To Six Months and Many More
When I first started this newsletter, it felt absurd to ask anyone to pay for it. It's not like I have anything to say that hasn't been said a million times by a million other people, and a significant percentage of those people have said it far better. They deserve money for their words, not me. I'm flaky and inconsistent and I have commitment issues when it comes to creative projects. What if I asked people to pay and then abandoned them after a few weeks? What if I asked people to pay and then they didn't think what they got in return was worth it?
All of this is still true. The difference now, after six months, is that I'm still here, writing. I'm still showing up. I'm still committing. To the people who pay money to read this every week, to the people who don't pay but who subscribe to read the free post every month, to myself. I'm committing to myself. Whether or not I'm the best writer or have the most unique perspective, I'm a writer with a perspective, and that's significant enough to deserve the space my words take up. It's significant enough to value those words highly enough to say that they do, actually, deserve to be paid for.
There is no adequate way to express my gratitude for those who pay for this. I've tried, many times over the past half a year, and I never quite get there. Everyone who currently pays is someone who knows me, who cares about me to some degree outside of this writing venture, and probably that's why they give their $5 each month. More the person behind the words than the words themselves. That's okay. Great, even. Writing compliments are my favorite compliments, and knowing that a handful of people care enough about me to pay for my writing, even if it's more about me as a person, means everything to me. It's frustrating how difficult it is to draw in new readers when I don't have a giant social media following behind me, but I am simply unwilling to do the work to cultivate a following like that. I wouldn't like the person I would have to turn myself into in order to do it, and social media marketing is not one of my passions. Is it anyone's?
It's enough that I get a trickle into my bank account each month, enough to loosen the ever-present knot of money anxiety in my chest if I want to buy, say, a fast food meal occasionally, or a perfume, or a book. Of course I would love to make a living from writing, but that's a dream few people get to realize, especially when it's newsletter writing. Everyone I know of who makes their primary income this way had the giant social media following before they took the leap to a paid newsletter. I did it all backward, as I usually do. I had nothing to lose. Maybe I should have heeded the internet's advice and tried to build a following with a free newsletter first, but I've spent two decades of my life writing on the internet for free. And I've loved most of it, don't get me wrong, it's just not something I can or want to do indefinitely. If not now, when? If not here, where?
The other bit of common wisdom I've seen repeated countless times is that you have to find your niche, and then niche even harder to find the specific corner of the corner where you can thrive. The internet is so oversaturated with content that it's almost impossible to stand out, so this is the solution, apparently. But I can't do it. I have too many interests and passions, too many thoughts and feelings, too many things I want to share and discuss and dissect. I love an overwhelming amount of things. That's the whole point of this. Even when the world is doing its very best to destroy any spark of joy we manage to ignite, there are always reasons to keep going, and there is nothing that feels as significant to me as helping people to remember that.
But this isn't just for me. It's for you, too, and so I would love to know if the way we've been doing this so far is working for you, or if you would, in fact, prefer that I narrow the focus. Would it actually be better to figure out a specific niche for my writing here and adhere more strictly to it? I know I just said I can't do it, but I could, probably. I've done it before in other spaces. And I'm willing to grant that even the broad focus of keeping hoping machine running is often stretched to its limit by the things I post. It's a loose framework at best, more the thing that gives me an excuse to dump my thoughts somewhere each week than the thing itself. That's fine with me if it's fine with you, but if it isn't, I'm sincerely interested in hearing about it.
What I want to say is thank you for being here, reading this, paying for it if you do. Thank you for investing in me when I wasn't sure I should be invested in. I'm more sure now. This has been a very important and necessary six months for me, inside and outside of this newsletter project, and I hope it will continue alongside the rest of my life for however long people are still interested in reading it. Even now, after so much growth and change and so much work done on the ways I talk to myself, I often feel very small and scared and sad, and this is a balm for those feelings. I hope it's also that for you. I hope it's a reminder, albeit a temporary one, that things can be so good and so sweet. The world is fiery chaos all around us, people are dying, laws that enable further cruelty are being passed, the earth gets sicker and sicker, but we're still here. We have to make that matter, because it does. You matter and I matter and the seemingly insignificant moments when we read a transcendently great book or laugh ourselves to tears or hug someone we love or eat a great meal or feel the sunshine on our face matter.
I've said all of this so many times already, I know. So thank you, also, for bearing with me, and please stay and bear with me some more.
In closing, thank God for words, and thank God for love, and thank God for community, and thank God for each $5 that drops into my account month after month, and thank God August is almost over. What a suffocating time, the last gasp of summer. I hate it so much. But there are a couple of good songs about August. Would you like to hear them? There's August by Taylor Swift, from Folklore, an album that affected me in a way I never expected anything by Taylor Swift was capable of. It's sweet and tender and yearning and I love it a lot. And there's August and the acoustic version by flipturn, a song I just discovered last week and was immediately hooked by. That strange and piercing voice. Both of these are more about feelings than about the actual month, and that's fitting because everything for me is more about feelings and there's not much that's good about August as a month. Anyway, until next time, when it will be September, a very good month. Thank God for September, too.