A friend and I had a call the other day to talk about our Substacks, you know, as one does for fun on a Friday afternoon.
We got to talking about what we wanted our newsletters to be. We met through blogging, and we both have journalism backgrounds. Our consensus was that we both wanted our newsletters to be well-written and something that could be Taken Seriously…and also that we didn’t want to take the fun out of it.
We both like telling personal stories—AND we talked about feeling kind of silly having Serious Topics and seemingly mundane stories in the same space. The first thing that popped into my head was walking into a fancy neuroscience clinic to interview its founders and try out the technology.
I was already feeling out of my element and massive impostor syndrome, and one of the people there mentioned something personal I’d written. Even though I have made a huge part of my career telling my personal stories, I still carry more shame about this than I should.
That writing about one’s self is navel-gazing, foolish, etc. It’s not as important or as serious as other writing. It matters less.
I let this conversation with my friend marinate in the back of my head as I went on with my day. We’d ended our call, honestly, not really feeling any clearer than we had going into it…
But there were two threads that stayed with me from our convo:
the fact that we had become friends, all these years ago, because of our seemingly banal personal stories about working out that we shared online—AND that this is what we both talked about missing
the fact that we also liked the part of blogging where it felt a little therapeutic to work shit out through writing, in a more polished way than a journal and a less polished way than for someone else’s website. On our own terms.
Lori Gottlieb talks about a therapist’s role being to help people change the stories they’re telling themselves. A lot of my own work with clients is helping them unpack where the stories they’re telling themselves came from.
And that story that personal stories, the stories of people’s lives, are any less important than Important Stuff? Pretty sure that’s some societal shit meant to take women less seriously.
Taylor Swift has spent her entire career being told that she “just” writes songs about breakups.
But guess what? She was also named Person of the Year last year because those “silly songs about breakups,” it turns out, have the power to connect people and help them feel heard, in a time when so many of us are feeling so disconnected in so many ways.
Taylor literally has the world’s stage now, but that doesn’t mean my story or yours mean any less than hers.
Stories are how we relate, how we connect, how we learn.
I’m here to tell you your story matters, even—nay, ESPECIALLY—if you’ve told yourself or someone else has told you that it doesn’t.
I love this and can completely relate. When I first started blogging, I wrote all kinds of little dumb stories about my life, and I found a great sense of connection with strangers all over the world as a result. At some point, when my professional colleagues started finding my blog, I felt like I needed to write more serious content, and I started penning posts that were more of how to guides on productivity, the airline industry, and all the other things I like to focus on in my personal time. It was nowhere near as authentic, even though I love that stuff too. Now, I write a lot more infrequently, but I feel like my posts have to be more substantive than they once were. I miss the blogging days of 10 to 15 years ago, when everyone shared the smaller things! (And as I'm currently in the midst of Charles Duhigg's fantastic new book, Supercommunicators, which makes a big point about strong communication being when you're sharing your hopes and dreams, I would argue that the little things brought us closer together.) I say, bring back the lighter side of blogging!