First Substack Post!

(Wait, what, I also need a subtitle??)

My first post on Substack! I’m super stoked to have discovered Substack today. Back in my heyday I was a blogger, so I was a bit bummed when by the early 2010s personal commentary all but moved to video form and then everything became video, first longform late night webcam ranty videos and then – what I never got into – the latest fad of 30-second sound bite highly produced and polished video shorts. Which… I’m not saying highly-produced is bad. If you want to get anything interesting communicated in 30 seconds, it has to be highly edited and produced.

Personally, I prefer communicating in writing. Unfortunately, I’m not very competent at articulating myself through speaking. Here’s an analogy: It’s like a calculus problem with three pages of work that you show and then at the end of the three pages of sequential operations, your answer. I can see the whole three pages of functions in my brain, but then if you ask me to talk about it in real time, I don’t know how. I don’t know how much detail to include, and maybe something needs a sidebar tangent explanation, I’m never quite sure. I don’t want to just give you my sound bite answer without any of the nuance, because frankly, the end answer makes no sense without the explanation. Whereas in writing, I can take a very prolonged pause without anyone getting impatient and sort out what exactly I want to say and in what sequence.

Also, my first draft of stating something is never very eloquent. When you’re talking, such as in video form, if it’s off the cuff, then you don’t get second drafts. Well, unless you edit or script, which I do, but then you lose authenticity. Funny enough, editing your writing doesn’t immediately mean your words lose authenticity, whereas editing and scripting video – I dunno, it always feels… not quite personal enough.

While a handful of us still have Wordpress blogs, it doesn’t have the strength in numbers to have an effective blog feed, not the way this Substack platform does! (Yay!)

So for this first Substack blog post, let’s do a statement of purpose. This is going to be my space for personal reflections, and a place where I can connect with other bloggers writing personal reflections on subjects I’m interested in. I’m hoping my use of this platform can be more community-oriented.

My YouTube channel is strictly education-focused, as is my author website, though I’ll post book and deck reviews on there as well, and of course, landing pages to my various creative projects.

My Instagram is surface-level everyday mundane stuff: what I ate for breakfast, garden show-and-tells, my go-to home remedies, arts and crafts, hiking and vacation photos, the occasional selfie.

A lot of the personal or social commentary that’s essay length, which I typically post on my website blog, will get cross-posted here as well.

And then in addition to that, I’m intending to use my Substack platform to share my personal spirituality-focused ramblings.

In short, what I would have posted on LiveJournal or Xanga back in the day is what I will post here, but, you know, matured to where I am at now in life, compared to where I was then.

Finally, more for me than for you, I am loving that there seems to be lots of kindred spirits with Substack blogs that I can now follow and have their posts aggregated in a one-stop-shop feed thingie in an app on my phone! LOVE that! Happy reading (for me)!!