Note 2 Self

Saskia Starck

This is Saskia, and this is Note 2 Self — your weekly dose of everything that’s simply too long to text. Consider this your personal invitation into my inner circle, where I share my thoughts and quiet reflections that usually live inside my notes app. Each week I explore modern life through conversations about relationships, culture, mental health, identity, and the stories that shape how we see ourselves and the world around us. Part personal journal, part cultural commentary, Note 2 Self is a space for honest reflection, thoughtful conversation, and the occasional pop culture deep dive.

  1. 5d ago

    The Knicks, Love Island, and What Makes Us Feel Alive

    In this episode of Note 2 Self, Saskia is still thinking about New York. After last week’s conversation about J.Lo, Subway Takes, and what makes someone a New Yorker, the city decided to answer in the most New York way possible: the Knicks won, the streets erupted, and for one night the whole city felt like one living, breathing nervous system. What starts as a story about a Knicks watch party on the Lower East Side becomes something much bigger. Saskia reflects on collective joy, the strange power of strangers wanting the same thing at the same time, and why connection can feel like its own form of resistance. From there, she moves into a very different kind of connection crisis: this season of Love Island, and why the contestants seem so scared to flirt, explore, risk, and be messy. She also reflects on Emily Ratajkowski’s essay Sex As a Single Mom, the roles women are taught to play, and how hard it can be to know what we actually want when desire has been shaped by what we were told would make us safe, loveable, chosen, or powerful. Because maybe the work is paying attention to what makes us feel alive, what makes us feel connected, and what makes us feel like we are finally telling the truth, and chasing that with all we’ve got. Emily Ratajkowski essay referenced in this episode: https://www.thecut.com/article/emily-ratajkowski-sex-single-mom.html Follow Note 2 Self on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@note2self_podcast Follow Note 2 Self on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/note2self_podcast/ Follow Note 2 Self on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@note2self_podcast

    39 min

  2. Jun 18

    New York, Fame Sick, and Reinventing Yourself in Your 30s

    In this episode of Note 2 Self, Saskia is thinking about New York. After J.Lo’s Subway Takes claim that you have to be born in New York to be a New Yorker, Saskia reflects on moving to the city in 2015 with one suitcase, no job, and no idea what life here would become. What starts as a New York take turns into something much bigger: belonging, identity, and who gets to decide where we are allowed to feel at home. Saskia talks about the energy in the city right now, dancing under the K Bridge at Chris Lake, the joy of connection, and why New York has always been a place for people who arrive, rebuild, and become. She also reflects on Lena Dunham’s memoir Fame Sick, the complicated relationship between a city that makes you and a city that can also break you, and what it means to leave behind an old version of yourself. From creative failure and grief around acting to redefining success in your 30s, this episode is about reinvention, changing your mind, and learning that the versions of you that came before do not disappear. They become another layer of who you are. Because maybe belonging is not about where you were born. Maybe it is about what changes you, what holds you, and who makes room for the person you are becoming.

    38 min

  3. Jun 11

    Off Campus, the Teach Us Consent Movement, and Why Talking About It Takes the Power Back

    ⚠️ Content note: This episode includes discussion of sexual assault (roughly 17:00–25:00 — skip to 25:00 if you need to). This is also discussed in the second half of the episode. Please take care of yourself, and skip ahead or come back another time if you need to. Support resources are listed below. In this episode of Note 2 Self, Saskia opens with a story from a chaotic New York rave, the return of Love Island, and the official start of summer. Before landing on the show she cannot stop talking about: Off Campus. What looks like a steamy college hockey romance turns out to be something far more important, and it's the thread that runs through everything this week. Saskia breaks down why this show matters: how it proves chemistry doesn't require toxicity, how it refuses to villainize women, how it portrays trauma the way it actually lives in a body: slowly, and never healed in a single conversation. And how one scene about trust, safety, and consent reframes what masculinity can look like. Because the hottest, most masculine thing a man can do is be vulnerable. That leads into the heart of the episode: the Teach Us Consent movement, the Australian woman who started it with a single Instagram poll, and the letter Saskia wrote to her own high school. She shares her own experiences with sexual assault and slut-shaming with a vulnerability that is still unfolding in real time... and the thing her therapist keeps reminding her: the more we talk about it, the less power it holds. Because whether it arrives through a hockey show or a hard conversation, the message is the same. You are not alone. And every time we say the things that once felt unsayable, we build something better for the women who come after us. — SHOW NOTES Lindsey Fleming's breakdown of Off CampusTeach Us ConsentKsenyeah (DJ from NY Rave Girls)— SUPPORT RESOURCES This episode includes discussion of sexual assault. If you or someone you know needs support, you are not alone: US — RAINN: https://rainn.org/AU — 1800RESPECT: https://1800respect.org.au/

    46 min

  4. Jun 4

    Avoidant Attachment, Dating Patterns, and What Changed My Love Life

    In this episode of Note 2 Self, Saskia maps a dating pattern most people recognize but rarely name: the people who feel chemically intense and exciting, while quietly leaving her anxious, confused, and spinning. She uncovers a decade of patterns starting in New York with the first wave of ghosting that trained her to chase intensity, then moves into Sydney, where a second cycle confirmed she was repeatedly attracting emotionally unavailable men. From there, she gets practical. She shares how attachment theory and therapy helped her rewire the script from “high and crash” to “clarity and consistency,” and the five red flags she now catches earlier. Saskia also gets specific about process: she built a list of what she wanted to feel, not just what someone looked like on paper, and kept revising it until it gave her a new standard for love. The turning point came in New York with two dates that made the pattern impossible to ignore: one familiar, one calm. She chose the uncomfortable calm over the old high, and that choice became the foundation of the relationship she has with Jeffrey today. The lesson is direct: anxiety can mimic love, but calm is often the truest signal of safety. Tune in now.

    41 min

  5. May 28

    Karmic Connections, Anxious Attachment, and Learning the Difference

    Some connections feel different from the moment they arrive... like you've known this person before, like they were always supposed to show up. But there's a really important question worth asking: is this a karmic connection, or is it anxious attachment masked as chemistry? In this episode, Saskia unpacks the difference, and shares the story she's never fully told on the podcast before. A New Year's Eve in Byron Bay, a trip to Hawaii, a person she immediately connected with, and what it took to finally let them go. She traces the three markers she now uses to tell the difference between a deep past-life connection and the intensity that comes from her own anxious attachment, and why confusing the two cost her more time than she'd like to admit. She also opens up about being in a cocoon period right now: managing a lot, feeling overwhelmed, and trusting that the seeds she's planted are growing even when she can't see it yet. Plus: her first real Botox experience, her annual tarot reading, and the SNL bit she and Jeffrey can't stop laughing about. Join her for the ride. Referenced in this episode: SNL sketch: https://youtu.be/sTUmhxi6Mo8?si=HG79lRkxgn4_UvNY

    44 min

  6. May 21

    Best Friends, Bachelor Nation, and the Difference Between Love and Anxiety

    In this episode of Note 2 Self, Saskia's cup is full, and not by accident. Her best friend flew back to New York for the weekend to honour their annual tradition of seeing their favourite DJ, Blondish, play live. It was, as it often is with the people who truly know you, exactly what she needed. The show didn't go quite as planned, with a hysterical "VIP" experience, but the music was transcendent, and that kind of friendship, the kind built over years of shared history and deep knowing, doesn't need a perfect backdrop. Saskia reflects on what it means to have someone in your life who sees you in full, and how quietly extraordinary that is. That idea, of what real connection actually looks like, runs as a thread through the second half of the episode, where Saskia turns her attention to Bachelor Nation. She's been rewatching an old Bachelorette season and she has thoughts. Having grown up watching the show and taking it as the fairytale that falling in love is all about, she now watches it with the rose-coloured glasses fully off. What she sees troubles her: a franchise built on the firework relationship, on anxiety mistaken for chemistry, on self-worth handed over to whoever holds the rose. The contestants aren't falling in love. They're trauma bonding. And for years, we were watching it like it was a fairytale. Love is not a feeling that either hits or it doesn't. It's an action. A choice you make when it's hard and unglamorous and not under the stars during a candlelit dinner in Paris. That's the episode. Tune in.

    46 min

  7. May 14

    Beef Season 2, Childhood Trauma, and the Pain You Don't Know You're Carrying

    In this episode of Note 2 Self, Saskia is fresh off a solo weekend in Brooklyn. Jeffrey away, apartment to herself, an afternoon wandering Prospect Park and sitting under oak trees. It should have just been a nice walk. But it led somewhere she wasn't expecting: straight into a therapy session about a flood that happened when she was four, a 100-acre rainforest property in Australia that was destroyed overnight, and eight months of her own life she has no memory of at all. What she thought never really affected her turns out to be one of the most formative things that ever happened to her. That thread, pain buried so deep you don't even know it's there, is what ties this episode together. Because it shows up again in her pop culture pick: Beef Season 2, starring Oscar Isaac and Carrie Mulligan as a married couple whose opening fight is one of the most visceral, painfully real things she has seen on television. Saskia does a deep dive into what makes their relationship so triggering to watch, the line that unlocked the whole scene on set, what the show gets right about how we fight the people we love most, and why the final scene brought her to tears. She also gets into a part of the show that made her stop in her tracks... a Black Mirror-style hour set inside an American emergency room that quietly dismantles how women's pain is dismissed, undertreated, and disbelieved. And she closes with the thought she couldn't shake when it was all over. Pain that isn't acknowledged doesn't go away. It just finds another way out.

    55 min

  8. May 8 ·  Bonus

    BONUS: Met Gala 2026 Best Dressed

    In this special bonus episode of Note 2 Self, Saskia is dropping a timely mini episode on the Met Gala. The exhibition, Costume Art, asked guests to explore the indivisible connection between body and garment, treating fashion as an embodied art form. The dress code: Fashion Is Art. And Saskia had a lot of thoughts. One thread she couldn't stop pulling on: how many designers, independently, arrived at the same answer: the female body as icon. Venus de Milo appeared twice. The Winged Victory. The Black Madonna. On a night asking where the body ends and the garment begins, something kept pointing back to how women's bodies have been depicted, celebrated, and mythologised throughout history. She thinks that says something. This is her full Met Gala wrap sharing some of her favourite looks from Sabrina Carpenter, Kim Kardashian, Anok Yai, Hudson Williams, Emma Chamberlain, and more, sharpest critiques, and one moment that stopped her completely. Because what we wear is never just what we wear. It's what we're saying.

    24 min
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5
out of 5
7 Ratings

About

This is Saskia, and this is Note 2 Self — your weekly dose of everything that’s simply too long to text. Consider this your personal invitation into my inner circle, where I share my thoughts and quiet reflections that usually live inside my notes app. Each week I explore modern life through conversations about relationships, culture, mental health, identity, and the stories that shape how we see ourselves and the world around us. Part personal journal, part cultural commentary, Note 2 Self is a space for honest reflection, thoughtful conversation, and the occasional pop culture deep dive.

Information

  • Creator
    Saskia Starck
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    59
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Saskia Starck
  • Show Website
    Note 2 Self

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