How Substack Helped Me Find Joy in Writing

A personal essay on living with writing insecurity

Not the newsletter I thought I would be writing this week but it's the one I needed to write. Recently, I have been experiencing a wave of insecurity and inability to manage the pressures of writing. In today’s personal and vulnerable post, I want to share my recent experience of navigating these difficult feelings and how they manifest themselves in my writing process. Lastly, I want to show how writing on Substack led me to a place where I could once again enjoy the process of writing.

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Good Things Are Finally Happening

This past month has been one of the most productive writing months of my entire life. I wrote and submitted a pitch for a print magazine. I wrote and developed recipes for an online publication. I started to document my food writing journey on social media encouraging me to write extensively in my journal to have a better record of what my days looked and felt like. Lastly, I am taking a food writing course with

Ali Francis

called Writing Food through Off Assignment, a non-profit literary magazine, where we do weekly writing assignments.

It has also been a very rewarding month. My pitch was accepted. My post from a couple weeks ago got almost 200 likes, a level of engagement I have never reached before on Substack. I met an incredible group of food writers through the food writing course and I did an informational interview with one of my favorite food writers, Rossi Anastopoulo. I also got to meet some of my food writing heroes such as

Alicia Kennedy

, Bettina Makalintal, Mayukh Sen, and of course our incredible teacher, the prolific

Ali Francis

.

Athena Writing, ArchaiOptix, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

My Writing Insecurities

This level of writing productivity and recognition is all I ever wanted, and it is finally happening. I should be jumping for joy. Instead, I am terrified. I feel paralyzed by fear, pressure, and deep insecurity about my writing. I am terrified of loosing this writing momentum, I am terrified of writing a shitty draft, I am terrified of fucking up, I am terrified of not having another “successful” post, I am terrified of loosing paid subscribers, and I am terrified of letting people down including myself. Just to name a few examples.

How can this be true? I should be happy and excited to write about things that I find fascinating. Instead all I have managed to do is cry at my computer for the last week. It feels like I don’t have the ability to enjoy the writing process unless there are no stakes, no expectations from others, no institution to worry about. I know that’s not exactly true, putting your writing on Substack for hundreds or sometimes thousands of people to see and read is not without pressure or expectations, but that type of personal reception of my work doesn’t trigger the same mental anguish as when writing for an editor at an established food media outlet or literary magazine or academic journal.

As much as I love to express myself through writing, I struggle immensely with the act of writing and had to work through a lot of writing-related trauma. This week has been especially difficult, even the act of sitting down and being still. The act of focusing on the words in front of me on the screen instead of the million words buzzing through my head. The negative thoughts that get louder and louder the longer I try to write. Limited beliefs start flooding quicker than Niagara Falls. Everything from, you will mess this up to, what’s the point of anything, to you will never get better so on and so forth. It is also a deep rooted fear of not being good enough or same enough as those who are worthy of publications and book deals.

Photo by Art Institute of Chicago on Unsplash

How Graduate School Ruined My Relationship with Writing

My writing self-esteem took a nosedive in graduate school. I had a lot of professors who didn’t know how to teach academic writing and instead provided a lot of harsh and not at all constructive criticism. At the time I was in graduate school, the writing center didn’t offer services to graduate students, thankfully they do now. My advisors didn’t edit my work or provide me with constructive and helpful feedback. Other folks in the department got luckier, their advisors did know how to teach academic writing and would even copyedit their work. My 5 years of graduate school were traumatizing, and left me without an ounce of self-esteem or security in my ability to write.

In my last couple of years of graduate school more and more books started to come out on academic writing. After reading many of them, I realized that academic writing is a form of technical writing and anyone with enough practice and resources can learn the formula for producing academic work. Academic writing is also notoriously convoluted, long-winded, and specialized.

Being told as a graduate student that my writing “Is not academic enough” was a hard pill to swallow, and took a huge toll on my self-esteem. Looking back now, that was also an obvious microaggression. I am glad that I wrote my Master’s thesis and research papers in a way that the majority of people outside of academia can understand. I stayed true to the type of writing that I actually wanted to do. Writing for me is communication, first and foremost. If we are not able to share our work beyond our tiny disciplines, what’s the point of writing it in the first place? I want to be able to communicate my ideas in a concise and clear manner with some beautiful prose from time to time.

Developing and improving my writing skills is one of my main life-time goals. Right now, my main goal is to be okay and confident in the way that I write and to start enjoying different forms of writing.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Healing My Relationship with Writing

After graduate school, I had to do a lot of healing. I tried different forms of trauma informed therapy, and I found that E.M.D.R. and C.P.T. are the most effective. It took me years of healing before I was able to write again and even longer to be able to share my writing and eventually start publishing again.

Even with all the healing, all of that criticism I got in graduate school seems to still follow me anytime I write, or anytime I write a piece of writing with external, institutional, and even genre specific expectations. It’s as if a switch is flipped and all of my insecurities and trust issues come running back.

Trusting the writing process becomes torture because my insecurity is so strong that trusting the process is being constantly challenged with negative thoughts and feelings. My metaphorical dam is not strong enough to withstand the power of those currents. At least not yet.

Some days are better than others, but when the stakes get a little higher, the self-criticism and old trauma wounds burst open. It gets harder and harder for me to remind myself of who I am and what MY goals for my writing are. Which is to make people think or question the world around them. I’m now better equipped at closing those wounds.

No It’s Not Just Imposter Syndrome

My professors, therapists, and managers attributed all my issues in graduate school to imposter syndrome, now commonly referred to as imposter phenomenon.

Imposter syndrome (IS) is a behavioral health phenomenon described as self-doubt of intellect, skills, or accomplishments among high-achieving individuals. These individuals cannot internalize their success and subsequently experience pervasive feelings of self-doubt, anxiety, depression, and/or apprehension of being exposed as a fraud in their work, despite verifiable and objective evidence of their successfulness.[1]….based on existing studies and reports, imposter syndrome tends to be more common in females than males and in marginalized groups (minority racial and ethnic groups, socioeconomic status). 

Do I have issues with self-doubt? Of course. Do I have episodes of imposter phenomenon? Of course. My problem with imposter syndrome is the removal of accountability from broken systems. Syndrome implies that the problem is with the individual experiencing it rather than a result of the systemic issues that are part of our educational and professional institutions.

Instead, I think of imposter phenomenon as a breakdown of the dichotomy of most marginalized individuals who are no longer able to mask effectively due to the overwhelming demand for masking at almost every level of their lived-experience. In other words, it’s when those of us who have been masking our entire life are now confronting the schism in who we really are and who these institutions want us to be. It is systemic as much as it is an existential problem caused primarily by the classicism, racism, colonialism, white supremacy, misogyny etc. of our institutions.

Edward Hull, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Trigger:

The thing that triggered me this past week was working on the article for a print magazine. It sent me spiraling into an abyss of emotional turmoil and physical pain. In my experience, writing academic articles is meant to be painful, because that’s what scholarship is. The same is true of when your work is traditionally published, society tells us we are now a somebody, a person who deserves to call themselves a real writer. My writing needs to be good enough to meet these institutional and societal expectations. My work needs to be serious and worthy of readership to enter the published writer membership club.

My feelings of self-doubt were coming from the same place as when I used to write academic papers. It was my modus operandi. The only way I know how to operate or so my brain tries to convince me any chance it gets. But over the last 6 months I noticed a shift, something is different now. When I write for my newsletter the words come easy (for the most part), I might go as far as to say that writing for my newsletter is a pleasant and fun experience. This was never the case with academic writing. Even when I was writing about things I was genuinely interested in. In some messed up way, whenever I try to write about subjects or ideas I care deeply about, I automatically shift into pain gear. But, after some much needed reflection, this only happens when I try to write with institutional expectations in mind. This realization will help me heal a little faster.

My Road to Enjoying Writing

Writing this newsletter has played the most important role in regaining my sense of self as a writer and once again finding joy in writing. Unlike traditional publications that are intended to be read, in my mind, my Substack doesn’t have that same intended readability. It frees me to experiment, take risks, practice, share, and even enjoy the process of writing. Writing my Substack has reminded me and encouraged me to enjoy and like the act of writing.

The lack of seriousness in Substack writing is my permission to have fun with writing.

Coming back to this point on readability, academic writing and published writing is very much intended to be readable. In my mind, this means there is no room for mistakes. This is my only chance to prove or show something to the world, to make the world a better place, to enrich and participate in knowledge production.

I think the biggest lesson from this past week is that I need to focus on doing the type of writing that currently brings me joy. The type of writing that is able to instill in me the confidence I need to eventually believe that a large majority of writing can be fun and that I can in fact trust the process. Some writing is of course going to be painful and emotionally difficult. But that’s definitely not a requirement of writing. We need to let go of the truism that writing is meant to be painful and difficult.

St Ambrose writing Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

What comes next?

I will continue to heal and work through my writing trauma and insecurities. I will continue to grow stronger and more resilient so that I can tolerate the pressures of writing in our society.

I am hopeful that I will eventually be able to write and enjoy whatever writing project I choose to pursue. The pressure I put on myself to tackle bigger and more academic projects is still very much alive, but this week showed me that I need to do a little more healing before taking on similar projects.

I agree that an artist needs to challenge themselves and sometimes push through those uncomfortable feelings, but I don’t believe that writing should be excruciating. We don’t need to suffer to be writers.

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Next Week!

I will share my super soft and airy sourdough Maritozzi recipe with my paid subscribers. In some baking news, the Matcha Coconut Cream flavor is back on the menu!

Photo credit to Olga Koutseridi