One Month Roundup

ask me how i did it, I’ll say, “I don’t know”, but i do.

Hello world,

All 600+ of you in fact.

I started this substack exactly one month ago, and was able to amass 600 of you and very high engagement numbers for a “newbie”. But, I guess I’m not.

I’m an English major, 10 years post grad this June. Throughout my career I’ve worked as social media manager, content creator, copywriter, caption writer, proposal writer, and writer for 1883 Magazine, with multiple print publications as well as digital.

My current day job is in HR and recruitment. People. Understanding people, reading people. All going back to my degree in both bullshit and the human condition. Reading subtext. Send tweet.

I posted a note that is still going viral. I’d like to say that was a happy accident too… but I knew exactly what I was doing. “Connect me with writers who want to be felt” I knew that I would get people flooding to the comments, eager to share their work. I was curating my own feed while building a community of like-minded individuals.

While I’m engaging with almost everyone that interacts with this note, I am being careful to still only follow and subscribe to users that align with what I want my substack to be filled with. Setting apart my account from a potential bot that interacts with everything and raises flags.

I write deeply personal, vulnerable and heartbreaking pieces. These pieces, while not everyone’s cup of tea, will hit the right chord of the right individual. That is who I want to be sticking around, and that’s exactly who I have been attracting.

My other secret is consistent posting, and that can be difficult, especially with my kind of work. I fortunately have archives of pieces written purely for survival during my toughest years. I am now editing, chopping, re-writing, collaborating with my old self to deliver these to you in new and creative ways. Every post is accompanied by artwork, photography or images all taken and edited by me. I love when I have a lot of art to consume.

TL;DR. I’ve been using photoshop since 2009. Before that I was making pixel art in Microsoft paint, and long before that? Kid pix on the grade school colourful Mac computers. I have been creating, designing, and writing content for years before I considered it a post-graduate study, or even a career. But here I am, and I don’t gatekeep.

Questions? Let me know below.

Best advice? Just be you in whatever drastic measure that means.