yes, here we are

in which I jump into this not-so-brave new world

So, if you have talked to me at any point about my future plans over the past year and change, the idea of launching a newsletter/putting together an essay collection pitch has invariably been raised, discussed at length, then left at jk … unless? And now here we are.

Part of my delay in taking this step to blast out my more personal thoughts and writing comes from the operative word used above: “launch.” Yes, I know that not everyone uses that exact phrasing—it’s not like there’s a settled terminology for newsletters—but that’s how I feel like I conceive of the ways that writers I follow describe the debuts of their bold new endeavors. A Launch! That’s a capital-A Action, replete with fanfare and a successful landing, with the off-chance of a spectacular crash (or at the very least an embarrassing sputtering as the proverbial ship fails to even lurch onto the planned course). Either way, there’s something worth paying attention to for anyone who happens to be watching. But I don’t always feel like my ideas are totally, fully launchable or my platform is big enough to support such a bold Action; I’m more likely to sidle up into my friends’ DMs and paste a link with a sheepish 😬 than to contact mission control to initiate the countdown from T-minus 10 for my genius thoughts to be transmitted out to the world at large. Part of that hesitance is because yes, I know I am wont to drive a metaphor into the ground in a fiery conflagration.

The events that ultimately pushed me over the edge to take the Substack step have been darkly comic, and remind me of the push my younger self needed to open up and share more online. Essentially, what it took for me to actually launch something in the past. Like everyone else who has popped up over the last week or so with a “hey, I did a thing” post linking to their new digital thought repository, I am here (now, at this moment) because of the utter collapse of Twitter thanks to the unreal Elon Musk meltdown. I’m not particularly notable on Twitter (although I am one of those repugnant Verifieds, thanks to my position as a digital media employee in the halcyon days of the 2010s), but I have used the platform to establish certain aspects of my identity and the ways that I conceive of myself and publicly present myself and share my thoughts.

Even though I am now terminally Online, I was a latecomer to Twitter. This wasn’t just apathy, it was antipathy. I was a Twitter Hater up until the moment I started my account, knowing it was a thing you needed to work as a professional writer when I was on the outside looking in, sitting in an office in Cleveland at a finance job (gasp) that felt as far from what I wanted to be doing with my life as it possibly could. I remember when my college friends started tweeting in earnest in like 2011 or 2012. I was an avid Facebook user (and had been on MySpace in the years before, RIP), but I couldn’t square the whole open world element of Twitter, the concept of “followers” over “friends.” Facebook and MySpace were more like normal closed loops to me, with a very clear line dividing connected friends and the internet at large. Unlike so many of my digital media peers, I was not making friends on message boards or Tumblr or wherever from adolescence on; I had my AIM buddy profile and my MySpace Top 8 and my Facebook groups and that was it. I wasn’t searching around trying to find my people. I didn’t quite know who I was, but I didn’t question that, so I was content with whomever was around me IRL also being the population of my online spaces. To me, tweeting out to the world at large seemed like the apex of empty vanity. The idiotic thing about this, of course, is that the only thing that I knew I really wanted to be was a writer, someone whose entire identity hinges upon the ability to convince strangers that they should pay attention to and value a very specific perspective. Read my words, please. That’s all Twitter is, publishing in micro posts. But I was a dumb liberal arts school student, so drawing my line at a populist new platform to share my perspective absolutely tracks. I was given a very individualized and specific test for my acquired snobbishness and absolutely failed.

As I sat wallowing away in Cleveland, I knew I needed to open up and step outside of my acquired prejudices if I wanted to be a quote-unquote writer. I couldn’t just be content to take on the trappings of the identity, thankfully; I was never one of the typewriters and cigarettes and whiskey tumblers aesthetic poser that were so prevalent in the early 2010s, as much as I went through a Kerouac phase. I had shared some work online before. When I was living abroad in Germany during my season of pro football I kept a weekly blog that ranged from unreadable to embarrassing, but it was something. So eventually I decided I was going to commit to being a writer, and that meant being more open to sharing work and thoughts anywhere and everywhere. And that was Twitter, and until now that’s been as transformative a place—both for good and ill—as others have much more eloquently documented.

The other reason I’m so hesitant to put my thoughts out in public has to do with the main topics I’d like to discuss here on this platform. Self-presentation and self-perception, especially through the lens of masculinity and the ways that I am affected by it. I want to use this space to explore the matters that I have been obsessed with of late, from the reason I finally feel like it’s okay to share selfies on social media and why I cut my hair myself and fixate on sneakers and have the urge—the need—to hit things. If you’ve made it this far, that’s what’s in store for you if you keep reading (and more importantly, if I keep writing).

The hesitance I feel here to publish now isn’t so much that I’m elitist about Substack; I’m more concerned the my efforts will just be received by no one and then jettisoned into the void, especially given the mass realization it seems like every one of my media peers has had in regard to finding our own opportunities for self-publishing and promotion. And I don’t know exactly where my voice fits. I inhabit a strange space in the media ecosystem, and I see that on Twitter—I follow and largely interact with reporter types and Online folks and view myself in a certain light as being a particular type of writer and person. Outwardly, though, more people who don’t know me personally see me as I am on another social platform, Instagram, as a fitness video model and workout warrior who isn’t exactly on the level to be commenting about heady matters, let alone media and writing and matters of intellect. This newsletter isn’t going to be a place to get workout tips, but the bulk of my audience (whomever that constitutes) might not want to hear from me about anything but that.

For now, though, I’m remembering that step I took in joining Twitter. Logging on was small and the action itself was inconsequential, but it did in many ways wind up being a decision that had major ramifications on my work and who I am today. I’ll use that knowledge to help me push this out into the world. Give it a read, that’s all I can hope for.