there’s a difference! Because this blog right now is still an infant, and literally I think only three people have ever even been given the link, I am able to be much more sensitive to the shifting experience of writing it as more people become aware of it.
for example: i shared it with Michael Dean last week (Michael if you’re reading this, which you probably are cuz i’ll probably send it to you, hi!).
Michael sent me an email back about it which I still need to respond to (though I bet I’ll have responded by the time you read this Michael) in which he said a lot of kinds things.
What the email also said without words is just ‘hey man, i see you’
Not in a creepy way but in a ‘witnessed’ way, like ‘hey i SEE you’ as in ‘i UNDERSTAND you’
but not a reductive ‘i understand you fully’ way, but just that i GET it, what you’re doing, and it resonates with me in some way.
it is alive and so are you and so am i.
all of that feels way more dramatic than it is, but that’s what words do sometimes so whatever.
All of this is to say that when I wrote this morning, I could feel myself writing somewhat TO Michael because he was now the ‘audience’ for the blog. Not that he’d actually read it necessarily but just knowing that he could - that changed something.
I’m not even sure it changed anything about HOW I wrote but perhaps it just gave more energy to it, like there was a lot more excitement knowing that these ideas might make their way to someone AND that someone, Michael in this case, was a friend who I had a hunch would dig them and have something interesting to say back.
Maybe that’s the difference? That the piece felt more like part of a dialogue?
I can’t tell if that’s good or bad but the energy of it definitely feels good AND raises perhaps the most interesting question: why doesn’t it feel that way on Substack anymore?
Or maybe it does and I just don’t realize it?
worth exploring more.