Trying my best to write down What Is New to get over my fear of Publishing On Substack (2)

first written in January, supposedly to be published on Substack, but left to rot like all things meant to be published on Substack for the past two years, leading to eventually actually writing things not meant to be published on Substack, leading to this blog, leading to publishing this, here, to maybe be published in some way someday on Substack, once I feel less itsy about publishing on Substack. This is Part Deux

• I believe I have decided, in so far as one can decide these things, to ignore the substack “community” and focus only on what i want to say. it feels silly and redundant to proclaim this, yet it’s been a long time coming, and might I also say, quite a difficult one at that. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt truly free to say what I want or need to say on that platform, or ever in my life.¹ Part of this is what I tried and failed to articulate in my “essay” Ice Burn, the last thing I posted there.
• One aspect of how to move forward from here concerns the directionality of what I publish. On the one hand i need witnesses, but I also need those witnesses to be supportive. otherwise I am being watched, which translates to my mind as being judged, and there is nothing really I can do about that.²
• This is why I have repeatedly tried to inform you guys that clicking the like button helps me (A LOT). Most of you still don’t do that, though, which is to be expected — the platform doesn’t make it easy unless one lets oneself get sucked into the ecosystem, get an account, have a feed, etc. Not wanting that is completely understandable. Just look at yours truly. Also, fact is, when communicating with people who aren’t your IRL friends, aren’t sitting across from you, sharing meals sometimes, there is no real internal need to let them know that your words mean anything to them.³ There is no need to even actually read the words.
  • Thus, i will not be paywalling posts that feel especially vulnerable or needy (the ones where I would feel horrible if knowing that everybody “saw/read/opened” but nobody liked). No, I simply won’t send them out via email and leave it up to serendipity whether anyone sees and reads them at all.
  • Any posts that tackle ‘processing the process’ or ‘substack’ or ‘boundaries’ will not be sent via email. it has happened too many times now that i poured everything into making these meta-pieces as true and real and not-performative as possible, only for it to be “received” like I said... nothing. i can’t even say “i love you guys, but...” because, obviously (??) i do not love you, because I don’t know you, because most of you are just email addresses to me on a stats dashboard that don’t respond in any way to, like, me-showing-you-my-lifeblood-re-stuff-that-is-important-to-me-aka-writing-to-you. i’ve felt conflicted about this pretty much since i started to write here and no longer wish to metabolize it for you.
  • This feels horrible to me. One reason i have not written to you in so long is that i have horrible childish feelings towards you that are of course in actuality misdirected feelings of grief over the expressive child i was not allowed to be, etc
  • thus, this probably also marks some sort of ‘rebranding’ (ugh) on here. i will publish these words but i will not send them to you via email. maybe i will send you monthly updates of what i wrote in the meantime for your comfortable link-clickening.
    • to elaborate slightly, maybe you recall that one of the few pieces i published last year mentioned my childhood. i have found there is a lot more pain there than i have ever allowed myself to notice before, and seeing as this pain specifically concerns expression, being heard and understood or not, the only way, i believe, to process it is in writing. this is what i wish to do moving forward. my “letters”, when they are addressed to myself, will be published to web only, not sent via email. i also see myself writing autofiction or something like it sometimes or always, who knows. attaching myself, my real self, to the stories might be counterproductive, maybe re-traumatizing.
  • also related, i have found myself reading less and less on screen. i think a level of screen saturation has been reached that i simply have to let ease up more often than not. the combo of macbook and arc browser helps, at least for websites that value clean presentation of words, with nothing else is on the screen that might distract. so, that works, but still i find myself wanting to read offline.
    • for this reason, i want to gather everything i’ve written every quarter year into a handy printable pdf for yearly paid subscribers.
    • they will be pretty or at least quirky but definitely well-readable without feeling like they’re wasting precious paper, or, god forbid, printer ink.
• i want to start making calendars again, regardless of whether kiryll is with me or not. the last time we said we would make calendars, kiryll was confident in being able to deliver fully automated digital downloads for every time zone. then, our personal lives and the holidays happened and all of our ambitions kind of disappeared. now, i find myself mourning the calendar a lot. for 2027, i want to pick up that thread once again, but i really need your help to do that, meaning I need to know that people actually want it. when i was trying to make the 2025 calendar happen, one (1) person expressed sincere interest directly. i find it both hard and suspiciously easy to believe that she was the only person who missed my beautiful lil product.
• i would like to formally distance myself from the word “essay.” previously, I would have called almost everything i wrote an essay. To my my understanding, it is a loose term for any piece of writing that endeavors to lay out a problem and maybe resolve it (essayer, to try or attempt). My favorite essays, by myself and others, had and have no qualms about being self-referential, for example. Too many of the “essays” that, uh, perform well, are also, incidentally, so performative in both their prose, their vulnerability, if applicable, and their Rigorous Research and Referencing Everyone Who Came Before. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s the culture. Maybe whatever. I don’t know.
  • I would now call nothing i write or have every written an ‘essay’ (except maybe some stuff i wrote in high school), because the word has come to mean something very specific over the last year of reading widely on substack and elsewhere, something i do not and cannot currently conform to. It is much too formal. when i think of myself of writing an essay, i take what i’m doing much too seriously and forget all the ways and reasons i write, really, in reality, to mine and others’ satisfaction. when I now think about “writing an essay”, suddenly there is this ultra-fitted leather suit around my brain with no space to move and be myself. writing Ice Burn was probably one of the most horrific writing experiences of my life, which is probably the reason i am still ambiguous around whether i would even like to win that prize. the ensuing expectations, do i even want them?
  • No, man, I do not. I do not want to think of myself as “an essayist.” Not that I ever did, but the mental ambition to one day do so was there. If anything at all, I am just a writer. A blogger? Not even that, because that word has been co-opted by keyword droppers and Adsense. Nothing is sacred anymore.

Re-reading this about three months after it was written, the question of being on a platform at all is now much more interesting than ever. I’m comfortable enough now in my own space, right here, free to publish whatever I choose, that what I outlined above (and, it seems, promptly forgot having ever thought about) feels fresh. I would even venture to call it ‘clean.’

Last Saturday, I ignored my auto-publish bot’s nudge to re-post something from last week on Substack because I was still getting the Ick re: even visiting that site. Today, I ‘spoke’ to Claude about it: “i had forgotten about just publishing to web till i read the pasted text today. i never did it before bc it i told myself i was missing out on views if i did it, lol, ugh. that i should be brave enough to just be in peoples inboxes. but what if i just don’t want that.” So ya. What if I just don’t want that. At this moment I see a bright future, writing down ANYTHING AT ALL, posting to Substack only because it is the nature of writing as an unknown person on the internet today. Not forcing myself to force myself on people’s inboxes. Not forcing myself to believe that anyone will ever see any of my words if I only publish on my little private island site (because they will not. because they are all Continental and have no money for private jets and I don’t either.)

This feels good. This is nice. Sending a monthly or quarterly email with a collection of links, then, feels fine, in theory. I imagine beginning it with “hello, here are the links my robot publisher told me to share with you this month.” And collecting ALL of my writing into a printable magazine feels SO DOPE I CANNOT EVEN (Idk if I’ve ever used that word. Now’s the time).

TBC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Revised April 20, 2026.