one year of substack
(Almost) a year ago, on Nov 7, 2022, I announced my wild knowing Substack and shared my first substack post.
When I first started, my goal was to share my writing via Substack every Thursday afternoon for a year and see how I felt. I had always secretly wanted to share my writing, and I started sharing bits on Instagram in Feb 2022. A soft launch, if you will. I had to try it out to see since it had been such a big “what-if” in my life.
I told myself it would be an experiment to see if I enjoyed sharing my writing and see if I would have something to share each week (In the last year of Substack, I sent out 46 substacks. 46 out of 52 weeks. If this was a school assignment, I would get 88%, B+, I’ll take it.)
I decided to share some of the things I’ve learned in my body in the last year (I knew most of them intellectually, but that doesn’t count until I can embody them):
Creative seasons are real: There are days, weeks, or seasons when my writing flows out effortlessly (creative springs and summers), and there are seasons when it feels like I have nothing to write (creative winters). And there are times when real-life stuff happens and I simply cannot write. This has nothing to do with the actual seasons of the calendar, of course.
A lot of people have written and spoken about this. I love how Rob Bell talks about it in his podcast, The Robcast: an episode about the tomato season.Stockpile for (creative) winter: Now that my body understands that creative seasons are real, instead of fighting them, I’ve been learning (slowly) to flow with them. I can see now that the times I’ve been able to keep up with sharing my writing weekly are when I’ve prepped for my creative winters.
(Big Magic), and more are famous for writing about this.
When I have created multiple posts at a time during my creative flow seasons (creative springs & summers) and then used my creative fall seasons to organize, edit, and schedule them out, I have a healthy stockpile of posts ready to go for my winter seasons of rest when nothing is flowing. Life (the beautiful and the tragic) never stops happening and I must plan for that.
To be clear, I still write every morning regardless (eh, 87% of mornings maybe, I get a B+ on that too). Even if nothing is flowing, I still journal and write a bit to keep the juices flowing. I want to be ready, pen and paper in hand, in case inspiration or motivation strikes. Julia Cameron (The Artist’s Way),Allow, allow, allow. Allow my writing to change, allow my ideas to change: Letting myself be wrong, letting myself change my ideas, surrendering. Forcing and pushing things to be how I think I want things to be just doesn’t work for me.
What started as a substack of sharing my journal entries has turned into simply sharing my writing (because saying that I was sharing my messy journal writing felt safer than saying I was sharing my writing).
And now it’s been a place to practice finding my voice and begin to share Real Life Magic, a project that is dear to my heart.
Let’s see what this Substack does next.I have to keep sharing even if it isn’t perfect. In an ideal world, I would go back and edit each post many more times, but this is a practice of me sharing my writing, finding my voice, etc, not of being perfect.
This whole Substack experiment has allowed me to know that none of my writing is perfect, and I still share it anyway. It is a practice of feeling fear and doing it anyway.Taking a writing class for the first time was very helpful! Thanks,
!
Thank you for reading! It has been a joy to share my reading, even if no one reads it, it keeps me accountable to my writing practice.
A fun note of celebration: I just got back from Guatemala, where I led my first international yoga/ adventure retreat! It was a long-time dream of mine to host a retreat at Lake Atitlán, Guatemala and I did it! It was incredible too!
