There’s a kind of tired that doesn’t come from working too much. It comes from turning everything into content. You have a thought while you’re deadheading the dahlias, the kind that surprises you and feels a little too true to say out loud, and by the time it reaches anyone it’s been trimmed and captioned and sanded down to the safe version.
If you’ve ever written something honest and then edited it until it couldn’t embarrass you, you know the tired I mean. It’s the tired of being a little bit “on” all the time, even in your own head.
For a long time I thought that was the price of doing this work. I’ve spent more than a decade learning how to make the work land, I’m good at it, and I’m not sorry about it, but somewhere in there I stopped having thoughts that weren’t auditioning for something.
Then I found a place online where I don’t have to do that.
What I put down when I started writing on Substack
The first thing I noticed wasn’t what I gained. It was what I put down. I stopped running every paragraph through the little internal focus group that asks whether it’ll perform, I stopped writing toward a metric, and I started publishing the thought I’d normally sit on, still untidy, before I’ve made it presentable.
I joke that Substack is where everyone who’s been to therapy went. It’s a kinder room. People read to the end before they answer, and they answer what you said instead of the worst possible version of what you said. It’s the opposite of soundbite culture, where the reward goes to whoever can flatten a complicated thing into eleven confident words. Over there, the complicated thing gets to stay complicated. Nobody’s clipping you.
That’s the draw for me. Not another platform to conquer, not a new algorithm to crack, just a room where the lights are lower and I’m not performing. I have an idea in the morning and publish it that afternoon, on nobody’s schedule but mine, without a single conversation about whether it fits the content pillars.
Why the unpolished pieces are the ones that travel
The part I didn’t see coming is that the pieces I was almost too nervous to send, the ones I never improved into submission, are the ones that find people. The safe version never does.
I wrote one over there called where all the famous women went that I would never have posted anywhere else, because it doesn’t resolve and it isn’t useful and I didn’t know what I thought until the last paragraph. Same with the untangling. Neither came from strategy. They came from taking off the costume, and they’re the truest work I’ve made in years.
The parts I kept sanding off were exactly what people were reaching for.
Why creators are moving to Substack for an owned audience
Creators are writing on Substack because it removes the layer between them and their readers. That’s the short answer, and I’m not the only one who went looking for a quieter room.
Close to 100,000 publications now make money on Substack, roughly double the year before, and there are tens of millions of active subscriptions across the platform, with several million people paying to read the writers they trust. That kind of jump doesn’t happen because of a fad. It happens because something structural is different.
On social media, there’s always a feed between you and the person on the other end of the screen, deciding who sees what, when, and how often. On Substack, that layer is gone. You own your email list, your words, and when you write something it goes to the people who asked for it without an algorithm casting a vote. If you’ve spent years building an audience you can’t take with you, that’s not a small thing. That’s the game changing shape.
Ownership is the part everyone writes about. The part I keep thinking about is who the work is for. The comparison I keep landing on is crowdfunding your creativity: instead of making something a brand will sponsor, or making something a platform will reward, you make the work and the people who want it fund it directly, which means the only people you answer to are the ones already reading what you write.
The founders and creators I know who’ve moved describe it as the most alive they’ve felt making anything in a decade. The money mostly isn’t better yet. What’s different is that they’re finally creating with a person in mind instead of a partnership deck, and building something with your audience feels nothing like selling at them.
How Substack works, from someone who just uses it
The simplest way I can explain it: Substack is a blog and an email list living in the same place, and you don’t have to run either one.
I’m no expert on this platform and I’m not the person to teach it to you. I’ve been in it long enough to understand the mechanics, though, and the mechanics explain the migration better than any think piece does.
You write a post. It lands in the inbox of everyone who subscribed, the way an email does, and it also lives on a page anyone can find and read, the way a blog post does. That’s the product. Two of my jobs from the last ten years collapsed into one text box. One login, no email service provider, no separate website, and the old question, is this a newsletter or an essay, just dissolved, because it’s both now, every time.
The subscriber list is yours, and if you ever want to leave, you export it and walk out with every name, which is not how followers work anywhere else. There’s no feed deciding whether today is your day. Discovery happens sideways instead, mostly through writers recommending each other and through Notes, which is the closest thing to a feed on there and still doesn’t stand between you and the people who already said yes to you. And readers can pay you directly for your writing, which is where those 100,000 publications come from.
That’s the architecture. It’s almost boring. And boring is the point, because it means the only variable left is whether the writing is any good, which is a scary and clarifying place to build from.
Do you have to make money on Substack?
No. There’s no paid tier on mine and there isn’t going to be one.
Substack is a creative outlet for me, a place to document what this season is like while I’m still standing in the middle of it, and the reason it works is that nothing depends on it. If it had to earn, I’d start optimizing it, and then I’d have built the same room I was trying to leave.
So if you’re eyeing this and doing the math on whether it could be a revenue stream, that’s a fine question and plenty of people have answered it well. It just isn’t the reason I’d tell you to go. You’re allowed to have a place that isn’t a business. Most of the people earning a living over there started because they wanted somewhere to think.
You don’t have to leave social media to write on Substack
I haven’t, and I don’t intend to. The internet loves a clean defection story and I don’t have one for you, I’m still on Instagram, still writing here on the blog the way I have for years, including this one. The front porch and the kitchen table are both mine and I’m not giving up either one.
If the tired you’re carrying is about your business rather than your writing, if what’s worn out is the part of you that has to keep feeding the feed to keep the lights on, my friend Kate made a free training called How to Make Daily Sales Without Social Media that I keep sending people. It’s not a pitch for quitting anything, just the practical version of what I’m circling here, building in the places that keep working for you after you close the laptop, so the feed becomes one room in your house instead of the whole house.
But if the tired is about the writing, that’s a different fix. Substack feels deeper than the doom scroll, and a lot of us are worn out in a way a better hook isn’t going to solve. So if you’ve felt a tug lately, toward writing more than a caption, toward saying what needs a few paragraphs to get where it’s going, toward the part of your thinking that a strong first line can’t hold, I’d follow that tug. Nobody has to burn anything down. There’s just a room you haven’t walked into yet, and it might be the one where you get to exhale.
And if you’re not ready for a new room, my emails are still where I show up most weeks, and they’re the closest thing I’ve got to this.
My Substack is the room where I’m not performing
So consider this an open door. My Substack is where the thinking stays untidy. It’s where I put the essays I can’t defend, the ones about what happens to women when they get quiet, and what I’m learning on this land, and the things I’m still inside of instead of already past. There are no graphics, no hook formula, nothing edited to death.
You don’t have to sign up for anything to see whether it’s your kind of room. Go read where all the famous women went first. If you get to the end and something in you loosens, subscribe here and I’ll meet you there with the version of me that isn’t performing.
Peace doesn’t broadcast. The quiet rooms don’t announce themselves, so you have to go find them. I’ll leave the door open.
You’re my kind of reader if you made it all the way down here.
If it’s the writing that’s tugging at you, come find me on Substack, where none of this is optimized and that’s the point.
If it’s your business that’s worn out, the part that has to keep feeding the feed to keep the lights on, my friend Kate made a free training on how to make daily sales without social media. It’s the practical version of everything I’m circling. Watch it here.
And if you’re not ready for either of those yet, my weekly emails are where I show up most. Quieter than the feed, and a little more honest. I’d love to drop into your inbox weekly!
