I Feel Like Quitting Substack

Where do we go from here?

The rain is pattering outside, the sky gray and the clouds moving swiftly across the horizon. The world is quiet and new—the house silent and still as the hour is just after dawn.

Today marks a half-way point in our Grounded & Wild series. A series I wrote for the summer with the intent of grounding and recalibration amidst the wild and chaos that summer brings.

But this summer has taken a turn I did not expect.

And I found myself questioning how I could write about grounding when I myself felt so incredibly ungrounded? The breath work and stillness I utilized over the other seasons has not helped me nearly as much. I feel uncentered.

Part of it is the move. Part of it was going on vacation to our soul-place (where we used to live) and then coming back here—a place with a lifetime of trauma memory, the contrast awakening terrible realization within. What an incredible thing sense of place is.

Part of it is this CPTSD diagnosis—which hits me harder at times than others. When the kids were at school, I had a lot more breathing room. When they are home (for the summer), I feel the existential panic of ensuring their childhood is not like mine. And their screams can send me curled into a ball.

And the last part is Substack numbers. Which I know sounds petty. But it has been terribly disheartening. I’ve lost over one hundred subscribers so far this summer and two paid subscribers and the numbers keep declining. I was told that this is Substack-wide and I read a comment from one writer that they had been here for four years and never have seen numbers this low.

But I do see new profiles doing well.

I’m not new to making an income with writing. I professionally ran a blog for five years or so and brought in a full-time income for my family starting in 2016. I traveled the country to attend conferences and took several classes, many of them high-ticket and intense. I loved it.

I had a newborn baby and a toddler on my hip and I was writing and traveling. When my husband lost his job—I was able to support us fully as he looked for a job for a few months.

But I lost it all in a series of events that led ultimately to my hospitalization two years ago. I wanted to write again this year and try out something different—Wordpress blogging was heavy lifting (I had spent 100 hours plus custom building my website and more!). I kept hearing about this Substack thing.

Could this be a place I started over?

I also had written several books—one of them I still want to publish and share. With our life right now, I needed a more flexible means of income and with our budget—anything extra helps. We really need me to start bringing in an income again, especially if we’re going to move.

In addition, I wanted to connect with myself again—through writing and I desired to connect with others. The main theme of my life was healing from CPTSD, navigating the flashbacks after the hospitalization and learning to live again in a new way. I used to be a trauma-informed coach. I wanted to connect with others women and voices who felt like they had been silenced and who were bravely rebuilding their lives again too.

So I took the dive, created a Substack profile and released my first post on March 9th.

So where do we go from here? What’s on the horizon for me, this publication and my writing?

I’m going to share some behind-the-scenes, where I am at now and where I’m going. And then we’re going to do a review of our summer series as well. I want to make a full-time income from my writing again. So let’s talk about this.

It’s time for me to share some numbers so I am going to move forward and add a paywall here to share for paying readers. It’s a bit more private of a thing. Upgrade anytime to see insight on my journey here.

Are we going to call it quits?