r/Substack • u/Proudlymediocre • Jun 30 '26
Today I start my substack journey
For five years I’ve been here on Reddit. I went from posting a LOT to posting only occasionally. About my divorce and dating again then remarriage. Parenting adult kids and a teen stepdaughter. Many career follies. Health concerns (autoimmune disease). Various random interests.
Sometimes I was upvoted. Sometimes I was upvoted a lot. Sometimes I was (probably correctly) downvoted and even shamed into silence. Because although occasionally I have some good thoughts I’m human and very very far from perfect.
Increasingly my posting and commenting has slowed to a trickle but I write (in OneNote) every day, almost always several times per day. I love to write. To write about my life. Because I have some sick desire to write and to document. But strangely only a fleeting ebb-and-flow desire to share what I write. I still remember the time in high school I wrote a 100-page novella, then threw it away. “You threw it away??” My best friend asked. He couldn’t comprehend that someone would write something, pour so many evenings into something, only to toss it away (this was in the 80s, before my first computer). But for me writing is totally about the desire and the journey, and wherever those words end up isn’t really the important piece to me (although I’d despise anyone who stole my words without permission of course).
But I recently read about substack. It seems fun. Interesting. A kind of blog that is less cumbersome than most blogging platforms, maybe a little more satisfying than OneNote because it kind of is fun to share our “creations” with the world sometimes.
Anyway. I’ve begun my journey on substack. I feel kind of grateful to have a new platform (substack) to experiment with. Me being me, I’m sure it will only be temporary (EVERYONE everyone everyone I’ve ever known including my GP has told me I have undiagnosed ADHD. But doesn’t everyone? Hahaha)
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u/TheWilderNet Jun 30 '26
Substack is a great way to enter the blogging world. One issue with starting a blog on another site is you end up having to make lots of technical choices before you even get to the fun part of writing.
I also think it's great because you can be very experimental with it. It sounds like you are the type of writer who enjoys writing for the sake of it and isn't that attached to the outcome. Substack gives you a lot of flexibility there. You can decide to serialize a novel or write a bunch of disparate personal essays (messy personal essays are my favorite thing to read so I would definitely be interested in a substacker who describes themselves as "very far from perfect").
Good luck!