How Substack Changed My Business & My Life

A Deep Return to Self-Expression & the Writer Inside

Failing at Being a Writer

The baby is stirring. Without fail, this happens whenever I pick up a pen… no matter how early I rise.

It’s easy to tell myself that this is what’s kept me from my writing practice for so long.

Most days, I feel as if I don’t have time to write.

Between running two businesses, being a (mostly) stay-at-home mom to a headstrong two year-old, not being able to keep my hand down when they ask for volunteers to organize local events, hosting an active women’s circle, and being steward to a beautiful swath of forest where my husband and I like to dabble in homesteading…

Time is my most precious commodity.

But writing is one of the things I love most in this world.

I often feel that I’m failing the writer’s test—in his Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote:

This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity….

…But after this descent into yourself and into your solitude, perhaps you will have to renounce becoming a poet (if, as I have said, one feels one could live without writing, then one shouldn’t write at all).

When I was living in France, traveling alone through Europe, and experiencing grand adventures in my youth… I lived by that “I must”.

It followed me everywhere.

I assumed being a writer to be a fundamental part of my nature. The need to write was part of my identity—it followed me across countries and lifestyles, through relationships and solitudes, through beautiful moments and dark nights of the soul.

Then one day, the need to write simply disappeared.

For years, I floated in the void that arises when a key piece of personality the ego needs to hold itself in place is shattered.

While I pretended everything was okay, I mourned the loss of my words.

I mourned the loss of the friend the blank page had always been.

Most of all, I mourned the loss of all the beautiful insights that drifted—like so much stardust—into the ether.

The Death of Creativity

It all began when my book was published.

After seven years researching and writing my debut spiritual, historical fiction epic… it was finally ready for the world.

Suddenly, my words—which had always been for me alone—found a purpose beyond myself. In an instant, fans were asking for the sequel and my publisher wanted me to write constant content to keep up with the marketing demand.

My sacred art became a commodity.

The world begged me to produce something which had always arisen unprompted from the depths of me.

My rebel heart couldn’t answer the summons.

Writing lived in that secret part of me that didn’t need to smile and pour tea for others… the part of me who didn’t need to please anyone, win awards, or follow rules.

It only needed to be real. To speak the world as it was.

The moment my every word had the potential to be useful, something inside of me broke.

Still, the flow of inspiration didn’t just evaporate into the blue one day. It drained from of me one drop at a time, like a spring in the desert slowly running dry.

I’d been waiting until The Heretic was released to start a family, and when my husband and I found out I was pregnant, I thought I would have a fabulous reason to write—to document everything.

Instead, when I turned to the blank page which had always been so nourishing, I felt myself dredging the bottom of an empty well.

As my body began to change, I won the hormone lottery (on the one hand). Throughout pregnancy and for a year afterwards, I was happier than I had ever been in my life. La vie en rose suddenly erupted around me, and everything felt tinged with a deep and satisfying goodness. The critic in my mind was silent. Even my twitchy nervous system was calm in a way I had never known.

In all honesty, I was pitiably stupid compared with my previous mental acuity, and I couldn’t multitask at all without becoming instantly overwhelmed, but it felt like a reasonable trade for being so overwhelmingly happy.

Yet with that deep joy that I’d never felt before, I lost all need to write.

I tried to muster up the drive to document my pregnancy… my daughter’s first year… and all the beautiful new things I was experiencing…

Nothing came. Beyond nothing—not even the will to pick up a pen.

My journals from that era are bizarre and disjointed. The page I always keep next to me finding ink only once every few months. Even then, saying nothing of any merit—what I ate for breakfast, what we did over the weekend, some scribblings about my mood… with little beauty and even less originality.

As a writer, I was lost at sea, searching for anything true… anything real.

I never stopped keeping a notebook on hand, but it slowly became decorative. A vestige of a past version of myself. I wondered if I’d ever see her again.

I continued my business, writing copy for my mailing list and landing pages. Even that simple practice made me ache with memory for the creative fulfillment I used to find in the written word.

As my daughter grew and my hormones changed again, my brain power returned, but my creativity remained funneled into business tasks that left no room for “useless” words.

My journal remained empty.

I felt ashamed to admit that as a writer, I just didn’t feel called to write. I hid behind my petty copywriting, pretending it was enough to fulfill me.

Until one day… a friend suggested I try Substack.

I didn’t have any hopes, aspirations, or expectations for the new platform. It never occurred to me that I could find a page blank enough to kickstart my need to write. I was already writing regular newsletters to my mailing list, so it seemed simple and easy to create a Substack and add on a paid tier as an extra product in my suite.

Instead, it changed my business and my life.

Finding My Tabula Rasa

When my friend Cybele introduced me to Substack, she said, “I think it would be awesome to comment on the ideas in your emails and read comments from other people.”

So I set out to translate what I’d been doing to Substack. But I quickly found it didn’t translate.

My story-style marketing emails sounded grotesque next to journalists and fiction writers who had come here to find freedom of expression and be truly themselves.

What I didn’t realize then is that…

Substack is a platform created for writers by writers.

It’s a place where words can be safe from selling out—uncompromised by the jealous red pens of editors… the censorship of advertising dollars… the contrivance of search engine optimized keywords… and all of the other parameters placed on the sacred art of writing.

Without prompting… without being told to do it differently… my Substack began to evolve.

The marketing emails fell away. I abandoned my mailing list. And I knew once again what it was to be consumed by a piece of writing.

The world was suddenly alive with color and Light. The part of me I thought had died in the desert was quietly reborn. I began to read more, learn more, think more. The world whispered new ideas. And I was home again.

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

— Derek Walcott

Writing requires diving deeply. It asks us to let go of how things should be in favor of how they are. It wonders about realms we might not dare explore without the safety of the page.

The blank page offers Everything—hope and despair, torment and wonder, pain and relief, torture and healing. In its loving embrace even the most vile creatures, thoughts and feelings we could never speak become beautiful, welcomed, seen, heard, felt, and loved.

Rilke says, “Let Everything happen to you—Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is the furthest you can reach.”

Substack has opened up a new blank page for me—one that has removed the veil from so many other blank pages in my life. It’s put the ink back in my blood and given me permission to take risks, to fail, to discover, and to “give back my heart to itself.”

Thank you, Substack, and to all my subscribers who make this practice so meaningful. Without your support, my voice would still be wandering the wilds of email marketing, waiting for a page blank enough to call me back to myself.

If you want to see what else might come through when I give myself the time and space to simply write, I hope you’ll consider becoming a subscriber.

With Love & Gratitude,

Allysha