Hey, my friends!
Happy Sunday, Happy New Year, Happy Black History Month… Happy first week of what I consider the REAL pre-game to the new year, because January is usually the month where whatever followed you in December gets properly looked at, and there is no better month to reside in such painful stretching than the longest month in the damn calendar year. Talk about a drag—
It’s been a hot minute, huh? 2 months to be exact. December 4th marked the last time I graced your Substack feed, and… honestly? I’m so glad I did. Good lord, I needed to be away from everyone, shit. Long gone are the days where I force myself to feel guilty for stepping back when I know it’s time to be hidden; I trust what I need the moment that wind I constantly tell you guys about blows past me and leaves a whisper of instruction behind.
In the time that I’ve been gone, I went home to Brooklyn, NY for the holidays and spent so much of it with family. It felt like the mission for this visit was to be engulfed in reminders of who I am and where I came from. The end of the year provided so much transformation: a new job in a writer’s room. I experienced a break-up, which I’ll talk about eventually, and it has created space for me to redefine what love not only is but how it moves. How it transforms. I changed my hair; I’m a loc’ed mami now, which is another thing I’ll address later on. But most importantly, I am my parents’ child.
Being back home and seeing my Dad fulfill a dream of his that he’s wanted for over 20 years finally come to light, I am so honored to be born into a family that imagines and executes. That thinks about the bigger picture. I am blessed to be raised by parents who tell me I can be anything and mean that shit. It wasn’t to soothe my ego; they made damn SURE their coming to America was so that we can have that choice. And there is not a day that goes by when my parents don’t remind me how proud they are.
We forget the stakes of our purpose, even the things that had to happen before us and through other people’s lives that make what WE have to do, happen. And so, going back home and shedding at the same time as I received was a wonderful reminder of this life we can’t always explain but we must submit to.
And so, all that? I didn’t care to have an audience for it. So I stayed away from you guys, just to feel it. Let it simmer.
But, I also stayed back for the same reasons that have sparked the discourse that’s currently happening right now: this app is no longer what it was when I got here a few years ago. It’s not even what it was when I became more active during the summer of 2023. And in a matter of months, we have borne witness to the rapid changes, from the language of constant promotion to the obsession with wanting instant results, bypassing what it means to just… enjoy a thing. And it’s kind of gross, but not surprising.
The aftereffects of Elon’s takeover of Twitter (I’m never calling it ‘X’, The fuck is that?) drastically made the app a place of recklessness where everyone is raging and the algorithm pushes you into further hysteria. The commodification of Instagram made it the platform for redefining beauty standards and popularity through photo and video sharing, where brands tapped in and turned us into celebrities. Then, TikTok practically became YouTube University but short form and led by Gen Z-ers, crushing the competition, which forced the other platforms to try and copy + paste.
Guys. We are in an era where the pockets of intimacy we could build online are no longer available because there is too much noise and a heavy obsession with popularity and financial gain to keep an online community safe and sound.
Before learning about Substack, I was done with being in the middle of the crossfire where these social media platforms didn’t care about nurturing our right to express ourselves, they wanted in on how much money they could make off us doing so. Twitter, which I grew up using the most because of my love for words and conversation, was ruined. And the thoughts that I had, I no longer wanted to explore there. I wanted the old feeling of blogging back; longform exploration of my intrigues and questions without the (once enjoyable) feel of a reactionary audience.
No place on the internet felt like it could provide that until two favorites I followed on Twitter introduced me to their newsletters on Substack:
“Ask Polly” by writer Heather Havrilesky is an advice column where people would write to her with deep-seated life crises she always had the perfect, most wonderfully drawn-out answers for. I mean, long and thorough. Spunky and exuberant. She cared with every response she gave, and I could tell because of how detailed she was in the response and how often she didn’t post (sis has a whole writing career and a family, I get it). I would read every. single. word, no matter how long, because I respected her mind and so did her audience. She’s brilliant and passionate, much like myself, I felt given a certain permission to be as full with my thoughts as I’d like because of her.
“Something I Saw,” by art curator/writer Kimberly R. Drew was another encouragement to join Substack, but for how she used it to share her love of art. Her posts would simply be a photo of a singular art piece she encountered and felt like sharing, the casket info of the artist/date of the piece’s conception, and that’s it. I’m a lover of art, and I appreciated being sent a piece to look at for myself, almost daily. It showed me that newsletters can be any way we want it to be, even just a picture of a thing and a blurb. It also reminded me to never be afraid of creating from a place of loving a thing. Let it be a little odd. And it’s because of her, I love to feature art in my posts.
When I finally started writing, I loved the silence of no feedback. I loved reading what stew I was brewing at the time, being in place of my reader the moment my work popped up in my own inbox. It felt so… sweet. And it encouraged me to keep going, to keep dropping letters. It took a minute for me to share my newsletter, but when I finally did, I got even more excited knowing I was sending a nugget of myself directly to my reader, instead of within the frenzy of a noisy, tumultuous app.
And when I wasn’t writing, I was reading! So much reading, ugh. I subscribed to thinkers! Artists. Lovers. People who pondered the world and had remarkable things to say. Who felt delighted to discuss the adventures they went on during the week, and it all felt intimate. Every Sunday, I reserved time outside my favorite coffee shop to enjoy the emails of people just like and unlike me expressing themselves in the different ways they felt. Intimate. Intimate…
…I keep coming back to that word, intimate. Because, the truth is, something has severed that intimacy and now, we have to work EXTRA hard to create/maintain it. That’s the frustration that’s showing itself here and now. There’s a force of business that has interrupted the flow.
People were writing on here, but there wasn’t a heavy influx of writers desperate to make money off of this. But most importantly, there weren’t a bunch of people who suddenly WANTED to be writers just for the sake of making money off of this.
So many of us were on here to breeeeeathe. To find ourselves in quieter corners, away from the hoopla. You didn’t have to be good, you just came for something… else. Whether you were a professional writer or not, you were forming a domain that felt careful. Fun. Unfiltered and explorative. So what do we do now that it’s not the same?
In my break offline, and in my seeing the upheaval and navigating my own feelings around the topic when I returned…
I came to accept a few truths we may ALL need to acknowledge:
Substack is no longer about newsletters. It’s become a social media app. The moment they introduced a ‘Notes’ and ‘Chat’ section, it enforced something else that encourages you to stay on it longer. To engage with it more. To “create” a “community.” And that’s the trick of the trade: engagement. That is how an app thrives. And I say that because I have found myself reading a lot of my favorites on the app itself, and not from my e-mail. And I hate that. With that, I’m forced to utilize the convenience the app brings and almost, in some ways, forego the ‘newsletter experience.’ Now, there is a heavy feed/timeline filled with ‘posts’ (no longer newsletters, really), notes, chats, and etc. I now have to scroll. I WAS TRYING TO GET AWAY FROM THE SCROLL, DAMMIT.
But this all means that the dysfunction around our relationship with social media has shifted us so deep, that there is no going back. Not for a long time. Maybe not ever. It has redefined the market as a whole, there is no way it will ever be what we grew up using it as. So it’s almost delusional of us to expect any platform to stay the way it is and to not try and boost profit, even in how we use it.
Social media is overwhelming because of the above. And if you can’t handle the overwhelm (which is understandable), you must must must begin to develop a full and luscious life you are happy to get back to whenever being online feels dreadful.
It is our jobs, as consumers and creators, to see things (the market + our outlets of expression) for what they are, and move accordingly towards what we need. Because that allows you to never attach to things that were fickle to begin with. These entities are too big and they are moving too fast for our complaints to matter the way we want them to. They are in a battle of sustenance with each other, and will constantly forget that what sustains them are their users. Why? Because we will get in line. Come hell or high water, we will use these apps. No matter how much we hate the changes, we adjust. And then—
We will argue about it. We will question ourselves. We will feel icky for staying. We will make excuses for why we need them. Et cetera, et cetera.
And, strangely enough, all of the above is valid.
So, what do we do?
We use them for what we need them for, knowing it will never be perfect. It’s not made to. It doesn’t care enough about us, so we can’t care too much about them. They give us platforms and we use those platforms to communicate/share. Whether that be for profit and/or for shits + giggles. So, if you want to use them for business, then fuck it. Use them for business. If you wanna use them for self-expression, then fine! Use them for self-expression.
Regardless, show up for what you want out of it.
I see so many of us (and I used to be the same) running in a spiral of figuring out what we want. And at the end of the day, it sounds like we want to create using these apps, but we just need boundaries in navigating them. And baby, that’s life! Our addiction to social media is our greatest defeat, not so much that we use them, especially if it DOES help us get our creative rocks off. That’s healthy. Expression is healthy.
What isn’t healthy is the desperation to make money, be noticed, and grow anxious to the point of paralysis because you don’t think your content is good enough. All of that is a distraction.
I don’t care for the Substack app, so some boundaries I’ll enforce is to stop using it, lol. I’ll pop in every now and then, but I do not want another place where I have to scroll. I’ll also treat my newsletter the way it’s meant to be treated, and post every week. But when I truly do not feel called to post, I will not. I would love to make money off my newsletter, but I don’t need to look over someone else’s shoulder to figure out how when I know the kind of things I talk about (and want to branch deeper into talking about), people would be happy to support because they love the work, not because some site told me to pimp myself. And from now on, I will read my favorite writers from my e-mails. Like a newsletter is meant to be read.
All we have to do is establish boundaries.
I love writing here. I do. I love sharing myself with you guys. And the more I choose to live, the more I want to discuss! I have so much I want to talk aboooout. Ugh. And I love that you guys enjoy what I have to say. THANK YOU, truly. Returning after the hiatus has needed to feel good, which is why I took that break. So as annoying as Substack has become, I’m gonna use it how I see fit and throw the rest of what it’s trying to push on me away.
Because I do shit how I wanna do shit.
…Shit.
So, know what you want so you can do what you want, too.
Till next time, my friends!
Love, Cyn
The art featured in this post is by Palestinian artist, Mahdi Baraghithi (b. 1991), whose work came across my timeline and I instantly felt drawn to it. A scholar in the arts, he holds degrees in visual arts and has shown work in exhibitions in France, Palestine, Lebanon and Italy.
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