Antoinette.
I’m an author, weekly personal essay writer, and the host of a few fun & supportive digital spaces that you should totally join :)
I’m also a long-distance hiker — that photo you see was taken at mile 500 of the Pacific Crest Trail in 2019, when I was covered in dirt and blisters and had my trusty little pink pee rag hanging off the back of my pack.
(Yes, a pee rag is exactly what you think it is.)
Perhaps the main thing you should know about me (other than how many months of the year I spend happily using my pee rag, lol) is that I'm totally obsessed with the question of how we close the gap between what we say we want and what we actually do—without being assholes to ourselves along the way.
For many years now I have been researching, practicing, and exploring the “how” of closing this gap, and the core answers I keep coming back to are: self-exploration, honest conversation, and creating in community.
What do those things actually mean? I’ll explain!
Self-exploration. Honest conversation. Creating in Community.
Self-exploration* is the art of being in honest relationship with yourself.
Aren’t the best kinds of relationships the ones that are filled with kindness, curiosity, tending, boundaries, experimentation, and delight? And yet this is not the typical experience that many of us have with ourselves.
What might it feel like to commit to being a better friend to yourself? To actively try to understand what lights you up, what breaks your heart, how you like to be cared for and tended to, which internal stories are holding you back, how you’re changing and evolving right now, and more.
My weekly Wild Letters email series is where I share honest stories about my own self-exploration in real time.
Honest conversation is where we can be seen and known, how we can learn and grow, and where our empathy and understanding are built.
For six years (2015 - 2021) I hosted 200+ episodes of a podcast called Real Talk Radio, where I sat down with wonderfully honest people to talk about their real lives. We dove deep into topics like: work, love, sex, money, addiction, friendship, racism, body image, mental health, grief, fear, courage, change, and... everything in between. That podcast is now complete, but the archives are freely available on all major podcast players.
In 2022 I experimented with another podcast project, The Pop-Up Pod, which featured intimate and thought-provoking conversations about long-term relationships (marriage, commitment, love, sex, boundaries, and more), all under the season 1 umbrella question of: Should I get married? And then the six episodes of season two explore a different question: How much money is enough?
Creating in community is the acknowledgement that we are not alone, and that the gaps we so badly want to close in our lives are made that much easier (and more enjoyable!) when we work on them together.
A few times each year I host workshops and accountability-type groups such as the Get Shit Done Club, a fun and supportive coworking group that has sincerely become one of my favorite places on the internet. It’s the place to bring your big projects, scary goals, and unsexy life admin tasks, a place to delight in the regular mood-boost of digital togetherness, and a way to gift yourself an effective antidote to procrastination, fear, boredom, & loneliness.
This group is always priced on a sliding scale, which is just one of the way that I prioritize financial accessibility in my business. I strongly believe that our financial resources should not be the sole determinant of whether or not we can access the products and services we want and need.
(Related to this, I’ve created a simple workbook called How To Give for folks who want to start or deepen their own wealth redistribution practice, which you can download for free right here.)
That’s another thing you should know about me—I operate my business in accordance with my core values: honesty, experimentation, connection, justice, and joy.
(If those values resonate with you as well, you know you’re in the right place!)
As a backdrop to all of this I have spent the past 15 years writing and sharing stories from my own life. I write about things like: sobriety, hope, non-traditional life choices, the many forms of love, grief, long-distance hiking, developing self-compassion, practices vs goals, and so much more.
These days my writing can be found in a weekly email series called Wild Letters.
I am also the author of two adventure memoirs:
How To Be Alone: an 800-mile hike on the Arizona Trail
What We Owe To Ourselves: a 500-mile hike on the Colorado Trail
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With everything I offer and create in this little corner of the internet, I hope to make people feel less alone. To talk about things that often go unsaid. To create brave spaces where we can come home to ourselves and belong to one another. Thanks so much for being here with me!
Nic
*A note on self-exploration: We can’t properly talk about self-exploration without also naming and unpacking the positionality of that “self” according to race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, ability status, gender, education, and more. As Toi Smith explains it: “Positionality is the social and political context that creates your identity and how your identity influences and biases your perception of and outlook on the world.” So important!
I am a white, cis, queer (bisexual) woman, a first generation college grad, and I am currently able-bodied, medicated for clinical depression, middle class, thin, and in a cohabitating partnership with a white cishet man who has some access to familial wealth.
I name these things about myself simply because they are true, and also because much of my work centers around sharing first-person stories for which it is important to remember that there is no such thing as an unbiased perspective or a universal human experience.