going viral on substack ruined my writing

it was also the single greatest thing that could have happened for my writing at the time.

as for many of us, substack is not the end goal for my writing, it is simply the vehicle that houses my creativity right now. and it is my favorite, most cozy corner of the internet with my favorite people.

my love for this platform knows no bounds.

so it felt incredible when substack fell in love with me right back — to the tune of nearly 20,000 likes on my substack to hard cover love story, resulting in real and meaningful growth in my subscriber base. ICYMI my husband, dan, published my entire substack and surprised me with my first authored book last christmas. i wrote about it on substack notes and it took off.

substack offered me a world beyond the snapshots of life on instagram, with our messes just out of frame, and past the well-rehearsed and pristinely shot videos on tiktok, where even the chaos is curated. it’s in the black and white text where i finally found mothers who do this thing full time, who care about the same things that i do, and whose hearts expand on this journey alongside mine.

writing has always been my chosen art form and substack offered me a warm cocoon to connect with the mom group that i actually wanted.

there’s an inherent depth to personal essay. it’s softer, with more room for nuance. the words said and left unsaid shine through in a way that says i’m in this with you.

what i love about substack is that anyone can do it and i think that everyone should.

but this can be where my imposter syndrome creeps up. am i cut out to write a book? can i write seventy thousand words that go together? would i even recognize myself with thorough editing and capitalization?

AM I A REAL WRITER?

dan knows my writing process deeply and intimately. he sees the weeks i’m in flow and when i’m dragging myself upstairs in the morning, hoping to find anything to say. he’s held me while i cried, poring over the depths of my first pregnancy, our first hope of a child, and the heavy depression that cloaked me for nearly a year after.

he sees how enlivened and frustrated i get, grappling with my words, twirling them around in my mind and then spitting them back out onto the page.

and if you know anything about my work, you know that i do not use capitalization here. this is a way for me to feel more expansive and unencumbered in my writing, it helps me from taking myself too seriously in the composition. which is the opposite approach that i take to my work, i treat my dedication to my craft as the most serious part of my life.

there is not a single deadline that i’ve missed, not a minute late. every week, no matter what is happening in my world, i carve out time to write and publish an essay on substack. i wake up at five am on tuesday morning, light a candle, make my pour over, sit down at my dining table and begin.

most weeks i have no idea what will come out. sometimes there’s a topic on my mind that i’ve been chewing on, but most of the time i’m clearing through my thoughts as i clack them out on the keyboard and then i slash them up in an evening. i tuck away the private pieces for myself like heirlooms and compost others as trash, allowing for the more well-processed parts to shine through on the screen.

am i a real writer?

dan heard me ask this question a million times and publishing my book was his way of answering me with a resounding and indisputable,

Yes.

You are a real writer. You can write a book, you already have.

MY BOOK

it’s the final present that i open on christmas morning. dan keeps saying that he’s not sure if i’m going to like it, that he took a big risk with this one. i have our son help me open the cardboard box, tear away the tissue paper and i’m instantly weeping.

my book.

i look up at dan, no you didn’t.

my whole body shudders as the tears stream down my face. you okay, mommy? my sweet boy asks after me. yes, yes. happy tears, honey.

my gorgeous, shiny, hardcover book. with my mother curious logo at the top, my favorite photo of me and my son on the cover, and my name printed at the bottom.

i immediately start flipping through the pages and see a foreword nope. not reading that, cannot handle that. and i notice every single detail. how the pages are formatted pristinely and professionally with the page numbers in the corner, but not on the title pages. my full name is printed at the top of all of the pages on the left and mother curious on the right. the spacing and the margins are perfect.

and then i notice the capitalization — YOU EDITED IT?! i shriek in astonishment and delight. the whole thing, it took weeks. he chuckles in response.

he even wrote an about the author, which is truly the greatest act of service i’ve ever known, the thought of writing my own paralyzes me.

when he said it took weeks, it actually took months. he watched hours upon hours of youtube videos to learn how to get the formatting of my manuscript just right. he worked with a graphic designer to reverse-engineer my logo. he chose the font, spacing, and subtitle (which he agonized over). Stories on Parenthood — brilliant, clean, simple — yes.

he read every single comment that anyone had ever wrote in response to my essays (still does) and compiled a list of his favorites. he used their quotes as blurbs on the back cover of my book.

eventually i did read the foreword and it’s our love story. the first night we realized that we weren’t friends at all, but so much more. it’s a long tale that requires backstory and i always feel uncomfortable telling it at parties because i don’t like telling long stories and this one feels particularly indulgent. plus dan and i never fully agreed on which parts to embellish and which to omit. we’d stumble over each other at dinners interrupting one another, “wait wait wait that’s not how it went.” no matter how many times we told it.

the foreword is his opportunity to tell our story for once. and it’s fucking gorgeous.

he boiled it down to the most important parts so that it’s more concise for my comfort and he gets at all of the best details, from his unique point of view. you can feel how much dan loves me when you read it.

—

i am so overwhelmed by dan’s act of love, this gift, his confidence in me (which is really just a reflection of my work) that i facetime my mom as soon as i stop sobbing. i need her to hold me in my joy. to let me collapse into being loved so fully and completely by someone other than my parents.

i tell her i feel pregnant and that i’m probably not making any sense, but it’s the only feeling that i can compare this to, for how huge this gift is to me. a whole new world of potential is in my hands, heartbeat and all, and i can no longer question

i am a writer.

SUBSTACK LOVED ME BACK

days later i still hadn’t told any of my friends, it was too big of a story to repeat individually and my heart was exhausted in the best way. so i did what i normally do when something sweet happens that i can’t keep to myself — i told the story to the internet.

i wrote a note on substack with some photos and made a fun video on tiktok and went about my day. when i re-opened substack an hour later i already had hundreds of likes. oh my, i thought.

by day two there were thousands. i texted my girlfriend who is a career content creator1 and said, i think i’m going viral, what should i do? she told me to respond to as many comments as possible and to try to stay consistent on tiktok for the week and that’s about all you can do.

i thought it would be a couple of days, but the first week required me to carve hours out of my day at the beginning and end to respond to everyone. i couldn’t keep up, but i kept trying anyway. it was exhilarating and i was so moved by how touched people were by our love story.

holding my hardcover book in my hands rewired my brain in a way that is hard to describe. i can write a book, i already did. the impact made the potential real, that was more than i could have asked for.

and then our story caught fire and i began getting more exposure than ever before. on my favorite platform? the one where people choose to read my writing for minutes on end? there are no words for how grateful i was and still am. how genuinely i thanked each and every person who shared and commented on my story.

and i’m so glad it was our love story. it was the best piece to go viral because it truly encapsulated my work, who i am, and how i write. so when people found my publication, they stayed (THANK YOU, I LOVE YOU. YOU WILL NEVER KNOW HOW MUCH I LOVE YOU!!).

i worked overtime to write a welcome to mother curious post, linking some of my favorite stories from a gallery of nearly fifty articles at the time. i kept making videos on tiktok and instagram. i was getting so much outreach about how to start a substack that i had to host a webinar to answer everyone. it felt weird and wonderful to charge for my work after three years of being a full time mother without a paycheck.

after a couple of weeks i thought the attention was going to die down, but it just kept going. so i kept going. grateful for the exposure, but wondering when i could get back to my writing.

the first post i wrote after i went viral was the longer love story. everyone was commenting things like “he’s a keeper!” and “this makes me believe in true love,” and “what a man.” and while all of these things are absolutely true2 i wanted to share the immense amount of hard work that we put into our relationship to make it so.

we didn’t simply fall in love and live happily ever after. dan is totally my prince charming, but i had no idea when we started dating. it was very casual, but we were inseparable. there was something undeniable between us, but falling in love didn’t come from chemistry alone, it took a whole lotta work and dedication. we have grown into who we are because of our commitment to ourselves and each other — and i really wanted people to know that.

after that article i wasn’t really sure what to write. how do i follow up now? what do people want to hear? how can i keep their interest?

i was also so anxious to have doubled my subscriber base over night.

continuing to follow my influencer friend’s advice, i began consuming more content than ever to try and stay relevant on tiktok and substack, and my mind was full of repetitive new years slop. i wrote my least favorite title of all time “being present with my kid is enough”3 and knew that something had to change.

there was no way that i could keep consuming content at the rate that i was and stay true to my voice. i reached out to a writer friend who is excellent at both consuming and producing and i said “how do you do it?” she recommended that i keep a running list of my ideas so that i could parse out my thoughts from whats trending.

i tried, but my mind still felt muddy because that’s not actually how i write. i don’t come up with ideas throughout the week, i don’t write down anything at all, actually, until i open a blank substack draft on tuesday morning.

as i was internally grappling with trying to find my voice again, my first print publication was coming out and my first paid article as well. it was another big week for my writing and i was having so much fun.

AND THEN I BROKE IT

i was hosting substack webinars and helping friends with their creative writing and things were getting lost in my personal inbox. so i made a new email address for my writing and shifted all of my work communications to that account.

meanwhile, folks started gifting me substack publications, but i couldn’t use them because they were gifted to my work email address as opposed to the personal one that was connected to my substack.

i figured it was time to update my email address on substack,4 but i wanted to make sure that i did it properly. so i spent a couple of hours chatting with the substack support bot to make sure all of my work would remain intact and then i hit “update” as dan walked in the door.

a very slow and almost imperceptible rainbow of colors started flashing through the normally orange substack logos and my subscriber count went to zero. my fifty one posts slowly disappeared and i had a full-blown panic attack.

i couldn’t even cry. i was curled up in a ball on the couch trying to remember how to breathe.

i felt so stupid. why the hell did i need to change my email address? who cares if those gifted subscriptions never went through? what difference does it make what email address i use? and worst of all, this is what i get for thinking my writing is going somewhere.

in the days that followed i was comatose. i mustered the strength to reach out to my networks and see if anyone could help me get to the bottom of it and thank god they did.5

but all of my work for an entire year was gone in an instant. one stupid click and it was over.

i had all of my articles saved, but it wasn’t about that. it was this community. it was all of the comments, conversations and engagements from and with everyone who has ever read my work.

there is no recreating a viral moment and as happy as i was when it slowed down, i would have given anything to get that back.

eventually the substack support team saved the day and put everything back together again. i worked with them and took the opportunity to update my publication URL and handle to my full name instead of mother curious.6 i was able to hit my deadline and publish on time. everything technically went back to normal.

but i was not okay.

my safe, coziest corner of the internet had betrayed me. not to mention, there was a system update while i was gone so the interface wasn’t even recognizable when i came back. i found it hard to be on the app. i didn’t want to look at it, i was afraid to touch anything, convinced that i was going to accidentally destroy something again.

INTENTIONALLY, STILL NO PAYCHECK

i had plans to go paid for my one year anniversary of mother curious on february twenty sixth, but i didn’t have it in me. more than that, something wasn’t sitting right with me.

going paid felt like the next step in my substack career, an obvious milestone that i was ready for. i’d love the opportunity to be on the “best of” lists and get my work out there in a whole new way, but — but that’s not actually why i write mother curious. i publish these stories vulnerably and openly to help shed a little light on what motherhood actually looks like for one brooklyn mom.

it’s important to me that anyone who is grappling with the baby question has a gentle space to explore what it could be like and if it might be right for them. to feel empowered if it’s not. it’s imperative to me that the way i tell my stories and the words that i use are specific to me and empathetic to the multitude of experiences of all parents.

mother curious is the space that i wish i could have found when i was grieving the loss of my first pregnancy. and it’s the place that i wish i had when i was scared shitless about losing myself in motherhood.

witnessing a full time mom embrace her role unapologetically in a way that satisfies my intellect, sparks joy throughout my day, and supports my independence and autonomy. sharing what it looks like to welcome our childfree friends as family, to prioritize romance with the father of my child and to center my desires as an individual. exploring the depths of a family who continues to go out to dinner, travels the world and forever challenges our ideas of what is possible in family life.

mother curious was created to be a free and expansive way to get curious about what it means to parent in a way that i never dreamt possible, all from the comfort and privacy of one’s phone. mother curious was created to be free and accessible to everyone.

i very much want to be paid for my work one day.

in a big and meaningful way. when i write a book. i hope that my readers will pay thirty dollars for my hard cover as opposed to the five dollars a month to substack.

i hope that i will have built enough trust in my voice when the time comes. i hope some of you will tell me that you were there from the beginning, that you remember my first book i never planned to publish that christmas, the one that totally changed my life.

i hope that i can sign your copy of my book and tell you how much it meant to me that you were here, commenting publicly or reading and never engaging, privately. i hope that i can make all of us proud of what mother curious has become.

for now, i’ll be here every wednesday at 7:36am sharing my stories of what it means to be mother curious.

table of contents

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Jan 14

this is a living table of contents that is updated as mother curious posts go live. MC was never meant to be digested in a linear fashion, choose what you’re looking for based on the topics below!

CONNECT: thank you so much for being here! i hope you enjoyed reading mother curious today. i’d love to hear from you! say hi to me on instagram, watch me try to figure out tiktok, or leave a comment on substack. the best part about substack is the conversations and connections we build together and i look forward to getting to know you too.