So, that happened

Adjusting to the change of a growing audience

Hello, my friends. It’s been a week and it’s only Tuesday.

A couple days ago, Substack added me to their Discovery shortlist of recommended reads. It was the kind of thing I would usually let roll off without absorbing as if it isn’t sufficiently deserved to bask in it. Yet, I’m absorbing this one. It feels good… even if the basking feels slightly uncomfortable.

As a result of the attention though, I’ve had a little flurry of new free subscribers checking out my feed despite not knowing me.

That’s new.

I’m so used to talking to people who know some portion of me from elsewhere; it is new and different to now know I am being read by people who know me only from the pieces I put before them here.

If you are one of these recent joins, welcome. And thank you. I am thankful you are here.

I offer no guarantees on quality. However, I promise to post only things I give a shit about.

And I promise to care deeply about how well I’ve written about them.

I would promise to deliver only great pieces if I could but that isn’t one I can fulfill.

For better or worse, you are joining at only the three-month anniversary of my decision to be a writer. Or to try anyway.

I’m brand-damn new at Being A Writer.

Some days, it feels like slipping on a favorite sweatshirt and going out for a walk on a favorite beach.

Other days, it feels like exactly what it is:

An attempt to learn how to hang-glide in front of an audience only after having already jumped off the cliff.

By way of intro if you know nothing of me, the important bits:

1) I’m a single father to a teen son. I love that role and that kid with the sum total of my being. Being a father to my son is my favorite thing. It will always be my favorite thing. I have never loved anything more.

2) I’ve been through an un-small amount of shit over the past decade. My life as I knew it burned down and left in its place were both costly losses I may never dig out from and a sense of clear-eyed peace about what matters to me and doesn’t.

I have boundless empathy for people who are struggling, disadvantaged, marginalized, hurt, recovering, or just trying to survive.

I often vomit up personal things. The tough ones are often my way of shining a flashlight for people who feel alone in the darkness of a private struggle or hardship.

Hard times and hard things are isolating. They close windows and pull down shades and seal the house to visitors. They leave people feeling as if all the world is continuing apace while they alone are weighed down.

I think we talk too little about the way it feels when life is hard.

And I think we talk even less about the time afterwards when the storm has passed but the scars it left have not.

All the world expects us to be good as new because we survived but people don’t so much get over hard, terrible things as much as they get through them... and then come out changed in ways both visible and not.

That destruction is not without its silver linings though. We come out stronger in the broken places. Maybe not immediately. Maybe not even in ways we know or see. But we do.

For me, a decade of that alchemy through fire left me pretty happy with the person I am no matter how flawed or failing. The fire did nothing to make me perfect but it made me pretty damn okay with being imperfect.

These days, I am pretty unafraid of being judged or thought less of for having let others read my diary.

I’m the one leaving it out on the table open to today’s entry.

And here we are.

Ninety days into my decision to be a Writer.

You are along for a ride that may well end in a ditch but what if it doesn’t?

How crazy would it be if this little very public swing for the fences was the start of something?

One outcome of my past decade is that I truly rejoice in others’ joys.

How wild would it be if you were here from the start and riding along with me at what turns out to be mine?

I can’t promise but I can hope.

Thanks for climbing in. It’s going to be a trip.

Let’s see where it goes.

p.s. I just got these corny reading glasses with headlights built in. They don’t light up a whole room but they’re enough to not be totally in the dark. There’s a metaphor in there. So I made them the cover shot for this post. Plus, they make me laugh and I love them.