Happy 1st Birthday, GrokNation!

Happy One Year Anniversary, everyone! I am getting emotional already; I can’t believe it’s been a year!

When I decided to start my own website after writing for Kveller.com for years, I had no idea if it would even work for a month, much less a year. My good friend and former Maccabeat, Immanuel Shalev (who now is the COO for AlephBeta.org) encouraged me to take the leap and start GrokNation so that I could share more of my brain and my life with the public through my writing and now video-making (on YouTube- CLICK HERE TO SEE MY VIDEOS!).

And boy, have we done that! My posts range from reflections on being a mom to what it’s like to win – and lose – awards, from why feminism and racism matter to what kind of music I like to listen to when I’m sad. I have written about my father dying and I have written about how small acts of kindness have affected my worldview and the way I choose to think and live.

I often have had the feeling I am the only one who wants to think deeply and engage on a heavy level all of the time. This website has proven to me that I am not the only one. There are those among you who care about a lot of the things I care about and you want to know more about those things and how you can change them. That’s why we started this site. There are so many of you who want to read what we are posting and who want more than a list of celebrity make up products that a company has paid me to say I use. So many of you crave intellectual stimulation from a website that happens to be started by a celebrity but which is not about being a celebrity.

And as for our “Nation”? You participate in the comments section on this site and over social media, you even write your own blog posts using our Grok With Us questions as writing prompts. You send us photos of you wearing your “I’m With Mayim” shirts or clutching GrokNation notebooks (even my ex-husband wanted one of those!) – which you can still buy on our website. (More products and styles in the months ahead – stay tuned!) And some of you have even connected with one another over email or social media, and online friendships have grown into in-person relationships. Our logo is becoming increasingly more recognizable and some very big media outlets have noticed and mentioned us, helping to spread the word even further about what all of us are doing here together.

In the past few months, we have started increasing our guest writer base, and have been including interviews with people who we think you should know about. I am beyond thrilled at the variety of voices we have featured at GrokNation: insights into parenting, mental health, surviving cancer, human trafficking, body image, prayer, comedy, feminism, birth control options, dating…the list goes on and on. The excitement with which our guest writers have taken interest in being a part of GrokNation is incredibly gratifying; people are sharing things they have never shared before and they are doing it because they believe in GrokNation’s message and they want to share their voices with a smart and thoughtful audience – that’s you!

I am incredibly grateful to Esther Kustanowitz who gives her editorial expertise and her intelligence and thoughtfulness to every post you see. Melissa Gruenfeld is our editorial assistant and makes everything run smoothly. Esther and Melissa care very much about what we do here and I am so lucky to have them.

Immanuel continues to give guidance and support and my assistant Todd deserves a huge thank you for managing everything that I manage and more. I could not do any of this without them.

Looking back on this year, I don’t even know if I could pick a favorite post if I tried. The content we have here is so consistently interesting and important, and the fact that many posts educate our audience about things they may not know about makes me feel like we are really making a difference.

The most powerful email response we got to a post sticks in my mind and I suppose it is literal proof that all of our work here matters. A reader read an article on our site by Samantha Taylor about anxiety and she shared with us that it literally jolted her out of the depression, anxiety, and PTSD she had been suffering from for so long. She said that she had lost relationships because of her struggles and that reading this article convinced her that it was time to get help. She found a therapist and had begun the healing process.

Wow.

I’m someone you know from TV, but I am also just a normal person trying to make sense of a crazy world. Thank you for grokking it out with me, for being a part of this site and my life.

Happy first birthday to GrokNation the site, as well as to the community that you are all part of every day by joining us here in this respectful and thoughtful conversation space! Let’s do more, let’s learn more, let’s create change more, and let’s keep on building GrokNation one post at a time!

Thank you all!