What should this newsletter be about?
Divination from my inbox
This morning I read my email (I know, I know, very exciting) and found three messages in a row that seemed to be pointing me toward a common theme. One, from Substack itself, talked about the importance of your voice over your topics. The second, an “Hola, Pápi” advice column, helped someone struggling with the urge to bust out of “normalcy.” And the third, and longest standing in my inbox, was Rob Breszny’s wonderful astrology newsletter, which began with a paean similar to my own recent rant about how suffering doesn't help you create art. The theme, in short: how do I make a writing space that primarily reflects me, my truth, and what I’m jazzed to talk about—and will anyone want to read it?
I’m seven months into writing here regularly, and I’ve been getting good feedback. I’ve been careful (sometimes with some brave and much-appreciated help!) to keep it focused on my own experience, particularly when talking about my work with clients. Confidentiality, anonymity, and trust are all paramount to me, especially when talking about my somatic therapy work.
There’s another thread, though, that goes through my writing life, and that thread is decidedly confessional. I am someone who has never been particularly private on the Internet. In my younger years, I found it important to share who I was and my struggles, not least because I wanted people to see that my way was an okay way to be, but also because I wanted them to see me. Anonymity for myself was easier 20 years ago than it is now, too, and so I also wasn’t risking too much. As time went on, more and more of my readers were people I knew in real life, and my sense of private/public shifted, sometimes with hard lessons.
But these days, there’s yet another layer: there’s a way in which therapists are meant to keep their own stories to themselves. And for me, that’s never felt very good or authentic.
Now in sessions with clients, absolutely. I do sometimes share, and try to do so in the way Pete Walker talks about: offering authentic emotion and relation to my own story when I feel like it will help make a healing empathic connection; holding back my own vulnerability and stories when it’s clear that sharing would only be making it all about me.
But when it comes to writing, I often walk a knife’s edge around self-disclosure. I’ve written about issues of sexuality in many places online, for example, but not so much the details of mine. I’ve told some stories of my own intergenerational trauma, but only in the most anonymized terms.
And then of course there’s fiction, that classic technique for revealing your truth while obscuring it in the reasonable doubt of invention. I would like to start serializing some of my novel work; is here also the place to do that? Or will I be getting too far outside the scope of what I’ve begun?
Back to those emails from this morning (remember those?). The first was from Substack itself, about cultivating connection with your audience. The highlighted writer was Substack food fellow Scott Hines, and he starts the essay with this great line: “There’s only one thing that people can’t get somewhere else on the internet, and that’s you.”
The essay goes on to talk about how he has trouble boiling down what his newsletter is about, and how he loves to write about a lot of different things. When he wrote a sentimental post that he previously would have written only for himself, his newsletter took off. The emotional connection to the audience—plus his joy in writing from the heart—is what made it work. “Your voice,” he says, “is your only unique product, and it’s also your greatest tool.”
I want to have that kind of confidence in my own writing. Granted, I’ve been writing online (at levels of professionalism ranging from “MFA program literary magazine” to “angsty aughties Livejournal” to “lead columnist for a questionable sex rag” to “paid travel writer”) for more than 20 years, but I still have trouble trusting “my voice” to carry.
Still. I’ve also had lots of people through the years tell me they were moved by my writing, or that it helped them, or that I was a really good writer.
There’s a danger, I think, to spreading myself too thin, and writing all the different aspects of myself in different places. It divides my attention in the insidious way the internet itself does, making it hard to be authentic in any real way. It smooths out my rough edges and deep inquiries into a shallow sine wave. And of course, Hines is right: there is really no “content” that any one of us is unique in sharing. As hard as it is to believe, I have to bring myself to the notion that it’s me my readers want.
Of course, the question of who or what exactly is “me” is something that I’ve been unpacking for years. After a year and a half of upheaval and massive relationship reconfiguration in my life, I’m about to take another big step toward finding out what’s going to make me happiest in this next phase. I’d like to write about that, too, and likely will, soon. But that brings me to the second email from this morning.
Advice columnist and self-proclaimed “Twitter-addled gay Mexican with anxiety” Pápi reminds us of another important point about identity, distraction, and reaching for newness. “It would seem that just as we are hardwired to build a ‘normal,’ so too are we hardwired to entertain the destruction of that ‘normal,’” he says to the letter-writer, who is worried that her life, contenting as it is, has become too staid. “As with any urge, the key is not to neglect it entirely, but to manage our responses. You don’t need to blow the whole thing up...You just need a pressure valve.”
Some days I feel like I’m blowing the whole thing up, but other days, I think I’ve found a more measured way of being. Writing closer to the heart, here, I think will provide some of that pressure valve—a means of expressing what’s truly important to me, in a way that hopefully helps others as well.
There’s a danger, too, though, in “letting it all hang out.” That’s true anywhere when you’re writing in public, of course, and I don’t plan on doing that, especially since the first and most cardinal rule I learned, years and years ago now, is that My Story ceases to be only mine once other actual people are involved.
But I do want to branch out here some. Serialized fiction may come later, when I have something I’m comfortable putting out. (A new reader found some old stuff in another internet locale, recently, which is also partly inspiring this post: oh look, something in me says, a random human found my fiction writing and was moved by it. Perhaps there’s something to that.)
Sooner, though, I’m probably going to be writing a little more frankly here about my own experience. I’m not here, after all, to write the textbook on complex PTSD, or to make Instagram-worthy inspirational graphics about trauma, nor even to review other people’s books on the subject, though I expect I will continue to do that, too!
What I am here for is to write about myself and my experience of the world, and that there covers an awful lot of topics. I want to keep moving on this venue, make a home on the internet that I can keep and get cozy in for a while. I had trouble keeping up with Patreon; as a blogging platform, it leaves much to be desired, and I felt constant pressure to deliver to people who were paying me monthly. Medium was okay for a while, but it too seems to have outlived its usefulness. I don’t know that Substack will remain the right platform for what I’m trying to do, but if it doesn’t, I know that it makes it relatively easy for me to move off of it and onto my own platform.
Finally, of course, there’s Breszny’s newsletter, which seems to dial in to what I’m working through nearly every week. This week, when I’m deeply contemplating secure attachment, a sense of safety and home, and the shifting place of intoxicants in my life, he writes: “More and more creative people find they do their best work when they're feeling healthy and secure. We know writers who no longer need to be drunk or in agony in order to shed the numbness of their daily routine and tap into the full powers of their imagination.”
May it be so.
For now, though, I hope you enjoy what I expect to be a closer look at who I am, what I care about, and why I write.