one year of unflattering

and a new membership level 🥳

One year ago, on May 16th, I published my first post on Substack.

I tend to barrel past these milestones or not notice them altogether, but for once I actually saw this coming. Here are a few thoughts.

I started this Substack for two main reasons:

One, because my income is irregular as a stylist. I felt the need both to diversify my income streams (ugh so annoying to use that phrase, but true) and have one of them be more regular and reliable. As a person with limited capacity, it made sense to monetize something I was already spending hours on for no direct financial results: writing blog posts and sending newsletters.

Secondly, I wanted community. Back in the day, I’d had a lovely active community on Facebook but phased that out in 2020 after watching The Social Dilemma. After that, I’d get great responses to my email newsletters, but people were responding only to me and couldn’t see when others were having the same reactions. I wanted a way that people could not only respond to me,…