No Permission Required.

SIDE A · TRACK 02 · FALL 2026

⏯ REWIND

The Christmas trees are already up at the store. Your first instinct is to scoff. Mine too. Then it hit me: if retail gets to skip ahead to December, I get to skip ahead to my year-end reckoning. No permission required. That’s literally the name of this thing.

— Kacy

WHAT’S ACTUALLY LOOPING IN MY HEAD RIGHT NOW

It’s that stretch of the year where a stranger’s fourteen-word Starbucks order can ruin your whole afternoon. That’s not the barista. That’s your nervous system filing a complaint. So here’s the actual agenda upstairs:

♫ The adult Halloween party. Do I go again this year, or sit one out so the memory of last year’s debauchery has time to fade?

♫ Thanksgiving. Same old traditional plans, or is this the year that one aunt finally makes her stand and takes the whole menu seafood?

♫ The kids’ gifts. I want to start now. I also know they’ll change their minds before December 22, so why not wait? (I will not wait. I will buy the thing, then buy the other thing.)

None of that is planning. That’s a brain begging for a pause button while you keep handing it a to-do list.

♫ REMEMBER WHEN

Remember the night before the first day of school? New Trapper Keeper, pencils with the erasers still attached, a clean page nobody had ruined yet. We were nine years old and we already understood what we forgot as adults: a fresh start doesn’t have to wait for January. Nobody handed us a resolution. We got a notebook and permission to be slightly better by Monday. Somewhere between the mortgage and the group chat, we stopped buying ourselves the notebook.

Hit reply and tell me your own first-day-of-school feeling. I read every one, and the best ones show up in a future issue.

▶ THIS CHAPTER’S TRACK

Living Without Validation

“Your worth is no longer up for vote.” — The Second Drop

Chapter Two of the book is about doing the thing without waiting for anybody to sign off on it. Here’s the December version: you don’t need the calendar’s permission to start your year-end reckoning. You don’t need the culture’s either. The stores skipped ahead. So can you.

December is a con. You show up exhausted, hosting, buying, smiling, closing out projects, and then on January 1st you’re supposed to unveil an upgraded version of yourself like a software update. That isn’t reflection. That’s a to-do list in a party hat.

So do it now. Think of the next hundred days as the side of the mixtape you actually get to sequence. That’s enough time to change something instead of just promising to. Behavioral scientists call it the fresh start effect: we go after goals when a date feels like a clean line on the calendar. The turn of the season is a clean line. Use it.

And be clear about what this is not. It is not “do more.” You’ve been doing more, at work and for everybody else, all year. This is the other audit: what did it cost, and how did it feel?

WHY START EARLY

♫ You still have time to act. By December you only have time to wish.

♫ Less holiday haze, more honesty. It’s hard to lie to yourself before the eggnog.

♫ You get to test-drive the resolution. Try it in October. By January you’ll know if it’s real or just a nice idea you had in Costco.

♫ You walk into the holidays lighter. Once you know what you want, “no” gets a lot easier to say, even to the aunt with the seafood agenda.

PRACTICAL ADVICE, FOR RIGHT NOW

01 Take the ten-minute inventory. Three columns: Kept, Dropped, Still Alive. Sort what you promised yourself last January. “Dropped” isn’t failure, it’s data. “Still Alive” is where your energy already votes.

02 Finish this sentence. “The thing I keep doing that I know I don’t have to do anymore is ______.” It’s a real prompt from the Companion Workbook, and this is the season to answer it. Answers involving a certain seafood aunt are allowed.

03 Pick one 90-day thing that’s only for you. Not for work. Not for the kids. Not for the aunt. Give it a name and put it on the calendar.

♫ THE CULTURAL CALENDAR · IN MEMORIAM

Dolly Parton died on August 25th at age 80. You know the rhinestones, the wit, “Jolene,” and “9 to 5,” the song she wrote that became the anthem for a generation of women tired of being underestimated. But what keeps getting me is what she did with the money.

♫ The books. Her father never learned to read or write. “Daddy never had a chance to go to school,” she told Oprah in 2020. So in 1995 she started the Imagination Library in her home county in East Tennessee, mailing a free book every month to kids from birth to age five. It has since gifted more than 200 million books and now runs in five countries.

♫ The fire. When wildfires tore through Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge in 2016, her My People Fund sent $1,000 a month for six months to families who lost their homes.

♫ The vaccine. In 2020 she gave $1 million to coronavirus research at Vanderbilt. The lead researcher said her gift funded the critical early stages of the work behind the Moderna vaccine.

She was the fourth of twelve kids in the Tennessee mountains, and she spent the rest of her life making sure other kids had a book. That’s reinvention with a purpose. It’s also the point of this whole issue: you don’t get to wait for the perfect December to decide what your time is for.

The Cultural Calendar comes back every month. Tell me what belongs on it.

FROM THE AUTHOR

I wrote The Second Drop, then the Companion Workbook, because I wanted somewhere to put all the honest questions. The workbook has three layers: Your Decades (the 70s through the 2010s), Your Chapters (prompts that mirror each chapter of the book), and Your Legacy. No rules. Nobody is grading it. I’m not writing this as a woman with the year figured out. I’m doing the inventory right next to you, and I have not yet decided about the Halloween party.

“You’ve already survived the first draft. This is where you title the sequel.” — The Second Drop Companion Workbook

♫ BEHIND THE NUMBERS

You may have noticed my prices are oddly specific. $12.74. $14.38. $26.77. $6.77. Nobody prices like that. Okay, it’s a little bit of a pricing strategy. Mostly it’s me hiding love notes in a checkout page.

♫ $12.74, the Companion Workbook. That’s ’74, the year I was born. The workbook is where you walk back through your own decades, so it seemed right that it wears mine.

♫ $14.38, the paperback. If you ever owned a pager, you already know 143. I (1) love (4) you (3). Now add the 8, and turn it on its side. That’s infinity. I love you, infinity. It’s on the paperback, and now you’re in on it.

♫ $26.77 and $6.77, the hardcover and the ebook. Those two are still a secret.

Hit reply and take a guess. I read every one, and the best guesses show up in a future issue.

The trees are up. The permission slip is signed. Start now.

— Kacy

P.S. Forward this to the friend who’s already dreading December. She’ll thank you by New Year’s. Or February.

♫ PASS IT ON

Know someone who needs an early start? Share your personal link below. The more people in the room, the more you unlock: the B-Side Pass, Founding Member status, and more.

♫ B-SIDE — WEB ONLY

This part never made it to your inbox. Print it, screenshot it, or fill it out in your Notes app in a parking lot. Ten minutes, no judgment, nobody grading.

KEPT — What did I say I’d do in January that I actually did? What am I quietly proud of?

DROPPED — What fell off? Did I stop caring, or did life just get loud?

STILL ALIVE — What do I still want? What would I start this week if nobody was watching?

One more, for the road: what’s one thing I want to feel more of by December 31st?

A FREE PAGE FROM THE COMPANION WORKBOOK

Who were you performing for? At 15. At 25. At 35. At 45. Name them — the actual people or the categories of people whose approval you were chasing. What did you change about yourself to get it?