The end of the world is as good a place as any to start something new.
F*ck it Dude, let's start a Substack.
As I sit to write this, Central Texas, where I live, is still damp from a rare and beautiful summer storm, the kind that you don’t dare hope for in our parched, oppressive summers. Last night’s storm dumped buckets of rain on the region, brought big flashes of lightning, and will surely have saved the lives of some trees, and will keep our lawns from being yellow and bleached for a few more weeks. Outside feels fresh, scrubbed and clean, and we’ll get a reprieve from relentless over-100-degree heat for a few days.
Today also happens to be a New Moon in the watery sign of Cancer. New Moons are beneficial times for fresh starts, for planting seeds, and setting intentions for new beginnings. As a Cancer moon myself, I especially welcome this lunation, as I have been feeling as parched and limp as our sad garden, not just from the onslaught of summer heat, but from the endless drain of life in the third year of a pandemic and amidst the United States’ vertiginous descent into fascism.
There is an irrepressible sense that things are dangerously unsustainable, and in need of drastic change, both inside and out.
Which is why I am so grateful for last night’s rain, and for today’s New Moon, and why I am sitting down to write this to you today.
For years now, there’s been a soft but steady whispering at my ear that writing needs to be at the center of my business, and my life. As long as I can remember, I’ve always identified as a writer, and have always had the ambition of writing books, but most of my writing over the last few years has been squeezed into the 2,200 characters of an Instagram caption, into clips and snippets for slide decks destined for my online group programs–hardly the dream of a writer’s life. This whisper has been steadily growing in volume in the last few months, building to an annoying and hard-to-ignore pitch. “It’s TIME TO WRITE,” it nags. It’s time.
This pressing sense of needing to make a change, and needing to center writing, has been co-occurring with a growing sense of unease with Instagram, the primary vehicle where I’ve been sharing my work. I hardly need to explain why social media is a soul-sucking place. Yes, it’s given me my business, most of my closest friends, and has provided connection, education, and the levity and relief of memes. But, for me personally, it’s been feeling increasingly more abusive, and less beneficial, of late.
In 2021, my IG following more than doubled, reaching over 13,000 followers by the end of the year. I have to admit I was damn proud about this, and felt buoyed by the sense that what I was doing was working: people wanted to read what I wrote, my words helped them feel seen and make more sense to themselves. I felt like I was following the rules, and being rewarded for it. And I imagined that this rapid growth would mean better things for me, and for my business. How wrong I was, how foolish.
One of my primary beefs with Instagram is the absence of consensual reciprocity in the relationship between content creator and content consumer. I’m one of the Insta OGs, joining the platform a mere two months after its inception in the fall of 2010. So I got hooked on the chronological feed: if I followed someone on Instagram, I could rely on seeing all of their content, in the order it was posted. That felt like consent-based reciprocity: someone I agreed to follow shared content, and I would see that content when I opened the app, and interact with it. In those early years, Instagram was a haven of connection and inspiration for me as an isolated new mom with undiagnosed postpartum depression. Stuck at home under a nursing baby, Instagram was a much-needed window into a wider world.
But with the advent of the algorithm, any reciprocity and consent went right out the window, which has been a point of contention for pretty much everyone on the platform for a long-ass time, but which started to really hit home for me in the last six months, when it slowly dawned on me that I wasn’t at all being rewarded for having grown such a following, but quite the opposite. It appeared that the more people followed me, the fewer people were actually seeing my posts. My relationship with Instagram started to have more and more of the echoes of my relational trauma: it doesn’t matter how good I am, how well I perform, my needs are not being met here, because this isn’t a place that’s designed to meet my needs.
Enter Substack, and the newsletter I am writing today, on this day of planting seeds under a New Moon. I’ve been slowly spending more and more time reading newsletters on Substack: the first I think was Marlee Grace’s, then came Lisa Olivera’s. I found comfort in reading longer-form writing, which reminds of the early days of the internet, of reading blogs in Google Reader (RIP.) The app is soothing, well-built, and the platform seems to genuinely support the work of writers. In the wake of the overturning of Roe v Wade last Friday, most of my online time was spent connecting with the work of writers of Substack. I like it here. It feels fresh and new in a familiar way, reminiscent of the early days of the Internet, before the algorithm ruined our collective mental health and turned us all into content-creating factories feeding the bottomless maw of the Attention Economy.
As an older millennial/baby Gen X cusp human who’s been on the Internet for 20 years (gasp), I know better than to put all of my faith in a new platform, in a new app. But I’m excited about the possibilities here. I’ve really, really enjoyed reading (and supporting) the work of writers here. I am really digging sitting here and writing this newsletter. It feels good in my body in a way that creating content for Instagram just fucking doesn’t.
So when my Chani app started dropping hints last week that this New Moon would be especially beneficial for launching new writing projects, I thought, Fuck it, Dude. Let’s do it. Let’s start a fucking Substack, flip the bird to the algorithm, and have my writing show up in inboxes and chronological feeds like it’s 2010. (Bringing big Walter Sobchak energy to this launch: The Big Lebowski remains one of my absolute favorite films.)
And so, here we are. Welcome to Resourced, the New Moon in Cancer seed I’m planting into the ground, my fuck-you to the algorithm, my answer to the loud-whisper call to center writing in my life & biz. I’m aiming to write weekly-ish posts, but this is aspirational, as I am a person who is often unwell, and who is working hard to undo the binds that the white supremacist capitalist cis-mono-hetero patriarchy has on my body, which means that I am committed to centering the needs of my body whenever and wherever I can, and sometimes that means not getting shit done that I mean/want to do. (Disappointing people over extracting from yourself is an acquired taste, one that I highly recommend.)
I am starting this newsletter as a gift to myself, as an offering on the altar of my creative dreams.
I am starting this newsletter as a gift to you, in the hopes that my words will resonate, will help you feel seen, will help you feel heard, will help you make more sense to yourself, and expand your capacity to feel your feelings and receive pleasure and joy.
As of this writing, my intention is to keep this weekly newsletter free. You can become a subscriber for $5/mo to support my work, and have access to my monthly advice podcast, Ask A Trauma Witch, the first episode of which will be released in July.
In the words of my dear friend and journaling inspiration Erin Fairchild, this is a freedom project. This is a place to center the fact that writing feels good in my body, that writing connects us to each other, and that when we feel good in our bodies and are connected to each other, we are resourced, and when we are resourced, we can become ungovernable, and together topple regimes of oppression, and co-create a world of justice and pleasure for all bodies.
So, welcome. Let us begin. Let us plant our seeds of dreams and hope into the ground, even though the earth is parched, because summer storms do come to bless us with life-saving rain. Because the Moon can always be counted on to be new again. Because the end of the world is as good a place as any to start something new.
CURRENTLY RESOURCING WITH: A weekly roundup of shit I’m enjoying.
🌈
This song by Sharon Van Etten.
🌈 This newsletter from Lisa Olivera.
🌈 Late to the party, but this book is terrific.
🌈 This conversation with adrienne maree brown was like a summer storm to my parched soul.
🌈 The Offer is the best show you’ll watch this year.
🌈 Dancing in the sprinkler in my backyard listening to this playlist.
DO COOL SHIT WITH ME:
🌈 I am teaching a workshop with Seagrape Apothecary titled Ritual for Trauma Repair on Saturday, July 17th at 12pm Pacific/2pm Central/3pm Eastern. Get more info here.
GET IN TOUCH:
🌈 Website
🌈 Email: hello@thetraumawitch.com, or reply to this email.