You might not have noticed

That I haven't written here much in the past 6 months

Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash

I started writing Soberbia on Blogger back in late December 2012 as a way to get and stay sober. I wrote for accountability. I just wanted to write about my experience so I had witnesses to my sobriety, and I did that, for 4 years I wrote regularly. I wrote a ton in 2013, a third less in 2014 and 2015, and then a third less than that in 2016. I moved my blog over to Wordpress in 2017 which I didn’t like as much and then I went back to Blogger in Feb. 2022.

Then Substack happened and I moved Soberbia over here in Oct of 2022.

In the 2+ years I’ve been here I’ve published 60 posts. In the last 6 months, none.

I wanted to love Substack. Was it just 2 years ago that Substack was this cool place for writers? When I heard about it it sounded like a writers dream. A place you could go to find new people to read, a place that wanted writers to get paid for their work that wasn’t bells and whistles social media but writing and reading! Was it really just 2 years ago?

Since joining Substack I’ve developed a love/hate relationship with my public writing- loving the writing, but not loving how it felt to publish here. It went from being a cool place to find new and interesting things to the typical homogenized trappings of every other social media site. Badges, notes, messages, blah blah blah. Engage! the platform commands. As if just writing and reading isn’t enough.

But I didn’t know what to do. How can I get my writing read? How can I connect with people who need what I needed 12 years ago when I wanted to quit drinking- to read about someone being sober? It seemed like there weren’t any good alternatives to Substack. I watched people put up paywalls, take them down. Then explain putting paywalls up again, explain taking them down again. I too was lured in to the ridiculous capitalist idea that if people value my writing they should pay me for it. (Let’s make jobs out of everything!)

In the summer of 2023 I started to question what I was doing. I often felt like I was living and writing with someone else’s brain- or that my brain was constantly under the influence of performance and algorithm (which isn’t great for writing about being sober). I felt like I was at a party I really wanted to leave, but so many other people wanted to stay so maybe I was missing something. But I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I didn’t like where I was hanging out.

That led me to quit social media on Nov. 1, 2023. At first it was uncomfortable and I checked the weather A LOT. But then, my own brain came back. My own thoughts, ideas! I lost my desire to buy $300 Babaa cardigans. My brain stopped thinking in platitudes, ads, and Insta-speak. But I didn’t leave Substack. It was looking and feeling more and more like social media, but I didn’t want to give up.

“It’s death by a thousand substacks. This is a calculated erosion of writers' brand identities and connection with their readers to build a successful social app on the back of the platform's top voices.”

The thing I loved most about Soberbia in the first few years was the writing, and the thing that surprised me was how connected I felt to the writing itself and the people who read what I wrote, who commented and conversed with me online. I feel like Substack quickly became this huge gawping monster, gobbling up everything in its path, requiring more and more of me to be here. I know I don’t have to do anything but write to be here, but I also don’t want to live in the cluttery advertisementness of it all. It’s social media not even bothering to act like something else anymore.

I know what, for me, is enough. I surrender. I’m going back to being my own host.

I’ll slowly remove all of my posts from Substack. I’ll have to copy paste each one, because Substack doesn’t allow you to export posts as a whole thing. I’m going to put them on Blogger so Soberbia can be all in one place, with the Wordpress years lost for good. (If someone knows how to get those back let me know!)

Substack makes leaving with what I own hard. They make unsubscibing from newsletters I don’t want to follow anymore hard. I don’t like that. It’s rude. It feels like mixed messaging to say “Anything you publish on Substack is yours to own” but then not let me have the posts intact.

If you like my writing and want to keep reading or stay connected, come find me at Rebelling. I’m thinking of it as part 2 of Soberbia- long term sobriety plus exploring my new diagnosis of AuDHD (Autism+ADHD). It seems fitting because I started Soberbia when I discovered my sober identity, and now at Rebelling I am discovering my neuro identity, both of which are deeply important to who I am.

I want my writing to live at my own house again, where I can welcome people in without wondering how things work and where all this extra stuff came from. I realized that writing is who I am, not how I make money. I get paid to be a coach, that’s my job. I write to create and connect, and capitalism can keep its grubby hands to itself.

Thanks for being here! And hope to see you at my house. :)