Confessions of a Substacker

What matters is belief in our Self and our craft. The rest is noise.

Dear readers,

I love Substack and the creative license it has given us, writers. But the pressure is on. To write and publish at a pace not conforming exactly to our own creative desires, but at one that’s dictated by the prevalent norm. The norm seems to be directed by the external, rather than internal. That is, by how to get more subscribes or more likes, monetize better, write Notes to gain more followership, use Chat to promote content, and such. 

Marketing has sneaked into writing, and writers by default, have to be marketers too.  

Nothing wrong with that, it’s how much of it you like or want to stay away from.

For me, the constant emails flying in on growing readership are distracting. I particularly try to stay away from Notes and posts on how someone has hit 1,000 subscribers in a few days or how Notes has helped someone garner 400 new subscribers. Too much pressure, personally. Maybe one day, I’ll gorge on this content. Not for now.

How do you handle it? I’d love to know.

Substack is a community of writers.

Of course, writers need readers, and writing merits readership. Every author wants to be read. But it’s distracting if we allow readership to dictate our writing. Then, we enter this zone of writing as a means to an end, don’t we? This squishes creativity and authenticity and does not get the best out of us. For the fact is, we write best driven by our internal creative force, with no end result in mind.

There’s a beautiful verse in the Bhagavad Geeta, which I increasingly remind myself of, in my world of Substack writing:

karmaṇy-evādhikāras te mā phaleṣhu kadāchana
mā karma-phala-hetur bhūr mā te saṅgo ’stvakarmaṇi
( Chapter 2, verse 47)

Translation: You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions. Never consider yourself to be the cause of the results of your activities, nor be attached to inaction.

Do your best to stay in the present, and results should not be your goal.

In our world of writing, that translates to me as, write your best, the rest will follow.

Time and commitment

I saw

Alex Mathers

post yesterday on “How to find time to write” and thought to myself: no way, not another reminder on what I have been agonizing over for weeks—not being able to write a post in over two weeks!

Alex’s post is well intentioned. It nudges us to stay committed to writing, despite it all. How can we argue that logic?

It’s what I tell my teen son too, every day. If you want to do well at something, you have to make it a priority and commit to it, every single day. It’s what I tell my mommy friends when they ask me how I make so much time for my son and his activities. It’s simple, I make it a priority.

Applied to writing though, for me, the same level of commitment does not seem to fit in, for better or for worse. Here I was for the past several weeks, simply not finding the time to write. Commitment and passion ain’t cutting it.

So, I wrote this heartfelt note below in response to Alex’s post (edited slightly to fix hasty early morning grammar). I admit, I feel a bit embarrassed retrospectively as it sounds a bit whiny. But it is honest. 

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Hi Alex,

With all due respect—you know I admire your writing—this post is one sided. Of course, commitment is key. That’s why we are here on Substack. 

But sometimes, commitment ain’t enough, as *life* intervenes. I have not written a post in two weeks, and I feel awful about it. I barely even had time to respond to your meaningful thread on why we don’t have time to write, sorry! Why? 

It’s an incredibly busy time of the year with my 8th grader’s tournaments and travel, a day job, and taking care of life and household matters. My husband travels on and off, and when he does as in the recent past, by 9 pm, when I am done with multiple drop offs and pickups, cooking, cleaning, coaching, winding up my work (my day job is consulting senior writer at the World Bank), I am dead meat. I also have mild chronic issues wherein it’s important I get rest when things get too intense. And sigh, I am also a perfectionist who has trouble putting something quick out there, I confess. My Substack, Imperfectly Perfect, is as much a reminder to myself as to the world, to let go, stay optimistic, and find perfection in imperfection! 

I still write—we can’t stop ourselves, can we? Ideas on the iPhone, starts to posts, even ideas for new Substack, lo and behold (!), maybe a Note, and responses to Notes to feel less guilty. I also try to read more, and I am steeped in ancient history and the Sumerians these days. 

In the meanwhile, I see posts flying in per minute into my Inbox like no one’s business and I feel further guilty that I am not trying hard enough (anyone else?). 

The French philosopher, Jean Paul Sartre, talked about “mauvaise foi” or bad faith in his Existentialism is a Humanism (there’s an incomplete post on this book in my Substack) which impressed me as a teen, eons back. We alone are responsible for our actions. So, if I don’t write as often as I’d like to, it’s my problem to fix. I get that. But sometimes, commitment and passion are just not enough. But I am hopeful June gets me back on solid ground. 

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And, therefore, to feel less guilty, and with a nudge from

Angela Gray

and

Tracey Whicker

, I got inspired to write this post.

Vedanta to the rescue

I skipped my weekly spiritual classes this week (yikes, I probably needed them more!) to chill at home. But no worries, the class came home to me. My husband, seeing his wife’s angst, texted me a beautiful verse from chapter 6 of the Bhagavad Geeta being discussed by our guru, Swami Dheerananda.

It all fell into place, as it often does when I pick up the Geeta. There seems to miraculously be a solution in there for a pressing issue I face in life:

saṅkalpa-prabhavān kāmāns tyaktvā sarvān aśheṣhataḥ
manasaivendriya-grāmaṁ viniyamya samantataḥ
śhanaiḥ śhanair uparamed buddhyā dhṛiti-gṛihītayā
ātma-sansthaṁ manaḥ kṛitvā na kiñchid api chintayet

(Chapter 6, verse 25)

Lord Krishna says here that the person who meditates should use his intellect to withdraw his Mind from all material thoughts and focus instead on one single thought: I am the Self.   The Self, in the Geeta and in Vedantic belief, is that entity within us that is God, simply put. It is also called the Atman and its counterpart outside us in the vast universe is called the Brahman.

Why is the Self divine? Because it is a neutral state of being, untouched by the workings of our Body, Mind, and Intellect. And that neutrality or sakshi, is God. We identify with the trio of Body, Mind, and Intellect all our life instead of our Self, and that is the chief cause of grief in life. Of course, I simplify here (See some longer posts here and here). Therefore, if we tune out everything and just literally say, “I am the Self”, we train ourselves to be unaffected by the dilly-dallying of our Mind.

Bottom line when applied to the world of writing—we should not even be paying attention to these feelings of guilt at not writing enough or more, or focus on the results of our writing, however they are, as they are distractions of the Mind, which is not real.  A wiser thing to do, per the Geeta, would be to focus on the perfection of our Self, which means, focus on what we can produce from within as a writer. 

Our Self is perfect. So, our output is perfect for where we are today. The rest is chatter. Our writing journey, riddled with ups and downs, just like life, will be imperfectly perfect. It’s up to us to look for those perfect moments. I just found one—I wrote my first post in over two weeks!

Meaningfully yours,

Anu Prabhala