One full year later
This was probably obvious to you before it was to me.
A year ago, I hit publish on my first Substack piece. Rereading that essay now makes me chuckle—the kind of laugh that you laugh when you know someone just needs to figure it out for themselves. It’s so clear to me now, a full calendar year later, what I could not see and could not say then. It’s how perspective works, I suppose. It can only be illuminated by time. There’s no speeding up the process.
Despite my early protests, I can now acknowledge that this was created as a space to allow myself to be a writer. (Did everyone else know this before I did?)
When I look back, I have always been writing in some capacity, have always been a writer. A teenager in the early aughts, I cycled through the online journal platforms: LiveJournal, Xanga, Tumblr, Blogspot. There were the essays I cranked out at midnight the night before due with a little too much ease and not nearly enough natural consequences to break me of the bad habit. Once, with the boldness only allotted to 16-year-olds with little understanding of the ask nor the undertaking, I convinced one of my favorite writers to mentor me in a yearlong school project about memoir writing. I had a brief foray as a music blogger that started (and ended) my freshman year of college during SXSW. I slid into the DMs of an editor for Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls at the Party and wrote a brief series of personal essays for them. There’s a reason why, year after year, I seek out writing classes and communities and lectures, why I consume others’ writing with a voracity that can’t seem to be sated.
And, yet, even in writing all of that out, it’s easy to get stuck in the qualifiers I want to give—I circle back tirelessly to the question of what truly makes someone a writer. The argument is old and worn. Predictable. I never win it. At some point, we must step away from those arguments where the intention is to win rather than to be heard or understood.
I want to thank you—everyone who has subscribed and read and shared my pieces—for giving me a space to call myself a writer, a little corner of the world where it feels a bit less intimidating to step into that. Thank you for celebrating this with me. There is no greater joy than when I get an email or a comment or a message telling me that my words resonated in some way with you. It’s what it has always been about for me—the words, how they bind us all together, how they make meaning of an otherwise messy and complicated existence.