Juliette Paige on Slowing Down in a Speed-Obsessed World.

You can achieve the dream and still feel unsettled.

Build the resume, carry the pressure, hit the milestone everyone respects.

And still think: is this it?

This week’s Field Note features Juliette Paige — mechanical engineer, former core product designer on the iPhone at Apple, daughter of a fourth-generation watchmaker and a fashion designer.

She mastered precision, then she examined the climb.

Juliette left Apple without another job lined up. Gave herself a year. Sat in the silence. Found experiential marketing and realized something most brands miss:

“It’s a feeling.”

If it doesn’t move a nervous system, it’s decoration.

Now she designs rooms with intention — lower-stimulation zones, clear structure, attention before optics.

We talked about:

– Growing up between timepieces and textiles– Walking away from something impressive– Expanding the gap between impulse and response– Designing belonging instead of escalation

If you’ve achieved something that looked right on paper and still felt a pull for more depth — this one will land.

Juliette strolling around Inwood Park, NYC.

Now that you’ve listened, ask: What am I climbing and why?

Juliette’s story lives inside The Field Year — a year-long archive of stories, portraits, and gatherings that bring unseen work into view. If you feel called to support it, you can contribute to the GoFundMe here.

With gratitude,

Lindsey

PS: Subscribe to Field Notes for documentary conversations, portraits, Spoken Records, and reflections on invisible labor, identity, creativity, burnout, belonging, and becoming.

PPS: Upgrade to Friends of Field Notes for access to The Dispatch, weekly prompts in the chat, and the digital Field Note Journal to help you document your own process in real time.

Founding Members can participate in their own Field Note experience. NYC-based. Travel not included. Reply to this email with questions.

Rachel Saslaw on Holding the Room Without Holding Her Breath.

You can fill a room and still feel alone.

You can be the host, the connector, the one who remembers and still carry vigilance in your chest.

This week’s Field Note is about Rachel Saslaw.

Rachel is the founder of StoryTell, a 700+ person storytelling community in New York City. By day, she leads product marketing teams. By night, she builds rooms where strangers speak the things they usually keep guarded.

From the outside, it looks effortless.

Her story starts with a girl gripping her bag too tight on the subway.

In this Field Note, Rachel shares:

Why she started putting “pennies in the jar of people are good”

The layoff that forced her to trust her own voice

What three years of showing up every month taught her about discipline

What stays with me is this:

Rachel built community by practicing softening.

She gathered evidence that people are good and staying builds trust.

That’s the work.

A question to carry with you:

Where are you still bracing?

What shifts if you loosen your grip, just enough to let someone see you?

Listen above and sit with the image.

Stop fixing. Start flowing.

Rachel’s story lives inside The Field Year — a year-long archive of stories, portraits, and gatherings that bring unseen work into view.

If you feel called to support it, you can contribute to the GoFundMe here.

With gratitude,

Lindsey

PS: Subscribe to Field Notes for documentary conversations, portraits, Spoken Records, and reflections on invisible labor, identity, creativity, burnout, belonging, and becoming.

PPS: Upgrade to Friends of Field Notes for access to The Dispatch, weekly prompts in the chat, and the digital Field Note Journal to help you document your own process in real time.

Founding Members can participate in their own Field Note experience. NYC-based. Travel not included. Reply to this email with questions.

A room full of strangers spent ninety minutes looking underneath their own lives — and found that they already knew each other's stories.

What if the most important thing in the room is the thing nobody thought to name?

For a year, I’ve been photographing invisible labor — the work that lives underneath every visible outcome. Fifty conversations. Thirty-four published stories. And five patterns that kept appearing, across every age, industry, and kind of life.

To mark a year of that, we gathered at Fabrik in Tribeca — a space built for meeting people in real life.

A room full of strangers wrote, moved, and sat with images — mine and theirs. They looked underneath moments in their own lives. Named the things they keep doing when no one is asking. Read a stranger’s face and found something true in it.

At the end, I shared those five patterns. The room had just lived every single one.

We talked about:

— The work you’re paid for versus the work you’re actually doing

— The moment of permission that changes everything — Where your attention goes and what it tells you

— What waits on the other side of fear

— Why meaningful work always becomes about people

No slides, icebreakers or talk of AI.

Just people paying close enough attention to see what’s actually there.

This Field Note is the record of what the room held.

What are you carrying that a room like this might help you see?

The next gathering is April 15th.

RSVP here.

Stop fixing. Start flowing.

Field Notes from the Work is made possible by the support of patrons. If you want to become a deeper part of this project, reach out at [email protected].

With gratitude,

Lindsey

PS: Subscribe to Field Notes for documentary conversations, portraits, Spoken Records, and reflections on invisible labor, identity, creativity, burnout, belonging, and becoming.

PPS: Upgrade to Friends of Field Notes for access to The Dispatch, weekly prompts in the chat, and the digital Field Note Journal to help you document your own process in real time.

Founding Members can participate in their own Field Note experience. NYC-based. Travel not included. Reply to this email with questions.

Tammy Bordeaux has been building for decades. The work she couldn't see was always the most important.

Tammy Bordeaux has been building things for a long time.

A career at National Geographic. A farmers market that became a community institution. Partnerships that took eighteen months to close and looked effortless from the outside.

She’s good at it, exceptionally good. The problem is — she couldn’t see it.

A woman named Angela stopped her mid-sentence at an event once and asked: Why do you say it like it’s nothing?

Tammy didn’t have an answer.

Because you can’t read the ingredients from inside the bottle.

This Field Note is about the work beneath the work — the invisible labor behind everything that looks like a vibe, the practice of getting quiet enough to hear yourself, and the question Tammy has been sitting with all year:

Which parts of this are actually mine?

Tammy at home in Tarrytown, NY

The real work was never about adding more.

It was always about finding what was already there.

What part of Tammy’s story stayed with you?

Hit reply. Tell me.

Field Notes runs on patronage. If you want more of this, you can support it here.

With gratitude,

Lindsey

PS: Subscribe to Field Notes for documentary conversations, portraits, Spoken Records, and reflections on invisible labor, identity, creativity, burnout, belonging, and becoming.

PPS: Upgrade to Friends of Field Notes for access to The Dispatch, weekly prompts in the chat, and the digital Field Note Journal to help you document your own process in real time.

Founding Members can participate in their own Field Note experience. NYC-based. Travel not included. Reply to this email with questions.

The record that lives on the other side of the photograph.

What if the most important thing in the room is the thing nobody thought to name?

On April 15th, sixteen people found their way to a room in New York City. No introductions or titles. Just people and what they were carrying — the year behind the photograph, the hour the smile was sitting on, the thing they keep doing when no one is asking.

We kept bringing in more chairs.

Here’s what I know to be true: the photograph is never the whole story.

The visible outcome is always the smallest fraction of what actually built the person standing there. We know this. We know it in our bodies. We just don’t usually say it out loud.

On a Wednesday morning in April, sixteen people did.

This Field Note is the record of what the room held.

Save the date: September 26th, 2026. The Bronx.

We’re bringing the human record into a much bigger room. More details soon.

If this work has a place in your life, consider becoming a patron. Patrons make the gatherings, the audio, the photographs, and the archive possible.

And if someone you know is carrying invisible work that deserves to be named — send this to them.

The next Field Note’s Session is May 27th at 9:30AM at Fabrik in Tribeca. RSVP here!

With gratitude,

Lindsey

PS: Subscribe to Field Notes for documentary conversations, portraits, Spoken Records, and reflections on invisible labor, identity, creativity, burnout, belonging, and becoming.

PPS: Upgrade to Friends of Field Notes for access to The Dispatch, weekly prompts in the chat, and the digital Field Note Journal to help you document your own process in real time.

Founding Members can participate in their own Field Note experience. NYC-based. Travel not included. Reply to this email with questions.