I Figured Out What This Substack is Really About

Photo by Brannon Naito on Unsplash

All right, it's time for an update. It's been a few weeks since I posted anything and it may have seemed like I completely gave up on this Substack thing. Actually, I've just been doing some soul searching about it, and during that time, I was also having a challenging time at work with a tight deadline, followed by a couple of weeks of recovery.

Here I am on the other side of that, ready to fill you in.

I started this thing thinking it would be a place where I would write gentle little fiction stories to help me stay calm and soothe my frayed nerves. I wrote exactly one installment of that and then quickly started writing about my own personal traumas. Mundane as they are I have never processed them, and that is messing me up I think. I have a queue of drafts where I have started to explore various topics or ideas I’ve been thinking about.

It makes me think the purpose of this Substack is not to write short little stories with no plot twists that advance along with the protagonist getting exactly what the ywant on the first try. That's nice, and maybe there's a place for that (though this would get you kicked out of any writers’ room in Hollywood I’m sure). However it feels like what I'm really trying to write about is my own life experiences that are unique to me and that I have mostly not processed yet. Even though I'm anonymous on here, I don't know if I have the guts to explore them all publicly, but a good portion of it I am willing to do here.

So that is what you can expect from this Substack going forward. I think I want to write about these things publicly, even if anonymously, is that I don’t think my experiences are particularly unique.

Maybe I can find a tribe of people who are all trying to figure this thing out like me?

Maybe we can learn from each other?

With this change, I turned off subscriptions to the paid subscriptions to this Substack because I'm not sure why I turned them on in the first place. I guess because of Substack's onboarding process. I get it the only way Substack can make money is if we turn on subscriptions and make money.

I realize that until I'm fully committed to this writing habit on a regular basis, can contribute interesting ‘extra’ things that might we worth paywalling, I'm not comfortable even having the ‘pay me’ button turned on. I want this space to feel more like a personal exploration and hopefully connect with some people who've had similar experiences.

I guess this is a blog. I’m blogging now. Again.