Stackin' Subs

How many newsletters is too many?

Another week, another newsletter. Both just seem to keep coming, huh?

In writing these weekly missives I don’t want to be a hypocrite or subject you to something I myself wouldn’t do. Happily, I do meet my own arbitrary moral standard, at least in this case. I subscribe to a frankly alarming number of email newsletters.

I enjoy subscribing to these newsletters—despite the way they seem to pile up in my inbox faster than I can engage with them, and so add an additional minute stress to my life—because they are intimate reflections of the lives and minds of people I care about. Some of that caring is one-directional, aimed at writers who are not my friends and have never heard of me, save for when I tweet at them to tell them I like their stuff. But most of it is not! I get newsletters from friends I’ve had longer than they’ve had their newsletters; I get others from people who I have become friends with because we enjoy the other’s respective newsletters. (Tweeting at someone to tell them you enjoyed something they created pays off!)

Relationships made or sustained online do not have to be cheap ones, and it is a joy to learn about the beliefs and feelings and habits of these people through their writing, which has bonded me to them across the voids of physical distance and modernity.

These missives are special to me for the same reason that songs by the friends I have who make music are special to me, whether or not it’s my kind of music: because in it is reflected something essential about who they are. I am not just hearing a voice, I am hearing their voice, or their guitar, and the depth of feeling that comes through is magnified by what I already know of that person, not just what I imagine about them, or what I hope they have to say about experiences in which I recognize myself.

I feel the same way about the friends I have who make other kinds of art. It doesn’t have to be “for” me; it’s enough to watch people I care about learn and grow and express themselves through the things that they make. That’s one of the nicest things about feeling part of a community of people who make stuff:¹ the chance to feel like we’re all learning and growing together. My artist friend Lizzy — someone I grew up with but didn’t know all that well until we reconnected as adults, in large part due to this shared project of “making stuff” — recently published a post called “I HATE MY ART (but I'm working on it).” In it, she writes:

I win an award for Most Improved Artist in my own heart. But that’s besides the point.

The point is, I don’t like most of what I’ve made. When I look back at something like my Americana piece, for example, I feel like it misses the mark. It’s lacking a certain energy or something. Ultimately, I wanted to be prouder of it than I am.

…I’m finding myself floating between anxious and excited (what else is new) but I’m trying to pull myself out of that and be analytical about my work. If I know what I’ve made isn’t what I want to have made, then I also know that what I make next should be different.

I feel that, deeply. March 27th will make three years since I first published Tabs Open, and when I look back on most of those early issues I die inside a little bit. But that’s not the whole picture. To be able to grow as an artist, you’ve got to start somewhere. By and large I think that “somewhere” is just being brave enough to put things out into the world. There is an understandable temptation to want to be perfect, to achieve a certain level of mastery before publishing anything, so as not to suffer the humiliation of being judged (or worse, ignored completely). That pressure increases when you consider just how many other you’re competing with for attention and possibly money, as highlighted in a recent Atlantic piece titled “We’ve Reached Peak Subscription”:

Why am I paying for these things? How much of this stuff do I even enjoy?

I didn’t cancel anything right that second, but it was the kind of light-bulb moment that has stuck with me as I peruse my credit-card statements or shuffle through apps looking for something to watch on TV, trying to divine what constitutes an acceptable return on, say, five or 10 bucks a month. It was the kind of moment that millions of oversubscribed Americans are bound to have eventually, if they haven’t already.

My own participation in that economy is something that I think about a lot. Even putting that little “Subscribe” button at the end of this newsletter each week gives me pause, in large part because I don’t want to add more stress than pleasure to people’s lives. In this way it becomes easy to justify not making things, or not putting them out there for consumption until they’re absolutely perfect, which you and your brain both know is a day that will never come. (At least as long as you make the prophecy a self-fulfilling one by never risking feedback.)

Still, it’s one thing to know all this and another to actually decouple my own brain from these fears. Ever since Substack brutally owned me a few weeks ago by announcing that it had been mistakenly double-counting page views for months — which had led me to assume some level of “making it” with this newsletter that was laughably far off — I have been doing my best not to think about or feel responsible to an imagined audience. (There being a pageview counter right on the home page when you log in makes that difficult.) Some weeks I have things to say, some weeks I don’t, and I am learning to come to terms with that.

I know that I have not been making enough writing time or reading time for the past few weeks. This is felt both quantitatively (knowing how much time I have spent on other things lately) and qualitatively (realizing that I feel like something nourishing has been missing from my life lately). I have not guarded my writing time with my usual religiosity, and I have a glut of unopened newsletters sitting in my inbox.

It reminds me of something else I routinely feel guilty about, which is not cleaning and refilling my hummingbird feeders frequently enough. Since last winter I have been hanging feeders off my balcony, and I am still delighted every single time I hear the telltale whirr of their wings or the ray gun pewpewpew of their calls. Lately I’ve been swamped, and the chore of scrubbing and mixing and filling is just one more thing to do, and I can go weeks at a time without following through on this relatively simple task that I know will bring me joy if I can just get through it.

But even when I get too busy and overwhelmed to engage with them how they deserve, I know they are out there going about their lives, and as soon as I am able to make time for them again, with clean and full feeders and my cheap binoculars, there they are again. They don’t need me, but they’ve been waiting for me all along.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next week.

-Chuck

PS - If you liked what you read here, why not subscribe and get this newsletter delivered to your inbox each week? It’s free and always will be, although there is a voluntary paid subscription option if you’d like to support Tabs Open that way.

1. I refuse to use the trendy terms “makers” here, or worse, “creatives.”