Why I Unsubscribed to 300+ Substack Publications This Week: A Brutally Honest Essay From The Heart

What the heck am I really doing on this platform anyway? What do I want to be when I grow up? The messy truth of myriad answers that are hard to find when you're not able to hear your own heartbeat ..

The creative process is messy. The process of figuring out a creative business that keeps you thriving holistically is messy. The weird, sometimes uncomfortable thing about creating on the Internet is that everyone can see this mess as it unfolds. When we read about people’s creative careers, it all looks linear because it’s told as a story in retrospect. Even the tangents have a throughline. But we live our lives in forward, not reverse, and although I try to consistently imagine that each piece I create is part of a large body of work that will somehow make sense in posthumous retrospective, it’s challenging sometimes to feel like I’m showing my messy insides to everyone all of the time.

I feel like I’ve made a big mess of my Substack and wonder sometimes why anyone is here reading it at all. I hate writing that down. I want to present a picture of composed, intentional, organized creativity that emerges from mostly good self-esteem and assuredness in what I’m doing and why. I want to show how I am gentle with myself as an example to others who I want to be gentle with themselves. I want to have just enough mess in my creative exposure … cute, charming mess that’s easily digestible. Which, I suppose, is also true of how I sometimes present my mental health as well, but let’s hold off on that for another day.

I launched here on Substack in May of last year. I brought over my Patreon newsletter subscribers (and honestly I’m not sure if any of them have actually stayed save two that I am close friends with IRL). It was an extension of a year-long plan I’d been calling “The Six Figure Artist’s Dream,” which I had also launched across social media and as a GoFundMe. It’s basically the idea about the 1000 true fans - if 1000 people would support me annually at $100 per year then I could do the work I believe I’m meant to do without constantly having to scramble for gigs, jobs, grants, loans, submission acceptances. I still believe in this model. I’m not sure if I know how to make it work.

I have had many successes here on Substack in this short time, either objectively through the eyes of others or things that are true markers of what success means to me. These include:

• A virtual book tour that spread the word about my book and my Substack while introducing me to a whole lot of great people here in this community

• A small but active daily-ish Chat thread where I share what’s true for me and people can share their truths and it feels really rich and connected

• Developing a really solid body of work here on a unique topic: the complex relationship between art and mental health including the shadow side of it that is often underdiscussed

• That one includes interviewing a whole lot of amazing creatives here (and also some off the platform) in a variety of formats including launching Visual Response Interviews which I love, love, love

• Generally, the whole community aspect here … I have made friends.

• By the numbers: over 1000 subscribers including currently 43 paid subscribers, about half of which are annual subscribers

But, I’ve also had my missteps along the way. I’m constantly throwing spaghetti at our virtual wall here, trying to make this whole thing work. Some things I tried that didn’t work at all:

• A paid subscriber only chat where people could drop a link to their latest writing and we would all support one another (Instagram pod style)

• A writer’s digest for paid subscribers that ended up offending someone who felt misled at being included in something they were asked to pay for; while I didn’t quite see it that way, it led to the decision to quickly end that

• A paywall that put “food for thought” questions, summaries and guided journaling beneath the paywall at the end of each article; Paywalling the archive

• I spent a ridiculous amount of time on a Choose Your Own Create Me Free adventure post that was ignored by most people (and in retrospect may have been confusing or hard to do on the app)

• Perhaps this idea to use Milestones for Paywalls … I still like some variation on this idea but it landed to a quiet thud and I’m not sure what that means. I’m sitting with this one.

In fact, I’m sitting with everything right now. Which brings me to what I came here to write about initially … why I unsubscribed to over 300 other Substackers today. Yes, I was subscribed to more than 300 - over 400 actually I think - and yes, for a long time, I was actually reading most of what everyone was writing. And it gave me great joy.

Honestly, my dream job right now would be to read and write full time on Substack. I loved doing my Weekly Friday digests where I bring together a variety of voices from around Substack through my specific lens of where art meets mental health and try to connect the community and highlight amazing writers and make it all more than the sum of its parts. I love Notes, chats, commenting, conversations. In fact, full disclosure, I sent an email to Substack at some point letting them know I’d love for them to give me a job doing this … no response. If I could spend full time doing this, I would. And for months and months, I did, self-funded (and now in debt as a result). But, as much as I love and appreciate the 20-something annual subscribers who believe enough to invest in this, it’s not enough to support the work full-time (hence perhaps the milestone approach?)

So, over time, I had subscribed to hundreds of other Substacks. I’ll subscribe to almost anyone that catches my interest, a magpie drawn to the glitter of words. But loosely, the subscriptions fell into the following categories:

• Anyone writing about art or mental health

• Anyone writing about writing

• People who had subscribed to me and those they recommended

• Local Substack writers in the Bay Area

• People writing in the Italian language, some in Spanish, so I could practice (which I’ve kept because I actually love this!!!!)

I feel overwhelmed and lost here, and I’ve felt that way for months. And I realize that a lot of that is because I got desperate when I began to understand that I wasn’t making enough money here to support the time spent here, so I started trying to do ALL THE THINGS to make more money here. And I worry that it all looks so dang messy as I keep tweaking and making changes and saying different things. I want to have a whole plan figured out, launch with the plan, have the plan work and be something everyone loves. That’s not how creative mess actually works, at least mine doesn’t.

And what’s happened is that I’m not able to hear my own authentic heartbeat beneath all the layers of what everyone else is doing here or saying we should do here or saying in a business or marketing class I’ve taken or …. I can’t hear myself. And maybe I’m scared to hear myself. Maybe I’m afraid that if I reel it all the way back and do 100% what feels absolutely right for my heart and soul without paying any attention to what gets people to hit that “buy” button then I’ll discover that there’s nothing here of value to anyone.

But you know what? I have to find out. Because I believe wholeheartedly in following your heart. And I’m so tired of doing things the way that all the classes and books and businesses and everyone everywhere has said to do them.

In order to hear my own heart, I have to take a step back from taking in everyone else’s words, even the words that inspire me so much. I have to unsubscribe from the writers here who write about writing and about writing on Substack and about publishing. I have to unsubscribe from other people writing about art and mental health while I pause and find out what more I want to say about it. I have to unsubscribe from local writers that I really only subscribed to for “networking” and ditto anyone else that I somehow thought being connected to could help boost me up here. I am embarrassed to admit I ever made decisions based on that because I didn’t do it consciously. I didn’t sit down strategically and say, “I want to make money here and by following/promoting/collaborating with/connecting to these people, I have a better chance of that.” It just happened, slowly, insidiously perhaps, unintentionally. It happened with good intentions because I do believe in building community, rising tides lift all boats, etc. I do believe that the best experiences I’ve ever had, online and off, have come from throwing myself into community, being of service where I can, and seeing what emerges. It was all well-intentioned. It just got messy.

So, I unsubscribed from almost everyone today. Surely, I’ll subscribe back to some. But I couldn’t even remember why I truly, truly was subscribed to people. At a glance, they’re all great writers and that was why. But it was murkier than that. Even in unsubscribing, I reckoned with some hard pulls … I don’t want to unsubscribe from that person because they have been an amazing supporter/online friend and I don’t want to hurt their feelings … I don’t want to unsubscribe to that person because they have shown interest in collaborating with me and if I do that then they might not want to … blah blah noise that makes it hard to hear the inner voice.

I don’t know what all this means. If I’m really honest, I have this secret inner hope that every single free subscriber will read this and go, “wait, I want to support you being fully authentically you” and will become an annual subscriber and it’ll support the work for at least another year and I’ll be able to spend full time continuing to figure it all out in community. But ultimately, whatever happens financially, I have to keep looking at what feeds my heart and soul, what I am meant to be doing at the deepest level … I need to be able to hear not just my own heartbeat but what is whispered in the silences between those heartbeats.

A reminder: