Notes on My Dissatisfactions with the Substack-Shape & Also a lot of Life-Shapes
Something about the way I write on substack is feeling increasingly limiting.
There was a version of this on twitter, back in the day — I noticed that certain thoughts didn’t feel like they fit in the medium. And then my thoughts and patterns started to bend or tend towards things that could be expressed and appreciated in that format.
My brain got more tweet-shaped.
The twitter-addiction dropped away last autumn, and now, my brain hasn’t quite gotten more substack-shaped, but my sense of what meets the criteria to share with the world has taken on a substack-shape bias. Which is feeling a lil bloated and stagnant and icky.
And of course, there are incentives, then and now, to stay on the public forum, the place where my work can be seen, where it plugs neatly into the gears of the attention economy where my money comes from.
Oh, this is hilarious actually — I was about to put a jokey call to action in parentheses there, “check out my course!” or “come work 1:1 with me!” or something, to emphasize the point (and of course to pay rent)… but uh
I now notice that I don’t actually have ways to make money right now. Which is hilarious to me.
I took down my courses, no new purchases on those
I’ve paused (or stopped?) my paid 1:1 work — I’m only working with people and processes that feel like I want to work with out of integrity and eros; and the recompense is an open question of mutual care, whether that’s money or housing or a general floating sense that we’ll take care of each other as we go, in whatever ways we’re able.
Oh I do have paid subscriptions on substack. That appears to be my only actual thing I can point people toward right now, to support my work financially. Oh and the gift link on my site. Or generally asking around for grants. But that’s it.
I find this interesting, that I seem to be systematically stripping away all my existing financial avenues, and that I didn’t fully notice until now. And that my way of noticing is by writing a rant on substack about feeling dissatisfied with substack, which is apparently my only currently open financial channel.
…This amuses me greatly, somehow.
Okay, so maybe I’ve been using the “it’s good to stay on substack because attention economy” thing as an excuse. Or it’s just a sticky habitual thought I hadn’t had the chance to unstick until now.
Either way. Hm.
Over the years, there were a lot of things I wanted to write or express — but when I felt into a tweet, the thing didn’t belong there.
And now when that happens, and I feel into substack, it feels like my brain tries to bend them into a piece about it — or an essay or something.
There’s a specific shape to it. Like I have to make sure it has a point, that it’s something interesting and actionable and that takes ~5-12 minutes to read.
Which is very much self-imposed, I realize. But something about the format I’ve fallen into here does this to me.
For example, a thing that’s been awake for me lately,
The whole “inner child” thing gets really confused and messed up sometimes. The failure modes, oh god the failure modes.
Jung wrote something about how the inner child that comes from your personal history isn’t the one that’s needed — only the inner child that springs forth from the mature adult is actually helpful.
My friend Rosa says something similar sometimes, about how there’s an inner child who has needs and needs and needs, and just wants comfort and softness. And that inner child actually just needs to let go; its cup will never be filled, and catering to it doesn’t help. But there’s an inner child, or childlikeness, that can come out of an adult developing into wholeness, and that’s the inner child that needs to be contacted and brought out. (I’m definitely bending what Rosa said towards my own way of understanding it, she’d explain her own stance better, feels like I’m missing something she’d emphasize.)
I’ve been feeling something there about Peter Pan and Krishna.
Like, Peter Pan is the child who never grew up, just got stuck. He’s very childish and very lost — hell, he literally leads The Lost Boys.
Krishna, on the other hand, is the childlike nature that emerges from wholeness, from the godhead. There’s innocence and playfulness there — but without the pathology and fragmentedness that “inner child” so often brings with it.
Uncovering the Krishna-thing in me, rather than feeding the Peter Pan-thing in me — that feels like the direction.
And it sometimes gets fuzzy which one I’m doing. And in a lot of inner child work, it feels fuzzy and conflated in me, as to which one a given teacher or modality is going after. Feels worth paying attention to.
That’s it. Fairly simple thought. Even here, I over-belabored it, I could do it much shorter. There’s not much need to bring Jung or Rosa into it — that feels like part of the substack-y, audience-seek-y urge. This whole “look, other people think this too, I have quotes to show you!” thing. It wants to prefabricate validation in me so that the energetic validation lands in you or something.
When I’ve felt the urge to share that over the past weeks, I felt the idea inflating, puffing up, squiggling its shape around in a blobby way, trying to take in other avenues, other thinkers, more steadfast conclusions… I felt it trying to become more substack-shaped, in a particular template that I seem to have taken on in my head.
And when that happened, I just got slightly exhausted and decided not to write about it at all.
I don’t wanna self-flagellate here; I’ve done a lot of work I’m proud of, I like the person I’ve become and the integrity that’s gotten me where I am. But I do want to wrangle a bit with the way that same integrity seems to be making me dissatisfied with the whole set-up I’ve been living with up until now.
This feels related: in one of my journals, I’ve been keeping a running tally of something. I might describe it as “Qualities of the World I Can’t Live in Anymore.”
Over the past couple years, everything in my life has changed, mostly by falling apart and breaking down. And things are just now starting to show signs of rebuilding… but it’s like they have to rebuild with an entirely new physics. I’ve either abdicated from or been kicked out of the standard world that my life was built on before. Just as a taster of some of the relevant pieces from that list (the whole thing would take many pages and be its own whole piece):
I’m very mold-sensitive now, and the majority of buildings in many climates have higher levels of mold than I can handle without my nervous and immune systems going into full havoc.
I’m also very sensitive to volatile organic chemicals — which makes many construction materials, cleaning products, fabrics, and fragrances challenging for me to be around.
It’s increasingly difficult for me to be in transactional connections — not just in my personal life, but also in my work. Which makes it difficult to, ya know, work with the world set up the way it is.
I can’t stop noticing ways that my choices and relationships get chosen or bent by fear-driven strategies. How attachment wounds get a vote on my relationships, or how scarcity puts its hand on the steering wheel when integrity is trying to go somewhere…
Also feels grating and spiky, more and more, to be involved in processes that don’t feel in integrity for me, even when they’re common practice more generally, and feel “realistically” hard to avoid — things like being involved in attention capture; or taking on work that feels like I wouldn’t be doing it if there wasn’t money involved; or creating an offering that would make money, but where I’d have to bend its essence for marketing and palatability reasons.
It feels similarly bad to write essays that bend a message in the direction of being more palatable, or less weird, or more relatable. I have a feeling it’s possible to be relatable and palatable without bending the message… but I’m not there yet.
It’s confusing and unworkable to interface with the world where people treat things as separate? or something? Like how the medical system acts like the body can be cordoned off into discrete specialist domains, rather than being approached as a dynamic systemic whole.
My system has pretty fully made clear that it has little to no space for drugs, alcohol, tv shows, movies, or hyperstimuli in general.
I heard myself use the phrase “selling my time” awhile ago, and my whole body went into some kind of energetic allergic reaction. Selling my TIME???? How could I possibly do such a thing??? Feels almost violent somehow, something that only makes sense when there’s some kind of underlying hostage situation at play.
Things like this have made it harder and weirder than I would have expected to start rebuilding a life. Those are just a small smattering of the more visible ones, and already, they form the outline of a life-shape that doesn’t fit into the world as I’ve known it most of my life.
I think it will take some time to build and grow the world where my life-shape can exist or flourish. To be fair, I seem to have been working this problem over and over again for a long time, giving myself groundwork for the new physics my life is governed by:
A recent stint of working through the ways money feels to me lately,
Some writing both about and from a stance of engaged wholeness that seems like the only way I can live without stepping out of the sacredness of experience.
The outlines of what connection and relationship feel like to me when they’re nourishing (and when they’re not).
Exploring non-transactional, non-fixated ways of being where I can show up as I am, in integrity, without agendas, and trust that what needs to happen will happen.
It’s all coming through. It’s just been — well, I want to say it’s been very slow, but it may only have felt slow from the inside. Looking at it from the outside, it does seem like an astounding amount has moved in 2 years.
And where I’m at now, what seems to be moving is a lot of noticing that the way the world and I fit together right now Just Ain’t It.
My writing formats? Nope. My ways of making a living? Nope. Previous standards of home, stability, shelter? Nope. Incumbent habits on food, water, air, relationships, entertainment, and work? Nope.
Something else is going to grow in, I know it will. I can feel it already. I trust it. It’s just going to take some growing pains and some clumsiness and potentially some resource gaps. I get the image of tree roots needing to crack some concrete so they can grow right.
I just don’t get to live in the concrete world anymore, or at least not for now. Which is very inconvenient, when the whole world runs on concrete, and all the things I want to do only have playbooks for how to do them on concrete. But I think I signed up for this, this process of figuring everything out from scratch. How to both live in integrity and in a world where food, water, shelter, health, clothing, work, relationships, friendships, and stance towards reality all need to emerge from integrity, without necessarily falling into the attractor basins of incumbent templates.
And to do all this without it turning into a circus of mental gymnastics — some set of books I can write without living by them, or some talks I can give, consulting I can do without growing my own flesh into the shape of integrity first. It’s so, so, so easy to lean in that direction, to turn all of this into something to tell other people, rather than something that I can shape myself with day after day, without the validation and fanfare my cute lil mammal brain finds so yummy.
Yeah, the scarcity-fear brain is definitely kicking in again. It’s like my bank account is a physical limb I can feel withering.
Breathe through it buddy, you’ll be grand.
I’m not totally sure what style or format of writing would feel natural and well-aligned for me these days. It’s not the usual essays, it’s not this wandering notebook-style thing. It’s not tweets.
It feels like it’s not even quite non-fiction or fiction. Not quite poetry. Might not even be writing. Maybe I need to take up painting or music or something. Immersive theater pieces? Weird little short film artifacts? Month-long co-living retreats where life-as-attentive-pursuit-of-wholeness-in-expression becomes more and more total?
Or maybe just gardening. I could grow tulips. Dill. Watermelons.
Feels like I’ve got a book or two in me, but they’ll take more years to compost and become fertile. And they might not look like books by then. I maybe just have to feel them as book-shapes for now, so I can feel them at all.
This is clarifying, actually. All these attempts to guess at a structure or some recognizable shape that will emerge — they’re all driven by impatience, fear, scarcity. My job for now is to get as close to the heart of experience as I can — to do the mystic-y shaman-y soul-y thing of dissolving whatever’s between me and Essence, and marinating there — and to stay deeply sensitized to what wants to happen from there. And trust that what needs to happen will happen.
“God’s will is done, and we are the ones who must do it.”
At this exact moment, that means puzzling over whether I hit publish on this or not. Feels like I probably should, if only cuz it feels like showing this to other people would be a form of exposure that forces me to drop some bullshit.
There’s a really strong and gentle current moving through lately, something around rightness, naturalness, a sort of right simplicity where everything is where it needs to be, how it needs to be, as it needs to be.
But for me, getting to that rightness and naturalness is almost entirely a subtracting process. There’s not much I can add or try or effort towards to get there. The efforting mostly seems to be a process of chipping and twisting and clenching and expanding and shaking until another layer of caked-on bullshit cracks and crumbles away.
Which is how writing this has felt. Like I’m shaking and clenching and doing a lot of weird peristalsis-y, eclosion-y moves to crack off ossified matter and pump more living energy into those desiccated places.
It’s nice. Like those relaxation exercises where you clench your muscles really hard so when you let go they can relax further than usual. It’s kinda that, but emotional-energetic-existential or something.