Why I Thought About Quitting Substack (and Why I'm Staying)

confessions of a quitter ☼ a new format for the newsletter ☼ mom's 70th birthday ☼ two marvelous book recs

confessions of a quitter (& why i wanted to quit substack)

I am a quitter who wants to stop quitting. My quitting resume consists of starting and stopping seven different Wordpress blogs (that nobody read), publishing an inconsistent stream of vlogs to YouTube (that my family and friends watched), posting a ton of photos on Instagram (that thousands of bot-looking people liked), and creating and abandoning a handful of offline projects after college (including an independent magazine and a queer event series that many strangers enjoyed).

If I am being honest with myself—aside from the fact that I need to make money and work a 9-5—I quit things because my attention span is a product of the internet and my ambition is a symptom of its culture. I have always been interested in doing Everything, most likely because social media makes Everything seem easy. So when something new catches my eye—like learning how to DJ or writing poems or creating music or making short videos—I am prone to looking at what I am already doing and wondering: What am I doing this for? No one is even reading it, no one is even watching it. I want to do that.

And then there is the more honest question that always comes up: When will I be a millionaire?

Or in more humble terms: When all of this pay off?

Anxiety comes in many forms. For the creative types, it seems to stem from unrealistic expectations of ourselves and the comparison-derived value we assign our life’s work (oh no, look at them, they’re younger and hotter and better than me!). I think every creative person dreams of the day that they can live a comfortable life based on what they create—and on their own terms. There are so many platforms and courses and internet hacks that it seems both impossible to understand how to get to where we want to be—the comfortable creative, as opposed to the starving artist—and irresponsible that we are not already there.

I have always wanted to be Someone online, to connect with an audience of people around the world and document the ups and downs of life, because it meant that I was not alone—that I belonged. And because it seemed to promise that I’d eventually get to where I wanted to be. Like, once I have 1M followers and Zadie Smith knows my name, I will finally be worth something. Once my book is adored by MFA snobs and literary critics, I will play video games and not feel guilty. Or once I am like this person I saw on TikTok or YouTube—or, now, Substack—I will stop feeling like I am behind.

Cringe and sad. But real.

Of course, when I stop to think, I know that I am valid and worthy and loved. However, no matter how many times I intellectually battle the narrative of Success or Capitalism (“once I am there,” “once I am this”), its voice persists in my head. Its volume dwindles, at times, when I am living my Real Life and lost (or rather, found) in moments of presence with friends and family, no longer thinking about Getting There. But the desire to be a certain kind of creative—one that strangers read and connect to and celebrate—still hums in the back of my head like the sound of a ticking clock I can’t find.

And so I find myself back online, attempting to find a community.

This year I made it a goal of mine to develop a healthy, sustainable relationship with Content, the ever-growing, ever-omniscient force that seems to haunt every creative person around the globe. Content always makes me feel like I am behind, like I am less creative than I should be, and that I am both silly for creating her and stupid for not creating her. It’s like, when I follow Content’s orders, she laughs at me: “You’re a content creator, not a writer.” And when I don’t follow Content’s orders, she scolds me: “You’re a writer with no audience… How are you going to be successful without me?”

I have accumulated so many photos, videos, and words over the past 10+ years that I started to feel anxious around what I wasn’t doing with them—insecure about all of the vlogs, posts, and books I should have been creating from the stockpiles of media that sat on my phone or in the cloud or somewhere in Google Drive. Success looks like publishing a video and writing a story every week, not every year. I should have been popping Content’s babies out constantly, like that Octomom from 2009.

It’s been fifteen years since 2009, why aren’t you a famous vlogger? Think of how skilled of a writer you could be if you’d started writing back then instead of chasing a practical income… Why can’t you ever stick to anything?

That’s Content speaking.

My main intention for 2024 was to start vlogging on YouTube, post to TikTok more often, and share my writing in public—which is why I launched my Substack at the end of last year. What I feel on here, though, is similar to what I’ve felt on almost every other social media platform I’ve joined: That I am not doing it right.

Like: I see a lot of these Substack posts and notes from random people with real conversations beneath them—how do I become a part of that? How do I build a community? How do I transition from sending things out to the void to finding real people to connect to?

I am afraid that I do not know how to use these platforms. I am afraid that what I have to share is not that interesting. I am afraid that I have always been an outsider to Content’s social circle, the person who publishes things into empty space and never amasses a community. I am afraid that spending time on these platforms—Substack, TikTok, YouTube, etc.—just means time away from writing my book, which is what a Real Writer should care about the most, right?

I am afraid that Content is just a distraction.

So last week I thought about stopping the newsletter. But then I sat down and journaled in the 700 page Google Doc I’ve kept since 2018. I asked myself why I wanted to quit another thing when quitting was what I intended to stop doing in the first place. The answer was very simple: I was not enjoying Substack.

It felt like something I had to do every week (or so): Think of something new to write and make it sound pretty. Because this was a representation of my writing, wasn’t it? This was the way I was supposed to find some sense of community around writing, so it had to be good, thoughtful, interesting. What if it’s how I’m discovered?

Cringe and delusional. But real.

And then I was like: Maybe I can just make sh*t to make sh*t, like, whatever the f*ck I want, the way I go to my journal whenever I am feeling emotionally or spiritually stifled. Substack can be a kind of journal. I am not trying to win a PEN award for these letters, right?

And then I was like: Plus, I haven’t spent any time on Substack as a reader. It’s just been a newsletter for my friends and family. Yes, I don’t really enjoy being chronically online—I spend my working days on a computer, so I’d rather not spend more time on a platform, and I much prefer in-person than in-the-comments. But maybe this is the best way to find the community that I am seeking while living in a place like Mexico City (where most of the writers write in Spanish): Interacting with other English writers and reading their work online.

And what if I just started writing the next newsletter and didn’t stop to edit it. What if I just wrote about how I wanted to quit Substack and how much I hate Content and how embarrassing it feels to admit that I want to be a content creator with an engaged audience so that I can make things while making a living off of them and feeling connected to the world at large?

So here we are!

I am going to stay on Substack and start creating whatever it is I want to create—and, most importantly, try building a real community with it. Like, a real community—not one based on commenting and replying and following in the aim of growing. I want to find my people.

If you are a Substack writer and you have tips for discovering like-minded writers, please let me know! I want to find people who are writing from queer perspectives, from BIPOC+ perspectives, who are excited about mindfulness and activism and breaking apart all of the societal constructs we were taught to live by and worship, like Money and Sex and everything in between. People who feel guilty about their American privilege because American institutions have funded wars and genocides across every continent, and, like, if we can’t make some semblance of change, then what are we even doing here? Also, people who are excited about creativity in all of its forms: Music, writing, video, photography…

And people who love zines as much as I do.

a new format for sleepover (a news-zine!)

What I would like this to be is an experimental congregation of random things. Like the independent magazines I love picking up in new places, filled with scribbles and words and expressions of life shared in “real time.” I always felt attracted to The Zine and The Indie Mag as cultural concepts because they seem to be the most accurate representations of life in the present, as most zines and indie mags are created by small groups of people who are local to a place (or a scene)—and published by them out of some innate desire to create something for themselves and their communities—without the fuss of meeting a “market gap.” Which is also why they don’t make money. Which is also why I had to stop mine.

But that is why I love them so much.

Maybe sometimes it will be an interview with one of my friends or a video of myself cooking one of the recipes I’ve wanted to try making for the past three years or a photo series of my mom because it was her 70th birthday.

mom turned 70!

Last month my mom turned seventy years old. I love everything about her. I love that she is the first to send our entire family random news articles about what vegetables not to eat or which highway routes not to take. I love that she always takes care of others and leads with her heart—she has taught me how to do the same.

I love that she is so comfortable with who she is, finding life’s big and little joys in baked goods, craft-making, and, the latest of her passions: birdwatching. And, most of all, I am grateful that she has always been my biggest cheerleader. Case and point: She is not a big reader, nor pretends to be one (knows who she is), but she has read every single newsletter I’ve sent out (is my biggest cheerleader).

On the other hand, I am a reader, and I want to share two books that blew my mind over the past few months. :-)

two marvelous reading recs

Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange: This book blew my mind. I read There, There—his debut novel—a while back, and in my opinion Orange went above and beyond with the sequel. The novel is an inter-generational narrative that touches on the Native American genocide, displacement, and abuse carried about by the United States government for years, as well as addiction, Whiteness, queerness, neurodivergence, family, and the glimmers of hope that keep us alive. This is the first intergenerational novel I’ve read, and I hope to one day write a project that tackles a similar form. I did not even know you could do all that.

Two of my favorite quotes are:

“Everything about your life will feel impossible. And you being or becoming an Indian will feel the same. Nevertheless you will be an Indian and an American and a woman and a human wanting to belong to what being human means.”

“Wake up. It is morning. Have a cup of coffee. Watch the sun come up. Feel as if you are the only person in the whole world seeing it. Know that it was always true that you were the only one seeing the world the way you were seeing the world. Give thanks to the rising sun. Give thanks to the day that was every day, was the sun itself making everything seen and was called the day as a nickname for the big light the sun was sending the world before it took it away.”

Nevada by Imogen Binnie: This has been a long-time recommendation from friends. I finally got around to reading it and enjoyed every single page, every single sentence. The book is regarded as one of the first literary works written by an author who is trans for the trans community—in that it does not attempt to make itself more accessible to heteronormative audiences.

One of the most referenced quotes from the book is:

“Eventually you can't help but figure out that, while gender is a construct, so is a traffic light, and if you ignore either of them, you get hit by cars. Which, also, are constructs.”

And another favorite of mine is:

“That’s what it’s like to be a trans woman: never being sure who knows you’re trans or what that knowledge would even mean to them. Being on unsure, weird social footing.”

One of the things I liked most about Nevada is that Binnie utilizes out-of-place capitalization to characterize specific words or phrases—ones that play a theme in almost everyone’s life, like Lady or Those Kinds of People or Very Special Episode. I copied that literary device in this newsletter, because the characterization of words as forces of their own spoke to me on many levels. ☷

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With love,

Your favorite capybara ~ AKA Travis Zane

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