a lil' letter about the heart behind The Fairy & The Moon
whether you have been here since the beginning, or arrived sometime last week, or this is your first time reading a letter from me, I want to give you the biggest hug ever, and hand you a warm cup of tea.
somehow there is 20,000 of you???? like what? I need us all in a little cozy room somehow, with fluffy blankets, snacks, and deep conversations.
im Rhiana Meri, the writer and the heart behind The Fairy & The Moon, and it is near impossible to accurately describe how much joy creating this little cozy world on the corner of the internet brings me.
it is my heart’s joy to write an abundance of work that invites my readers into a true emotional journey.
so many of you often tell me how my writing leaves you feeling seen in an incredibly deep way. that it brings language to feelings you haven’t known how to name. that you leave my letters feeling understood at a whole new level, and a little lighter than you felt when you began reading.
every single time you tell me that, the motivation behind why I am truly here lights me up yet again.
the truth is that self love is an ongoing practice, and many people often feel lost, confused, and a little bit intimidated.
its the most human feeling ever— wanting to love yourself better, desiring to have a truly healthy relationship with yourself, but having no idea where to begin or how to keep going.
why this work is my heart
every single thing I do is because this work is truly my heart. its my soul. it means everything to me.
if you know me a little bit then you know that my upbringing was drenched in themes of abuse of every kind, addiction, unsafety, and chaos. healing was an absolutely non-negotiable thing for me, and my willingness to plunge into the depths of myself, and build a truly safe relationship with myself, saved my entire life. and i mean that literally.
self love has been my hardest, deepest, and most important lesson. It saved me from self abandonment, gave me back my voice, reclaimed my autonomy, and changed the way I move through the world.
I know this journey intimately, and most of the time I had no choice but to traverse it alone. I think helping people feel seen heals a part of me that never got to receive that.
I want you to feel heard, I want you to feel seen, and I want you to feel completely and totally capable of transformation that lasts.
a place to practice self love
some of you are new, and some of you have been with me for a while. either way, I want to tell you a bit about how everything works here.
my free letters are made to feel like the best, deepest, conversation with a very, very good friend. its probably late at night, on a patio, and you both are drinking wine. everything is honest and raw, at one point you cry, and at another point you are laughing with relief. something heals in you, and you feel the difference when you leave.
over the past year, I also became an author. I wrote “Becoming Your Own Best Friend: the guided journal” and I am absolutely positive I wouldn’t have made it without the love and motivation this community has brought me
Lessons in Self Love: the deeper practice
my intention with the paid space of the Fairy & The Moon, which we lovingly call “Lessons in Self Love” is to bring the emotion and energy from the beloved free pieces, into actionable work that lasts and matters.
I never wanted to offer you beautiful words that briefly inspire you, only to leave you wondering what to do next.
I want to give you a pathway that you can depend on. a place you can go to truly practice the work of self love, to actually turn it into a reality for you that changes your life.
I worked as a self love coach for about 7 years, helping people from all over the world move through healing their inner child, breaking patterns, and reclaiming their self love and confidence. It was incredibly natural and energizing to me to act as a guiding light, to simply help others shine light on those dark spaces, and encourage them to heal it for themselves.
my entire being lights up when I make the “curriculum” for Lessons in Self Love every month. I get the opportunity to sit with myself, and think of everything that I have ever needed, and how to give it back to you. I think of your words, the struggles you’ve shared with me, the deep desires of healing that you have, and how I can weave them into 3-4 monthly letters.
every single month, paid subscribers receive a self love package to their inbox:
❀ The Monthly Self Love Practice
a thoughtful, guided practice devoted to one meaningful area of your relationship with yourself
❀ Guided Journal Prompts
questions created to help you move beyond the surface and hear what your inner self has been trying to tell you
❀ Mid-Month Reset Letter
a soft place to pause, reconnect, and begin again. without shame or judgement, instead with a whole lotta love from me.
❀ Extra gifts & Surprises
little resources made with love, such as July’s Recipes for Self love: for the anxious hearts
your support keeps this little world alive
I want to be incredibly authentic with you about something: paid subscriptions also allow me to keep pouring into this space, dedicating more time, energy, and heart into what we’re building here.
This community matters deeply to me, and your support makes it sustainable.
so I want you to know that when you become a paid reader you are not only unlocking additional posts.
you are truly helping this work remain independent, thoughtful, intimate, possible, and alive.
you are helping to protect and pour in to a little corner of the internet that is truly devoted to tenderness, emotional honesty, healing, and the lifelong practice of coming home to ourselves.
when you naturally share, restack, comment or engage with a post of mine, you are doing SO much more than you know. every single ounce of love helps to make this space grow.
it is an honor to do work that makes me feel alive. your support means more to me than I could ever possibly express.
the most magnificent part of the entire thing: you.
i had been working on building communities for many years of my life, like the true aquarian i am.
and in many ways it felt like everything i had learned, was meant to be implemented on substack.
the more this space unfolded, the more i knew i wanted The Fairy & The Moon to feel like a cozy, safe community. i wanted people to come home to this newsletter and feel like they could exhale, feel supported, understood, and connected.
through conscious writing, our subscriber chat, and offering opportunities to connect as a community, i have been able to create a safe space for over 20,000 of you. can you believe that?!
you, the reader, make everything i do feel absolutely worth it. your thoughtfullness, your presence, your kindness, and your empathy, amaze me all of the time. your comments, your messages, and everything inbetween always leave me in awe- like wow. writing as my most authentic self, has also brought me the most authentic community of humans. my gratitude is endless, but more than anything, you are my very, dear friends. it is very clear to me that those who come to my substack, are indeed kindred souls. and i feel connected to each and every one of you.
i did a reader-survey with multiple questions, and one of them was,
“How does reading The Fairy & The Moon make you feel?”
you said:
Powerful + seen
Inspired, whimsical
Relaxed! I am slowly learning about myself, with help from articles like yours.
Seen
Inspired and lightened
It makes me feel better about myself, and it’s like a safe place away from the world
2000s romcom cozy mood
Heard
very happy and calm, thank u very much <3333
Relieved And inspired
warm and excited!!
happy, at peace, and refreshed <3
More at peace 🤍
read the recent favorite free letters:
there is no such thing as having it all figured out
in the past month, I have celebrated multiple accomplishments. some of them are dreams I have held in my heart for a decade, others are things I never thought I would even want to do. I reached 15,000 subscribers on substack, an accomplishment that feels like something I have worked towards for the past 10 years but could never imagine how that wish in …
if you don't control your day, it will control you
recently i have been — for lack of a lovelier way to put it — a total negative nellie. irritable, discontent, harboring a glass-half-empty mindset. i wake up, annoyed. i move through my day keeping a running list of everything that is wrong, everything that i don’t have, and everything that i wish i had. and it’s hard to notice or see, because it feels …
if you are new here, i hope you’ll begin with whichever free letter calls to you. there is so much waiting here for you.
and if you already feel that little spark of recognition—if you want a loving pathway for putting self love into practice, while helping this space remain alive, I would be so honored to welcome you into Lessons in Self Love.
your subscription gives you somewhere to practice.
and it gives me the ability to keep creating.
thank you for being here, for reading my words, and for making this little world possible.
from my heart to yours,
rhiana meri
Sei bellissima!!!!!!!!!!!!
I just love how confident and assured you are in the way you talk about yourself and your work. Sometimes I think that my most self loving self would be confident and assured in my completely unrealistic desire to never work and just galavant around doing whatever I want whenever I want 😳 And then the critic in my head immediately shuts me down and says I am a lazy and entitled POS. I am always at odds with myself about this.
The funny thing is, I don’t have to work right now (haven’t had to for a few years now) and rather than just enjoying it, I am constantly beating myself up for not working anyway. That or trying to create work for myself, just to shut my inner critic up.