Two years!
of me stressing over what to put into the subtitle
Hi friends! I’m coming on here to tell you that I’ve been writing on Substack for two years. What do I want you to do with this information? I don’t know — clap? Cheer? A jovial slap on the back? Write me a handwritten letter about how my internet writing has changed your life? Hoist me up in a chair and lift me up and down like I’m the bride at a Jewish wedding? Drown me in praise, for once? Your choice!
I’m kidding. Or am I? Can you see how I’m couching my personal milestone – committing to something for a small yet significant amount of time – in jokes because it makes me uncomfortable to sincerely celebrate myself?
I like Substack. Most of the time. I wish it were named something else. I wish there were fewer thin, classically beautiful white women succeeding on here. But I like it. I like clicking and scrolling and diving deep into random ones I find. It makes me feel like when I was a teen, and I was obsessed with a fitness blogger named Peanut Butter Fingers, named that because her hot husband always caught her sticking her fingers into peanut butter jars. Oh to be so lovely and mild that that is your biggest infraction! (She’s still at it, by the way! She has three boys now, so I am basically one more boy and fifty pounds of weight loss and a move to North Carolina away from becoming her.)
Has this Substack changed my life? No. But my life has changed. I started this when I had an eleven-month-old and a new home in the suburbs, and now I have another child and a new career, and I am still feeling petulant and unwilling to admit to the fact that I am an adult.
In her memoir, Trying, Chloe Caldwell writes: “Writing publicly is so embarrassing. But someone’s gotta do it.” This is how I feel about having a Substack.
Like many personal blogs, Substacks, whatever you want to call them, this began out of a (navel-gazey? neurotic? embarrassing?) impulse to answer the question Who am I? To be more specific: Who am I, now that I have kids? Now that I live in the suburbs? Now that all of the things I defined myself by have mostly washed away?
Do I have an answer? No. Also, who cares. Life spins away, all wobbly like a dreidel. I am trying to care less about “my identity.” I sometimes get caught up on the fact that I haven’t done anything remarkable in my life, but maybe I just need to rework what I define as remarkable. I saw a video of a woman in Maine who saved up to buy a giant inflatable whale and brings it around to schools to spread marine education. The whale is huge, taking up almost half of the school gym, and you can walk inside of it. Can you imagine the magic of that, as a kid? I thought, now that’s remarkable. That is something to strive towards. Maybe not that exactly, but you get the idea. Small things are big. My boys will be gentle. That is good enough.
Will I write this for two more years? Or ten? I don’t know — having kids has taught me to stop making predictions about my future. All of the things I said I’d never do — here I am, doing them. Going forward, I will stop making proclamations. I want to let myself be moved, like a log bobbing about a stream.
For now, I’ll continue sending my little writing scraps out to float around in the ether, like moon rocks. I only have 200-odd subscribers on here, but you are a loyal bunch, and I love you a lot.
And we love you too. Congrats to two years on here, I wish it was called something else too ✌🏻