I feel bad using “karen” to describe women who gripe out strangers.
All Karens, just know that your name in heaven will be different.
But I must have had a neighborhood-wide “karen”-bounty on my head this week.
Granted I did make some mistakes worthy of response and most notable was me not seeing my dog poop in front of a house.
I always pick it up, but the one day I miss it...
So my dog and I are strolling along and he stops to sniff.
I keep going as usual listening to some podcast in one ear.
My dog catches up with me, but I hear fast foot falls trailing him.
A young woman with furrowed brow is yelling in German (I am fluent but my headphones were a bit loud.)
Auggie (Augustine von Hippo), my beautiful Swiss shepherd dog mix, ran to happily greet her.
I try to stop him, but he is too friendly.
With headphones now down, her tirade catches up with me.
Yep, sure enough he went #2 right in front of her house and I missed it.
No problem. I’ll go to pick it up.
But she wants blood.
Lots of “How dare you”s and “This is not the first time”s (even though I am only there once every 2 weeks)
“How can you walk with you dog of the leash, there are children here.”
“Lady, look, I understand. I will be more careful next time,” is my reply.
She storms back inside.
Not two minutes later I cross that very same low-trafficked street and don’t look over my shoulder.
Another karen is screaming at me in her car because she has to make a semi-sudden stop.
I gesture an apology and keep going.
Finally, on my next walk with Auggie, I am riding a bike.
A woman is walking, smoking and talking on the phone in front of us on an unpaved path.
I ring my bell a few times to let her know we are there but she doesn’t glance back.
My dog happily trots past her and I am quick to follow.
Then, with fanged mouth she spits, “Its against the law in Hamburg to not have you dog on a leash!”
I sigh and give her a passive-aggressive thumbs up.
Not very Jesus-like.
Auggie is our second dog. And he is 10x more obedient than our former golden retriever, Luther.
I just love walking with an obedient dog unleashed.
Subdueing creation.
I don’t even think a karen-apocalypse could get me to permanently leash him.
This is how we should feel about email writing.
And, this is my hope for you.
That you, especially as a writer/author, unleash your joy of writing your emails (daily if you can).
Sometimes you might accidentally leave a #2 in the wrong place and provoke some karens.
But you just keep on showing up and publishing.
It’s even more fun when you get subscribers coming in on auto pilot.
My done-for-you 5-day educational email course can get you rolling on that.
Check out my offer
https://blairjohnlee.substack.com/p/done-for-you-email-course
Blair
P.S. Had to look it up, but the closest male equivelant of “karen” is “ken”. But “male karen” just has more zing to it. This is about as far from a theological conversation as we can get right now.