Welcome to the A Day Well Spent community! Please introduce yourself 🌠
And why I started a newsletter about seeking pathways to more purposeful living
Welcome to A Day Well Spent! I’d love to learn more about you.
Welcome to my online space / supercharged blog / newsletter / website - any of the above will work. It means a lot to find you here reading these words.
For those of you who don't know me, I’m Leyla Kazim. I’m a BBC presenter, writer and journalist who lives in London and I’m usually found on the the TV and radio doing cool things to do with travel and food.
One of my favourite things about this newsletter since I launched it in June 2023, is the absolutely incredible community that has grown up around it.
It is thanks to this community that there are extensive and insightful discussions under each post where hundreds of smart, welcoming and ever flourishing A Day Well Spent readers get to talk about interesting topics and connect with each other.
I would love to hear more about you, what you’re interested in and what brought you here. Please introduce yourself to us!
Whether you’ve found your way here from my Instagram, word of mouth recommendation or from within Substack itself, allow me to explain a bit about what A Day Well Spent is and how it’s come to be.
And if you’d like my columns sent directly to your inbox, you can subscribe below:
Over 10 years of writing and the near annihilation of it by social media
I started writing for pleasure in 2012. I say pleasure, it was more the result of friends badgering me to stop spamming their Facebook feeds with bad food pics and instead direct them - and the token handful of words attempting to describe what it was I had cooked - to a blog.
“Blogs are all the rage you know. Everyone has a blog now. You should definitely do a blog. I have a blog. Go on, start a blog,” they cried.
And so I did. It was a travel and food blog called The Cutlery Chronicles (good name, huh) where I shared my kitchen and global escapades.
I’m not sure why I’m using the past tense, it still exists. I guess it makes me cringe a bit, which I hope translates as progression from my writing then to my writing now. But who knows, it could all be bad.
At least the old stuff. Definitely do not look for the old stuff. You can’t anyway, I installed a clever widget that removed all the date stamps. I win, internet.
Some of my writing on there includes the time I quit my (previous life) job to eat my way around the world for 8 months during 2015 (note to self: write about your previous life one day). Each week for 33 weeks straight, I locked myself in the hotel room to edit images and write about the past seven days, resulting in this blog series.
It was tough maintaining that weekly discipline whilst wading in and out of WIFI connectivity, AC capabilities and the world’s most terrible food poisoning in Mexico (who knew so much of a given day could pass whilst ensconced upon the throne of Armitage Shanks).
But I knew I would never return to these experiences if I didn’t document them in real time; I’m so glad I did as it’s helped get me to where I am today.
This is also around the time I started my Instagram account.
Ahh, Instagram. You equal parts beautiful and hideous beast.
Once I was back in the UK and figuring out how to not fall behind on mortgage payments (which at the time ended up mostly being through professional food photography, something I soon came to realise I didn’t actually enjoy - lots of cold food and minimal human interaction), serendipitous (read: alcohol-fuelled) encounters at food events and a lot of haranguing editors resulted in the opportunity to dabble in a little professional food and travel writing for publications.
Which I really enjoyed.
Then social media kinda… took over
Work briefs increasingly focussed on visuals (cue more cold food) and the goal became capturing attention and getting the message across in the first few seconds of motion, or in a devastating single image.
It’s during this time I discovered both a knack for and love of presenting and being in front of the camera - and I’m not a bad video editor either - so I fully embraced this evolution, and I still do.
But writing for an audience took a back seat and like a young child fighting their seatbelt and their sibling in a car journey that’s just too damn long, sulked. “Are we there yet?” my writing would ask me. “No we are not.” I would snap back. “Stop asking me that. And no, I don’t know where it is we are going. So don’t ask me that either.”
(reader: I do not have children).
After a while, I realised two truths. One, I really missed spending time on words. And two, I was forgetting how to hold an actual pen and write in ink with my actual hand (true fact - wth).
And so to fill the void and ensure I didn’t lose this most vital life skill of basic dexterity, I started writing to and for myself in the form of journaling.
The ‘what the hell is Substack’ phase
10 years on and I begin hearing whispers about a new platform that allows writers to write, publish directly to their audience and - wait for it - get paid through subscriptions.
People speak of a different kind of community, of engaged readers that read to the end and leave insightful comments and start their own conversations with others down there.
People talk about users who value the words and insights of others in an ad-free online publishing utopia and who are constantly on the search for their next favourite writer.
People speak of the rapture of writing about what tf they want and earning money whilst doing so.
People speak of the freedom of writing not for an editor, a client nor a search engine, but for their audience directly.
It’s called Substack
Except it’s not new. It was founded in the US in 2017 and has since grown to disrupt the writing and publishing landscape with its 33 million users (at the time of writing).
In the UK, it feels like this is part of an emerging shift in the world of words, media and publication. And that it’s only just beginning.
I fully credit Sunday Times bestselling non-fiction author, award-winning novelist, podcaster, creator of
, and my pal, for first planting the seed in my brain when she joined the platform early 2022.“Have you heard of Substack?” I asked my husband at the time. He hadn’t.
I then noticed writerly friends and peers moving over to the platform, including my good and brilliant friend
who authors . When I ask Rosie how it’s going on Substack, she tells me “it’s amazing and I’m obsessed”.People I knew seemed to be spending less of their online time on Instagram, Twitter and the rest and more time elsewhere. It turns out that elsewhere was here.
I have a Zoom call with
, Head of Writer Partnerships at Substack and author of the insightful and thought provoking and after brain dumping onto her a bunch of ideas, I become convinced Substack is the place for me to get reacquainted with writing for someone other than myself.So why not a travel and food publication?
I figured you would ask that, it’s a good question.
My professional background and some of my passions lie within the sphere of travel and food. But A Day Well Spent is neither a travel nor a food publication (although both will occasionally feature). My Instagram will remain the best source for those.
Travel and food are two of my greatest passions, but I don’t spend my day-to-day existence just eating or galivanting. There is a lot more to me beyond travel and food, much of which I have only discovered myself over the past decade.
During that time I have quietly developed interests and expertise which rarely get public airtime. And I think they deserve to. I am a different person to who I was ten years ago and I also know myself a lot better.
Things now feature in my everyday that were not even on my radar ten years ago
Self sufficiency, yoga, spirituality (I will accept woo woo), mindfulness, creativity, foraging, arts and crafts, herbalism, homesteading, calisthenics, offline days, permaculture, food production, New Moon intention setting, and endless other equally awesome sounding things I consider to make up a day well spent.
Where I am today in my life is a very good place for which I am eternally grateful. Many things have played a part in that, including privilege, “the Universe” and a lot of hard work.
No one is responsible for us except ourselves; every action, decision and thought I have made has got me to where I am now. Some of those will have been conscious, some unconscious. The same goes for us all.
And so, I think there is value in both the way that I live and my view on the world and I have a yearning to share this with a wider audience beyond my gratitude journal and my husband.
Where I can reflect on and share my ongoing journey of self-empowerment and personal fulfilment. As well as the slow and sustainable way in which I strive to live to maintain peace of mind, body and spirit.
Because for me, an equilibrium of these three things is my definition of a day well spent and ergo, of being happy.
So if I had the chance to create a new space for my writing, from scratch, that’s part of a bigger community-based network, it would look quite different to the travel and food blog I launched back in 2012.
A Day Well Spent is where I share insights into maintaining this equilibrium and where my real life and internal meanderings unfold.
Not going to lie, it’s a little daunting. Sharing this side of me that most haven’t seen before. But it feels exciting and it feels like the right time.
It would be my great honour if you wanted to stick around and join me on this journey.
Don’t forget to tell your friends about this really cool new Substack newsletter you’ve discovered that you have all the good feels about.