The Price of Being Seen

A few weeks ago, another writer asked me to read something they had published. This was not unusual. In fact, it had happened several times with this particular person. They would send me something they had written and ask what I thought, usually with one of those wonderfully casual messages writers use when we are trying to disguise the fact that we have placed several internal organs on the internet: Would love your thoughts if you get a chance.

So I would read.

Not skim while standing in line somewhere. Not tap the little heart and continue scrolling. Actually read. I would slow down, notice what they were trying to do beneath what they were saying, think about the sentence that stayed with me, the point where the piece changed direction, the question it left behind. Then I would give them the best response I could because I understood what they were really asking for. They were not simply asking whether I liked it. They wanted to know whether somebody had stayed long enough to understand what they were trying to show.

They wanted presence.

So I tried to give them mine.

Later, I would publish something of my own. Sometimes it was an essay I had spent hours inside, pulling sentences apart and putting them back together, trying to make sure the thing I meant was actually the thing I had written. Eventually, because at some point a writer has to stop rearranging commas and rejoin civilization, I would send it out and occasionally ask that same person what they thought.

What came back was usually a sentence or two.

Sometimes simply:

Nice essay.

I want to be careful here because this is not a referendum on length. Two sentences can make somebody feel profoundly understood. Ten words can be enough if those ten words reveal that the person actually entered the room with you. Conversely, six paragraphs can contain the emotional nourishment of a parking receipt.

What bothered me was not that the response was short.

It was that I felt the difference in attention.

“Nice essay” is perfectly polite. It is roughly what one might write in the guest book after touring a reasonably maintained lighthouse. Nice lighthouse. Good stairs. Would recommend coast.

But I kept thinking about the contrast. This person had repeatedly invited me into their work, and I had tried to arrive fully. When I occasionally invited them into mine, I often felt as though they waved from the hallway.

Shadow was nearby one of those times, asleep with the confidence of someone who has never once asked another creature whether her work has been sufficiently appreciated. I looked at the message again and realized that what hurt had almost nothing to do with the number of sentences.

I did not need them to write more.

I wanted to feel seen.

That is a much less sophisticated sentence than everything I had been telling myself, but it was also truer.

And once I admitted it, I began noticing something much larger.

For years, people have told me that my writing makes them feel seen.

Somewhere along the way, I became very good at doing that for other people and surprisingly bad at noticing how invisible I was beginning to feel while doing it.

There is a convenient version of this story where I become the heroic giver surrounded by an army of ungrateful newsletter writers. I could stand nobly atop a mountain of thoughtful comments while everyone below shouts, “Great piece!” and runs away.

It would also be bullshit.

I want attention too.

I want people to read what I write. I want comments. I want someone to tell me what stayed with them. I want somebody to encounter a piece I spent two days wrestling with and respond with more emotional specificity than the little heart button. I have published an essay and then wandered around the internet with approximately the emotional dignity of a golden retriever who has brought everyone a ball and cannot understand why nobody is throwing it.

So I understand the impulse.

We write because we have something to say, but we publish because we hope somebody will hear it. Otherwise we could simply keep journals and save ourselves an extraordinary amount of anxiety about subject lines.

The strange thing is that online writing has created a world in which almost everybody is competing for the same scarce resource. It is not content. We have enough content. Humanity has produced more content than any civilization could reasonably require. At this exact moment, someone is probably recording a forty-seven-minute video explaining which type of olive oil corresponds to your attachment style.

Words are abundant.

Attention is expensive.

Actually stopping for ten minutes and reading somebody carefully costs something. Responding thoughtfully costs something. Remembering what they wrote last week costs something. Showing up repeatedly costs something. Attention may be one of the few things left on the internet that cannot be infinitely replicated, no matter how aggressively Silicon Valley tries.

I have tried to give people mine because I know how much it can matter. When somebody sends me something important to them, I often read it. When someone is nervous about publishing, I encourage them. When a piece stays with me, I try to tell the writer specifically what I saw rather than leaving the digital equivalent of a passing motorist giving them a thumbs-up.

I do not regret that.

I do not want to become less generous.

But I am beginning to understand that generosity and endless availability are not the same thing.

I also want to be clear about who I am not talking about. I am not talking about the quiet reader who opens an essay on a difficult morning, reads it privately, and never comments. I am not talking about someone who cannot afford a paid subscription. I am not keeping some secret spreadsheet containing likes, comments, restacks, and outstanding emotional receivables. Quiet reading is still reading. Somebody can carry an essay with them for years without ever telling the person who wrote it.

That matters too.

Some of the people who have meant the most to my writing life may be people I have never heard from.

What I am trying to understand is something different. What happens when a relationship repeatedly asks for my attention but rarely makes room for mine? What happens when someone specifically values my ability to witness them, but seems less interested in witnessing me?

There have been times when people publicly said they hoped I would engage with something they wrote. There have been people who reached out directly and asked me to read, comment, share, or respond. Most of the time, I did. Not because I was building up credit for later, but because I understood the request underneath the request:

Please tell me somebody stayed long enough to understand what I was trying to show.

So I stayed.

And when I occasionally asked for that same kind of presence, sometimes I could feel the difference immediately.

There have been moments when I felt used, and I do not particularly enjoy admitting that. The word sounds accusatory. I am not interested in turning this essay into a public trial with screenshots, timestamps, and a surprise witness from Notes. But the feeling was real. My ability to witness other people sometimes seemed extremely valuable when they needed it and strangely easy to overlook when I needed the same thing.

The more useful realization, though, was not simply that some people disappointed me.

It was that I had helped create some of these dynamics by rarely setting limits on what I gave.

I thought being generous meant always showing up. Always reading. Always encouraging. Always making space. Always being the person who could tell somebody, in some form, I see what you were trying to do here.

I rarely stopped to ask what happened when I had given away so much room that there was very little left for me.

I thought community meant we were seeing one another.

Sometimes I was simply the one doing the seeing.

And perhaps being seen has very little to do with how much somebody says afterward. Maybe it is simply the feeling that another person stayed long enough to understand what you were trying to show them.

That is what I have been missing.

Not applause.

Presence.

Once I saw that pattern in my writing life, I recognized it from elsewhere.

Usefulness has always been complicated for me. I have spent a great deal of my life trying to become useful enough, capable enough, productive enough, helpful enough, accomplished enough. Somewhere along the way, usefulness became tangled up with worth. If I could solve the problem, help the person, carry the weight, absorb the difficulty, make somebody else’s life easier, then perhaps I had earned my place.

Writing slipped almost perfectly into that arrangement.

If somebody told me an essay helped them understand themselves, I had done something useful. If somebody told me they felt seen, I had done something useful. If someone said my words helped them feel less alone, I had done something useful.

And I treasure those messages. I genuinely do.

If something difficult from my life can become language that helps somebody else understand what they are living through, then something meaningful has happened. The pain does not become good. I do not believe everything happens for a reason. Some things happen because people behave cruelly, bodies fail, systems collapse, or life does what life has always done, which is refuse to consult us about the schedule.

But sometimes something once unusable becomes useful.

That matters to me.

The problem begins when usefulness becomes the rent you believe you have to pay for belonging.

When you become so accustomed to asking, What can I give? that asking, What am I receiving? feels selfish. When spending an hour helping somebody else feel seen seems generous, but admitting that you would like somebody to sit with you for ten minutes feels needy. When people keep telling you that your work makes a difference in their lives and eventually a thought arrives that feels almost indecent:

What about making a difference in mine?

That question has bothered me because I have been comfortable with my work having value as long as the value flows outward.

It can help someone.

Comfort someone.

Make somebody laugh.

Give language to something somebody could not name.

Make another person feel seen.

All of that feels noble enough.

The moment I ask the work to give something back to me, though, I become uncomfortable.

And that is interesting.

Because perhaps I have spent too much time proving my generosity by how much of myself I am willing to give away.

The discomfort gets even stranger because writing online comes with numbers.

A lot of numbers.

Writers used to send their work into the world and wonder whether anybody cared. Technology has dramatically improved this experience.

Now we have charts.

I press Publish, the email goes out, and the house remains completely unimpressed. The refrigerator continues refrigerating. Traffic moves outside. Somewhere, somebody is almost certainly fighting with a stranger about politics beneath a video of a dog wearing sunglasses. Shadow may raise her head, check whether my latest contribution to literature has generated anything edible, and return to sleep.

Eventually, I check the analytics.

A few opens.

Later, some more.

A like.

Maybe a comment.

I get up, make coffee, take Shadow outside. She investigates a patch of grass with the intensity of a federal prosecutor uncovering a decades-long conspiracy. We return.

I check again.

An unsubscribe.

There is something almost elegant about an unsubscribe after a deeply personal essay. You can spend two days excavating some private corner of your life, deleting anything that sounds more impressive than honest, trying to find language for grief, autism, psychological abuse, survival, shame, love, or starting over, and somewhere another human being receives this carefully constructed piece of vulnerability and thinks:

This seems like an excellent moment to reduce my email volume.

Fair enough.

The stranger thing is that the numbers exist beside messages telling me the exact opposite. People tell me I am talented. They tell me something I wrote helped them understand their childhood differently. They tell me an essay made them feel less strange or less alone. I save some of those messages because they mean more to me than I know how to explain.

And still, lately, I have felt like a failure as a writer.

There. I said it.

But what I am beginning to distrust is the evidence I have been using to convict myself.

Somebody tells me an essay changed something for them, and my brain thanks them politely, escorts them from the premises, and opens Excel.

Open rate.

Subscriber growth.

Unsubscribes.

Likes.

Restacks.

Paid subscribers.

Book sales.

Somebody else’s publication growing faster than mine.

At some point I stopped asking whether the essay was true and started wondering whether thirty-something percent constituted a respectable open rate.

This was not exactly the literary life I imagined.

I wanted to tell stories. I wanted to write about what happens after survival because survival stories usually end at the exact moment I find most interesting. Everybody loves the rescue. Everybody loves the cinematic moment when someone escapes the burning building.

Nobody talks much about Tuesday.

Tuesday is when the building is gone and you still have to figure out what to eat for dinner.

I wanted to write about autism without reducing autistic people to diagnostic criteria, superpowers, or inspirational posters. I wanted to write about trauma without turning pain into a motivational product. I wanted to write about grief, love, shame, anger, identity, starting over, and the peculiar comedy of being a human being who understands perfectly well that existence is temporary and will nevertheless become enraged because the Wi-Fi dropped for seventeen seconds.

Somewhere between wanting to do that and actually doing it, I discovered the scoreboard.

Human beings are incapable of leaving a measurement alone. Give us a number long enough and eventually we will use it to determine whether we deserve happiness.

At first, I thought reaching a certain subscriber count would make me feel legitimate. Then I reached it, and my brain immediately called an emergency meeting to announce that the number had never actually mattered.

There was another number.

Naturally.

Then engagement mattered. Then paid subscribers mattered. Then open rates mattered. Then somebody else’s publication grew faster, and suddenly a stranger I had never met became Exhibit A in the prosecution of my entire creative life.

Success is remarkably skilled at renegotiating its contract.

Every time you meet the terms, it introduces an amendment.

I wish I could tell you I am above this because I write reflective essays about identity, survival, and the danger of allowing external validation to determine our worth.

I am not.

I have absolutely published something about releasing the need for external validation and then checked the analytics sixty seconds later to see whether people approved.

Human beings are magnificent.

We contain multitudes, contradictions, and push notifications.

But underneath every metric was a question that had nothing to do with Substack.

Do I matter?

That was what I was asking the dashboard.

And that is a terrible job to give a dashboard.

I have slowly realized that I have been confusing two questions: Is my writing worth paying for? Am I worth something?

They look deceptively similar from behind a subscription dashboard, but they are not the same question. They merely enjoy wearing matching outfits.

One is economic.

One is existential.

The economic question can be tested. The existential one cannot be settled by Substack. Five new paid subscribers will not settle it. Ten will not settle it. A hundred will not settle it, because somewhere there will inevitably be a cheerful man named Greg who gained four hundred subscribers yesterday by publishing seventeen words about stoicism.

There is no winning that game because it has no winning condition.

But understanding that does not mean the work should remain economically weightless.

That has been the harder realization.

Writers are taught to become extremely strange around money. We say writing matters. Stories matter. Art matters. Words can change minds, preserve memory, challenge power, expose injustice, help us understand ourselves, and occasionally destroy Thanksgiving.

Apparently language possesses enormous value right up until the person producing it would like to pay the electric bill.

Then everybody becomes an eighteenth-century monk.

Shouldn’t art be pure?

Perhaps.

Unfortunately, National Grid has declined to accept purity as payment.

A carpenter builds a table and sends an invoice. A therapist spends an hour helping you understand your mother and sends an invoice. A plumber arrives, looks gravely into the abyss beneath your sink, turns a wrench three times, and sends an invoice suggesting he personally defeated Poseidon. Nobody asks the plumber whether restoring water to the second floor was spiritually fulfilling enough.

Writers can spend twelve hours wrestling meaning out of grief and conclude:

Anyway, hope you enjoyed it.

I have done that for a long time, partly because I genuinely want people to have access to what I write.

That has not changed.

But there is another truth underneath it.

Free protected me.

If I never really asked people to pay for the work, I never had to find out whether they would. Nobody could reject a price I had never asked. And when you already struggle with your own worth, avoiding an experiment whose answer might feel personal can look remarkably similar to generosity.

Charging for my writing cannot prove that I have value.

But giving everything away because I am afraid to discover whether the work has value is not humility either.

Sometimes it is fear wearing very tasteful clothing.

The same is true of my attention. I do not want to become less generous. I do not want to stop reading other people’s work or encouraging writers I care about. I do not want every friendship measured on an invisible spreadsheet titled WHO OWES CHRIS THREE PARAGRAPHS.

But I also do not want to keep confusing generosity with self-erasure.

This change is not punishment for silence. It is not a test of who cares about me. It is not an invoice for every thoughtful comment I have ever written. It is not an attempt to make readers responsible for how I feel.

It is something much simpler.

I cannot keep building a creative life on the assumption that my work, my attention, and my time are the only resources in the room that are supposed to be infinite.

I want to stop measuring the generosity of this publication by how much of myself I am willing to give away.

I want to change how I show up for myself.

That is the real pivot.

Before I tell you what is changing, I want to tell you what is not.

Some of you have been here for a long time. Some of you arrived recently. Some comment regularly. Some have never said a word but keep opening these emails anyway. Some have shared essays. Some have bought my book. Some have sent something I wrote to another person because you thought they might need it.

I do not take any of that lightly.

Attention is one of the most finite things we possess. Every time you spend some of yours here, you are giving me something real.

You have already helped turn this from something I write alone into something that exists between us.

That is why I do not want what comes next to feel like I am taking something away.

I think I am trying to build something deeper instead.

For a long time, I have thought mostly about making this publication bigger. More subscribers. More reach. More followers. More growth. More numbers for the dashboard to arrange attractively while my nervous system interprets them as scripture.

I still want new readers to find this work.

But I am becoming more interested in depth than reach.

I am less interested in building the largest possible audience than in building something that matters deeply to the right one.

I do not need every person who encounters an essay to become a paid subscriber. That would be lovely, obviously. I am principled, not deranged.

What I want is something smaller and more meaningful: a group of readers for whom these stories matter enough that they want to help make the next one possible.

So beginning with the essay after this one, most of my long-form writing will become part of the paid publication.

Not because I want to make this place smaller.

Because I want to make part of it deeper.

Paid is where I want to take the work further. Longer essays when the story needs the room. Riskier questions. More intimate pieces. Stories that require time instead of speed. Essays where I stay with the question after the easy answer has already left the room.

The work about survival, autism, trauma, grief, love, shame, culture, loneliness, identity, rebuilding, and the magnificent stupidity of being human will mostly live there.

This is not a velvet-rope VIP lounge where paid subscribers receive champagne and classified access to Shadow’s private thoughts.

Shadow’s private thoughts appear to concern chicken, suspicious vehicles, and whether I have deliberately failed to notice that dinner was due forty-five seconds ago.

Paid is simply where I can give the work more.

More time.

More thought.

More depth.

And once every month, I will throw the door completely open.

One complete long-form essay every month will remain free for everyone.

Not because it matters less.

Because I want some stories to travel without a ticket.

I want those free essays to be among my best work. I want them shared. I want somebody who has never heard of me to stumble onto one at an inconvenient hour and recognize something of themselves inside it.

Maybe they are grieving.

Maybe they are rebuilding.

Maybe they have spent years believing some particular feeling belongs only to them.

Maybe one essay tells them otherwise.

That is still part of the mission of this place.

Free subscribers will also continue receiving previews of paid pieces, public Notes, occasional experiments, and whatever communiqués Shadow decides constitute matters of public importance.

The goal is not to build more walls around the work.

The goal is to build enough structure that the work can keep existing.

I have spent too much time trying to prove the generosity of this publication by how much of myself I was willing to give away. I want to build something different now: a place generous enough to welcome people in and sustainable enough that I can afford to stay.

Paid subscribers are not buying proof that I matter. They are not rescuing me. They are not settling an emotional debt because an essay once helped them.

They are helping create the conditions under which I can keep doing the work.

Many of you have already supported this work in a very tangible way. You bought Now That I’m Still Here: A Memoir of Ruin and Resurrection. Some of you bought it when I was still a writer trying to convince myself I belonged in the room. Some of you shared it with someone who needed it. Some of you took a chance on a story from someone you had never heard of.

I do not take that lightly.

That book was the beginning of this conversation. This publication is the continuation of it.

So I want to say thank you in a practical way.

If you have already bought the book, write a Note here on Substack sharing what it meant to you and tag me. Tell people what stayed with you, what surprised you, what made you think, or simply that you read it. Once you do, I will gift you six months of paid subscription access.

Not because support should become a transaction. It should not. I am not trying to turn gratitude into a loyalty program where Shadow starts issuing membership cards and demanding proof of purchase before allowing people into the house.

I am doing this because those of you who have already helped carry this story deserve to come further into where it is going.

They are buying time.

Time to think.

Time to research.

Time to revise.

Time to take the riskier path through a story instead of the fastest one.

Time to make something more ambitious than whatever sentence wandered out of my head before coffee and somehow convinced itself it was finished.

And perhaps most importantly, paid subscribers help me build a publication where success is not simply measured by how many people pass through, but by how deeply the work matters to the people who stay.

You have told me these words matter.

I believe you.

Now I am trying to build a publication that treats them that way.

If you want to help me make the next chapter of Now That I’m Still Here possible, become a paid subscriber.

And if paid is not possible for you, stay.

Really.

Read the monthly essay. Open the previews. Read the Notes. Share something with somebody who needs it. Be part of this place in whatever way makes sense for your life.

Your presence here is not invalidated because there is no receipt attached to it.

The door is not closing.

Once a month, it will be wide open.

The paid subscription is simply the room beyond it, where I can take more time, ask harder questions, and make the work without pretending that time itself is free.

If this place has meant something to you, come further.

There is more I want to tell you.

The next morning, nothing dramatic happens.

This feels important.

I spent days thinking about this decision as though changing a subscription setting might cause a minor shift in the Earth’s axis. I imagined people subscribing. I imagined people leaving. I imagined silence. I imagined judgment. I imagined several versions of failure, because anxiety prides itself on offering a complete menu.

Then morning arrives.

The coffee still has to be made. There are dishes in the sink. Shadow is waiting near the door. She moves more slowly now than she once did, but she still knows exactly what she wants. Outside is outside. A walk is a walk. There are smells requiring investigation, and none of them care about newsletter strategy.

My phone is on the counter.

For once, I leave it there.

I do not know whether anyone subscribed overnight. I do not know whether anyone unsubscribed. I do not know the open rate. For several minutes, I do not even know whether anybody has read the essay.

Shadow and I go outside.

The morning is quiet. She stops at the edge of the yard and investigates something invisible to me while I stand beside her.

For most of my life, I think I have imagined being seen as something another person gives you: recognition, attention, approval, somebody saying, I see what you did. I see what you survived. I see what you made. I see you.

And those things matter.

I do not want to pretend they don’t.

I still want people to see me.

Maybe the mistake was believing their attention had to come first.

Perhaps there is another kind of seeing that begins before the room responds. Maybe it is noticing when you are tired. Noticing when you are lonely. Noticing when something that once felt generous has begun to feel like disappearance. Noticing when you have been giving and giving because some part of you still believes usefulness is the rent you pay for belonging.

Maybe asking to be supported is not the opposite of generosity.

Maybe boundaries are not punishment.

Maybe becoming sustainable does not require becoming colder.

Maybe it simply means that I stop treating myself as the only renewable resource.

I do not know yet.

That is the irritating thing about actual change. It rarely arrives with certainty.

Yesterday I made a decision about what I want this publication to become. I have no idea whether it will work. I will probably check the dashboard later because one essay about external validation has never, in recorded history, cured anybody of being human.

But not yet.

Shadow finishes whatever investigation has detained her and starts walking again.

I follow.

The phone stays inside.

Nothing has been proven.

The numbers are still waiting.

For now, they can wait.