9 completely random and personal questions with writer and creative director Kate Arends
We discuss how overthinking swallows her writing, what she's unsubscribing to, how motherhood gave her a feral/sticky creative spark, and what’s hiding in her iPhone notes.
In today’s special edition of bathmilk, I sit down with someone I admire from afar (storytellers, horse girls, comedians, mothers, dreamers, gorgeous fail-artists and more) and ask them a series of personal questions.
In a few simple words, Kate Arends is divine. Her Instagram, home of 322,000 followers (about the population of Cincinnati, Ohio) graces algorithms with bright red tights, impeccable Goodwill finds, afternoon desserts with candlelight, pajama Friday, dreamy bedding, stacks of books, woven bags, and nature.
We met when I started writing for her popular blog, Wit & Delight, an incredibly freeing and open lifestyle blog about home design, food, feelings and fashion. The blog itself stretched the legs of many writers and (personally) launched my own confidence in writing for a broader audience — and I will be forever indebted to Kate and her selflessness for that.
In her personal writing, she gets to the open wound of life. Her Substack, “House Call” shares open essays about overthinking, intuition, mental health, and being misunderstood. Beyond the truth serum element of her newsletter, she writes insightfully about home design and gift giving. I love her gift guides and Kate’s five things features.
So, without further ado…
BATHMILK: The thing that you do, regularly, that’s hard as shit but worth it.
KATE: Starting anything I don’t want to do is hard enough. But this? This might be worse.
I don’t indulge in overthinking anymore.
That sentence is a betrayal of my former self—overthinking wasn’t just a habit but a cornerstone of my personality until I noticed that overthinking made me utterly impossible to be around—especially for myself.
I brought that thought to therapy. We started to pull the thread, and what unraveled was a mess of fear and arrogance, all dressed up like intelligence.
My personal brand of overthinking was never wisdom. It was the belief that if I pondered enough, worried enough, predicted every possible outcome, I could outsmart life.
How delusional is that?
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
The worst of it was when overthinking swallowed my writing. I had nothing left to say from this horrible in-between place of awareness with no replacement for neurosis. My obsessing was evident in every sentence, but I didn’t know any other way of looking at the world. Knowing none of it was even in the ballpark, I knew I had to keep hitting publish anyway.
It was unbearable. All those essays live online. But it showed me exactly where I was getting in my own way. Overthinking did what it needed to do for as long as I needed it. It kept me safe. It gave me something to cling to when I didn’t trust myself.
But when I held onto it long past its usefulness, it gave me a version of myself built entirely out of fear—a version that had no chance of meeting my expectations. I’ve been in a fistfight with that version of myself for the past two years, but I think she’s finally down for the count. She’ll probably be back on Monday to brawl again.
Anyway. I’ve started to overthink just writing these words. And when I do, I remember how the world feels so much more enticing when you’re not bracing for impact.
BATHMILK: I recently heard on a radio show that people are “speaking less words” these days (makes sense with social media, etc). And they predicted that a future trend would be “trying to get a certain amount of words in a day” like we do with “getting steps in.” What is your gut reaction to this? Are there weird Black-Mirror-esque trends you expect in our future?
KATE: That sentence is hugely unsettling.
Connecting my experience with words (and then expressing them) has probably been the most important practice of my life, which feels both profound and vaguely embarrassing. It should be automatic, but it isn’t. So I get why this is happening.
A little way I try to do my part is encouraging expression in both of my kids now that they can scratch their thoughts onto paper—though so far, their written works mostly focus on who farted, who lied about farting, and whether or not I’m the meanest mom alive (Spoiler: Sometimes I am).
I don’t know. I don’t think it’s good to resist change. But we do have agency. Either we’ll adapt as a species and learn to emotionally regulate without narrating every fleeting thought, or nature will just shut the whole experiment down and outsource our emotional needs to houseplants.
Either way, I’m keeping my notebooks.
BATHMILK: Time to get personal (hehe). What is currently hanging out in your iPhone notes? Something in mine? A list of weird things that hurt me as a mother. 😜
KATE: I can relate. I keep a running list of things I’ve unsubscribed from—things like complaining as connection, which is really just mutual doomscrolling out loud. Or the promise of circling back, a phrase that belongs in the same category as “let’s grab coffee sometime” and “totally down to collaborate,” meaning: No one is ever closing that loop unless we die in the same nursing home. (Editor’s Note: This made me laugh out loud.)
You’ll also find my graveyard of shitty first drafts, the most recent titled “This Is Supposed To Be Fun,” which was a lie. There’s a section for future travel plans (a mix of aspirational and delusional), questions for the universe (why do I always say the weird thing instead of just being quiet?), and what to cook for dinner, which is essentially just what I would cook if my brain could execute a meal plan.
The whole thing reads less like a journal and more like the ramblings of someone who spends too much time alone but insists they’re fine. It’s honest and I like that. So, iPhone Notes forever.
BATHMILK: What are you currently reading/watching/listening to? Or, what are some of your favorites (books, TV shows, podcasts, movies) from 2024?
KATE: I’m going to disappoint you here because I have never been so boring.
The other day, I noticed I was driving in complete silence—no music, no podcasts, not even the soothing voice of some wellness guru trying to sell me mushroom powder. Just me and the sound of my own aging suspension system.
Maybe it’s being a mom, but it feels like silence is the only place left that doesn’t demand anything from me. Music wants me to feel something. Podcasts want me to learn. Instagram wants me to hate my kitchen. Silence just shrugs and says, I don’t care if you stare at that weird mole on your arm for 40 minutes.
I’m not bragging. I’m not “embracing mindful stillness” or “cultivating presence.” For a long time, I tried to make it that and it only stressed me out more. I have started to wonder if presence is simply survival. My brain has felt like an overworked middle manager who’s started smoking again—we need one goddamn minute.
You didn’t ask for this, but what I’m suggesting for listening material is to choose nothing. Grab that small moment when the world isn’t asking anything from you.
And I hear The White Lotus is pretty good this season.
BATHMILK: How do you use writing to understand yourself and the world around you?
KATE: I write and then rewrite again without trying to figure it out. I find the truth lives where loose ends remain.
BATHMILK: Let’s get into it: motherhood. What has that done for your creative self? What has it taken away?
KATE: I lost my time to spill the milk, as my friend Leslie likes to say—meaning, I lost that time to do nothing but follow every weird, pointless tangent until something sparkly emerges. I grieve this. When I’m feeling sorry for myself, I am angry.
This was once my favorite way to write and design: no plan, no agenda, just meandering until I accidentally made something good. But now? There’s literally no time for it unless I decide to forfeit sleep, and I’m not doing that. I’m 40, which means that any night I sleep less than seven hours, I look like someone who's been through it, in the way where people ask “Are you ok?” before you’ve even spoken.
But—the twist!
Losing that kind of time to Motherhood™ gave me something else. Curiosity. Not the polished, intellectual kind that sparkles on a bio, but the feral, sticky-fingered kind my kids have.
My daughter is a compact mystic in bike shorts and unbrushed hair, seeing right through the veneer of how things should be and calling it out. She’ll take you out at the knees before breakfast, and she’s rarely wrong in these observations. She narrates her thoughts constantly, which would be unbearable if it wasn’t so fascinating. It’s like living with a woodland gnome who’s a better creative director than you but doesn’t even have to try.
We have this workshop in our basement—leftover from the previous owner, who apparently needed a subterranean laboratory for reasons I do not want to know. It’s creepy down there, but my daughter has done enough casual property damage (RIP to the carpets) that we needed a designated space for her creative “explosions.” The other day, she told me she doesn’t see trash, only opportunity. Great for her, a constant hair-pulling inconvenience as a mom who just needs some semblance of order to make it through the day.
On Friday night, we hung out down there and made snails out of literal garbage—one named Lulu, one named Bebe, and one named Frank. Then we wrote a snail anthem about their long tails and slow-moving, sleep-all-day lifestyle.
It’s a different kind of lackadaisical. Not the luxurious, self-indulgent kind I used to crave, but this off-the-cuff improv that’s half art, half chaos, and fully thrilling. I’ll protect that part of her with my life—partly because it’s beautiful and partly because if I don’t, she’ll 100% turn her bedroom into a found-object sculpture garden when I’m not looking.
BATHMILK: Do you have a story about failure? And why did it make you an even better version of yourself? 🙂
KATE: Oh, where do I even begin?
The thing I want to say about failure is that it’s a matter of perspective.
An example. In my industry—content, influencing, whatever we’re calling it now—success is measured in metrics: followers, engagement rates, impressions, shares. Data points that supposedly tell the story of your relevance.
By those standards, I’m failing.
I’ve lost over 30,000 followers in the past five years. I try not to count anymore, but every so often my eye drifts to the number, like an old ex I can’t help but check in on.
To most people, this would be the smoking gun. Proof that I took a wrong turn somewhere. In internet math, losing followers = failing. But what that number doesn’t show is how much of myself I found in the process. A lot of that time I floundered—but without that, I wouldn’t have learned to follow the breadcrumbs back to what lights me up. To me, it is misunderstood to let whatever stories people make up live in their minds—not mine.
So for me, failure has become a sign that I’m doing something honest. That I’m finally asking the better question: What if I just made things I care about for people who actually want to be here?
Bigger isn’t better. Being liked might mean forfeiting the most essential, irreplaceable parts of who you are. It’s a sacrifice that has a price.
And look—I’m not going to pretend this is all some confident, badass reclamation arc. I’m not driving this transformation. It’s more like a current I’ve been dragged into, and my only job is to not fight it. To make sense of what’s happening while it happens. To narrate from the middle. I fought it for years and only recently realized it was just making this process take longer. I don’t know, there’s a force stronger than my will at play here.
I told my therapist the other day that I felt like a deflated party balloon someone stepped on in the driveway. Or that plastic bag from American Beauty dancing in the wind. My work is a performance, but it’s me. The loose ends didn’t need to be tied up; I didn’t need to choose myself or my career. They just create tension—what’s real and what’s performance work hand in hand to create the kind of tension that fuels expansion and curiosity.
To my astonishment, I’m happier this way. I’m far less judgmental now. Far less afraid.
BATHMILK: We are always talking about core wardrobe (best basic finds we all come back to). But what about a core home design? Can you share some of the best/basic finds for your home that you come back to again and again? What’s the home equal of a crisp, white button-up, for example?
KATE: Oh, I love this question! When I think about a “core home design,” I think about building a palette—not just colors, but materials, shapes, and even moods—that can shift with me as I inevitably go through my various flavors of the moment.
I think it’s really telling that in our most private spaces, we’re worried about getting it “right.” My hunch is that we’ve turned home into an outward expression of ourselves and, in the process, lost the ability to tune into what we need our homes to be. No one is coming into your bedroom but you and your chosen people. What happens to design rules when we’re the only audience?
I’m writing a book right now that touches on this—how we unhook home from external expression and focus on what it gives us internally. (Editor’s Note: Hooray!!)
So to answer the question: My core home pieces are the things that make that evolution easy. Things like…
Simple linen curtains (or rattan blinds) work with any style I’m into at the moment.
Warm, natural wood furniture — especially pieces that already have some wear, so I’m not precious about them. Almost all of mine are secondhand.
Textured neutral rugs — nothing too loud, just the perfect base layer. I like Swedish Kilim rugs because they have color and personality and can work in modern and traditional spaces.
Really good lighting — table lamps, floor lamps, sconces—because mood lives in the lighting. Light doesn't have to match the home's architectural style. This is where tension works really well!
Art that can move around — pieces I love enough to keep, but flexible enough to hang anywhere.
And lastly, a great warm white paint for your walls makes the entire home a canvas on which to get expressive.
That’s my home version of a white button-up—a palette and pieces that work no matter who I’m becoming next.
BATHMILK: Let’s end with a tough one: Regret. A fair teacher or not worthwhile?
KATE: It's both. You have to feel it to be free of it. Don’t spend any more time than you need to thinking about the past.
wow thank you for this!! i am now feeling extra grateful that I have "time to do nothing but follow every weird, pointless tangent until something sparkly emerges." <3