We all have mind noise

and it all deserves to be heard

Today I want to do some Deadpool shit and break the fourth wall. I want to talk about substack on substack. The world right now is so bloated with media. We can’t make it a mile without an advertisement being shoved down our throats for the latest something. I can’t scroll for seconds on Instagram without being told what I need or what I should be downloading. Tik Tok tells me who to follow, Twitter tells me what I should be reading and quite honestly, it’s exhausting. I have fallen in love with Substack lately. With the simple hand back of control. The feed is streamlined and not cluttered with what I MUST HAVE or WHAT I MUST DOWNLOAD! It instead features only the publications I subscribe to. Occasionally the people you read recommend other substack newsletters but it doesn’t have that forced feeling of Instagram.

It is also so nice to see creative freedom. No character limit or one-by-one square to squeeze thoughts into, it’s open and it’s vast. With the addition of notes now you also have a place to put those passing ideas and chats allow you to connect. This isn’t designed to be an advert but more of an appreciation post and a pondering on where we are right now in the world. I am personally struggling majorly with this rise of video. With the noise and clutter. The way everything is swaying in favour of mindless content, staged pranks and being purposely designed to be consumed in a single bite. I’m a project lover. I love long-form writing. I don’t just like the thoughts but I love the avenues and back streets people go through to get to the thought. It’s fascinating how people arrive at an idea. How a poem blooms. I don’t just want to know what things people like but I want to know why.

I feel we are shifting away from question marks and focussing more on exclamation points. More on bold periods than subtle commas. To see feelings fleshed out gives me the belief that I am human. I know that sounds silly but sometimes I feel so alone that I forget I am part of a full race of human beings. Emotions are cropped and edited to fit a story or a tweet or a Tik Tok or a reel and so much is lost in the process. Even when we have video it’s trimmed down to a minute instead of being given space. We are running out of room to breathe. We are losing our ability to choose. Both of these statements seem more true by the day lately. Substack does fall a little at building community and it can be difficult to find the newsletter you want at a certain moment and it needs a tool to help promote it such as Instagram but damn, in terms of finding content to read, it thrives. As a writer I disapprove of the addition of badges and making people somewhat elite to others based on their amount of readers because as I’ve said before, I don’t think the amount of people who read or invest in your art is a sure sign of quality and we as humans struggle drawing the line between the two but that’s a conversation for another time.

What I am really saying is that you never need to feel silenced or feel the need to lessen yourself to fit a template. If you want to talk about the seventh king of England for seventeen minutes you should do exactly that. You should be unafraid to put your whole self out into the world. The right people love all of you and there is an audience for everything. I am sure if we went back a couple decades and said that somebody would be making millions off reviewing snacks they’d call you crazy and throw you down a well or whatever they did in the sixties. Whether you class yourself as a writer or not your words hold worth. Your absolute truth is the best truth. Not the diluted truth, not the sweetened truth but the absolute truth in all of its glory. Let loose your mind noise and let us drown in your static.

When I think of letting it all go, I think of Novo Amor and only half know why. Let’s not question it and just love it. Here is a near hour of music. See you for the next one.