Since it’s already tomorrow, I may as well start a new Writer’s Notebook. It is rather fortunate that I finally discovered a working android text file editor, so I no longer need to fiddle with glitching note taking apps. This is especially good for when my digestive system traps me on the loo for substantial blocks of time. After talking things over with Em, since neither of us can sleep anyway, I came to a few conclusions. I’ve decided to simply delete my Substack account… I’m just letting it go. I was taking the good with the bad. But at this point, I have such limited energy and too much brain fog to even read emails on a daily basis any more.

Anyhow, I’ve been weighing the pros and cons of abandoning Substack. It’s not about the lack of growth; it’s more that Em has felt it’s just a drain on me. I do get something out of some of the newsletters, but frankly, I can just delete it all and sign up anonymously to follow a few I still want to keep up with, and just be done with it. I feel keeping the profile and back link are good enough.

It’s become apparent to me that Substack success will mean needing to carve out a niche. Since that has clearly never worked for me, I’m just grasping at straws, and as usual, I’m drawing the shortest of the lot. I’m also unsubscribing from daily upside and the recent stacked marketer because frankly, fuck the finance markets and fuck the marketing industry. [Even Neil Patel, whose content I learned so much of my SEO strategies from, eventually made me unsubscribe when even paid UberSuggest became useless and he became all about push notifications.]

This, however, does not mean I’m giving up on writing. On the contrary, I’m going to keep my website updated… [I did so daily for a while.] It’s not about the views, and frankly, it never was. The reason I’ve been around this long is that I don’t rely on any one thing to sustain me. I don’t write about any one thing. If Substack was useful to me at all, it was in realizing that my interests need to vary. There isn’t one thing that interests me; there are many, and to ignore the majority of these facets of my being to give people a niche or two to follow, that’s absurd and wrong and limiting.

As I just said to Em, life should be about making something. The things that happen in your life are not what define you. Yes, our experiences and memories do shape our personalities, habits, and ways of thinking, but they are not the be-all end-all. What happened to you is not you. I’ve tried to explain to her that the things that dominate Em’s life are things that happened to her, not the things she’s herself created. I get it. I lost my entire career to TikTok. Not the platform itself, but the mindset it created.

Yes, my website is a conglomerate of things that don’t fit together. But, I wrote them. They exist, and they are something. In these darkening times, something has to be enough. My writing is enough. I don’t need to deal with constant emails, many of which are truncated with the necessity to subscribe to read further. It’s not that I can’t afford to, I certainly can. It’s that at this point, with my chronic fatigue syndrome [slowly sapping away more of my days as I age], I know I have limited time. It could be two years, it could be twenty, but I don’t know. 

What I do know is I’m not making the best of my time. My writing is certainly doing a lot better than it was two months ago, but at this point, while Substack has been really helpful in the What I’m Reading category, it’s no longer serving the purpose I intended it to, a way to remain relevant. Fuck being relevant. Just do something that you enjoy, that brings you at least some sort of comfort, and just stick with that. 

Stop focusing on the things that are happening to you, and make things happen for yourself, even if no one else gives a fuck, because chances are no one but you ever will. But, the fear of becoming irrelevant; I live that fear every day, because honestly, I am irrelevant to anyone but Emily. If I lose Em I become entirely irrelevant. No matter what I do, even if I publish the entire contents of my website in book form (which is something I honestly should do sooner or later), I will fade into obscurity. 

But I can’t worry about that, because frankly, it may be that in death I become a legend. I need to be OK with that. That’s why I’ve been pushing Em to just get the words out, even if they never get published, because at least you are creating. The very act of creation is the only point there should be.