I'm done swallowing my stories: Starting a Substack

August 29, 2025

This is a post to announce that I’m now writing on Substack. Not as a replacement for my blog, but as a way to revive a particular kind of writing and to practice the freedom of the short form memoirist writing I cut my teeth on in the early days of blogging.

Head to Substack to see what I’m talking about. I’ve already published 17 posts in the month of August! My posts there take mere minutes to read instead of the dozens of minutes required to read my average blog post.

What follows is the back story to my Substack, published here to my blog where back story and long form writing reigns supreme.

Thanks for being here, or there. I appreciate you reading my words, wherever you follow them.

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In early 2024 I started writing down my thoughts on self-censorship. Specifically my own self-censorship going back to the early 2020’s.

This essay has been years in the making. First there was the living of the experiences, more than five years ago now. Followed by my attempts to understand what was going on at a micro-level, without recognizing the cultural influences at work. Then there was the period of cultural analysis and reflection. Finally, I got to the actual writing which started early last year.

I wish I could publish things more in the cultural moment. If I was a full time writer I could maybe pull that off. But as a person who writes at the edges of my day, instead of as the day’s work, it sometimes takes me years to fully process an idea for publishing.

Lots of what I’m sharing here is now water under the cultural bridge. But to continue with the water metaphor, I’ve been dealing with the ripple effects up until quite recently and so these learnings are still at edge of my own experience.

I like to write about my life but for half a decade now I've experienced a diminishment of my voice. I've been swallowing my stories.

There are a few reasons for the self-censorship.

The least interesting of these is technical in nature.

The mechanics of blogging are hidden to the reader, but are significant to my process and my ability to get things published.

My blog platform is solid and steady and practically impervious to the problems that plague a typical Wordpress site, for example. We pay for our domain but my blogging infrastructure is free and has been for the entirety of my blog’s life because of my husband’s knowledge and network. (Most of it I don’t understand, which is no doubt reflected in how I write about it.)

It’s solid but it’s also clunky to use. True story that maybe a few of you reading can appreciate. I actually upload posts in simplified HTML.

Who does this? There is no drag and drop editor, no WYSIWYG, and certainly no app interface.

My blogging platform is like a battleship. It’s not going anywhere and you can’t take it down.

Yay for this self-sovereignty, longevity, and security! But it’s also cumbersome and heavy, not easy to maneuver. I’ve been feeling constrained and weighed down by this for some time.

I rely on Damien’s help for under-the-hood fixes and some things desperately need a tune-up. But he’s hesitant to touch it right now because he’s not sure what cascade of problems he will unleash in making the changes I’ve requested and the time required to fix them.

The processes behind my blog slow down my publishing so that I can’t post things quick and dirty. The slower things get the more time I have to ponder them and rework them. The slowness compounds itself. Many drafts never see the light of day because of this.

Then there’s the familial and personal reasons for swallowing my stories.

The kids going through teenage and young adult years, and the limitations I experienced around telling my own story as it implicated them, was a contributing factor for sure. But I also lost a lot of my self-confidence during those years, a situation I've written about extensively.

As I summarized in a post I wrote last fall,

I went through a prolonged period of losing my confidence as several life events happened in short succession and somewhat concurrently: a midlife crisis, the deconstruction of my foundational religious beliefs, financial loss and stress, and the end-game efforts in raising and homeschooling teens. During that season it became even harder to quantify and explain myself.

This was a hard time to tell my story, though I did persevere.

However, the timing of all that coincided with a cultural phenomena. And the cultural on top of the personal and familial has felt like a weighted blanket on the stories of my life. It’s contributed significantly to a quieting of my voice.

I haven’t written about the cultural context for a couple reasons.

Firstly, it took me years to identify it and I might not have even acquired the skills to thoroughly interrogate it had I not gone to grad school. (Interestingly, the intellectual discourse of the grad school milieu could have further dampened the flame. I’ll explain all of this a little later but I mention this now because I don’t believe higher education is necessarily the answer to understanding culture. But in my case, it helped.)

Secondly, there’s only so much time for writing. And although I wanted to more fully excavate the cultural influences on my writing I also just need to tell the story of my life, as it’s happening. Sometimes there isn’t time for both.

It’s past time to add some cultural analysis to help contextualize (put into a larger context) my personal experience of swallowing my stories.

The cultural context

Humans live in a cultural context and I think we gain deeper self-awareness with more thorough cultural understanding.

For years I have observed and felt the anxiety, grief, and despair in Western culture. Maybe this is because I was raising children who came of age in a time of ecological, political, and economic crises; which felt different from my own coming of age in the 90s.

How they feel about their future is very different than how I felt about my future at their age. And the collective discouragement, frustration, and anger of our young people has been one of the baseline notes in my life for the last decade.

Maybe I have a heightened awareness of this having lived in Montreal, a city with a large student population, frequent protests and demonstrations, as well as strong social and political movement energy.

What I’m trying to say is that all is not well with the world and you don’t need me to tell you this.

Those of us concerned for the social, economic, political, or ecological common good can feel fairly stricken these days with all the injustices.

(I wrote the sentiments of the previous five paragraphs before the following current geo-political events: the Hamas attack on Israel and the ensuing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, the re-election of Donald Trump as the 47th president of the US, and every climate-change amplified natural disaster of the last two years.)

The grief I feel from the knowledge of systems of domination, oppression, and exploitation (and my complicity and participation in those systems) moves through me in cycles and waves. Add climate change and natural catastrophes on top of this and it can be mentally and emotionally debilitating.

However, my grief has subsided significantly since moving here last summer. Nature buffers the societal social tension I felt in Montreal for sure. But I also just feel more resilient and resourced here.

I moved here to put my efforts into building familial, land, and community systems to support myself and my loved ones. I feel agency, which along with taking action is an antidote to the anxiety.

At both the individual and cultural level, this sense of despair and anxiety doesn’t always present as grief. It often gets expressed as cultural loathing and shame.

Cultural shame and the value of critique

Under the weight of guilt, grief, complicity, and feelings of powerlessness, some people turn to a kind of cultural abnegation.

Although I have observed this in the culture-at-large, spending time in a graduate program of a Western liberal democracy university (the same university system people the world over flock to for both the liberal openness and credentialing) brought the issue front and center of my consciousness.

I used to associate shame being used as a tool of social control within religious traditions. That naivety completely died, as it should have much earlier in my life, during the pandemic. Shaming people is a human thing, not a religious thing. So although I am talking about my experiences in Western culture, shame is cross-cultural.

What I’ve observed over these years is a mantle, or cloak of cultural shame and loathing.

I might notice this more keenly because I’ve been in an academic environment and disdain and deep criticism for Western culture has been a part of academia for many years already, which trickles into other areas of society.

Let me be clear about where I stand on criticism and critique. I am a big proponent of the individuals within a system and worldview being critical of those structures and perspectives.

Cultural constructs that are good for human development and contribute to human flourishing, whether we’re talking education, politics, economics, religion, etc. can withstand critiques. Nothing is permanent or without flaws and things can be improved when we honestly evaluate the conditions and systems we live within. This necessarily involves critique.

Further, I think the most honest criticisms of a system, group, or ideology should be generated from those within that system. Recognize and name the problems, then work to improve them.

This is not usually how things play out however, as system-supporting mythologies are in place and upheld, often with violence or coercion to prevent such intra-group critique and change.

In the religious context we have a name for those individuals, groups, or communities that provide intra-ideology critique, regardless of the penalties they might face. These are the prophets, and as the Biblical stories of Jewish prophets demonstrate, prophets aren’t usually well received.

I deeply value the critique of Western culture. There is so much to be learned from other worldviews and much to be improved upon. As long as not everyone is flourishing in the culture, there are changes, perhaps revolutionarily-large changes, to be made.

I’ve written my own cultural critique posts and essays for a long time, most particularly around education practices, although my critiques diversified during my grad studies as I was being challenged to think deeper about society.

However, as much as I value cultural-critique from within the culture, over the past decade I have observed a shaming within Western culture that goes well beyond critique into the diminishment of human being-ness.

I operate from a philosophical axes of a fundamental goodness and relatedness ontology oriented to individual and collective freedom that requires and demands a responsibility for and to one another. (For a full exploration of that, see my philosophy of education.)

Within such a framework, becoming more, seeking to maximize my own agency, amplifying joy and beauty is not a misguided, selfish, or willfully ignorant response to the problems.

It’s a means of becoming equipped, fortified, activated, and resourced to attend to the problems; to attend to the internal and external pain of human being-ness, in relationship with others.

I’m depending upon others to work towards their individual potential and to bring that potential to the table. I expect that others need the same from me. Therefore, there is no benefit to wearing, or being around those wearing a mantle of cultural or self loathing and trying to shame people into better behaviour.

Which is not to be confused with humility, taking responsibility, seeking forgiveness and reparations for wrongs done, for holding the weight of your corner of the blanket of human suffering. All of these actions do diminish self in important and particular ways while also requiring us to be more of our “better” selves.

I understand so many of us don’t know what to do with all the pain and distress we feel at the state of the world and so we direct it at ourselves and others.

I bad. You bad. We all bad together.

I have a lot of compassion for this pain but the response is misdirected.

How does this relate to my writing?

It’s been a real challenge for me to write about my life during this period of cultural upheavals and shaming.

In part because in grad school I was actively learning to complicate my own position and experiences. Nothing in my life is simple or remains untouched by my own critique. I think this has been a good development intellectually, spiritually, and ethically, though it has bogged down my writing.

Relatedly, I’ve been studying my own complicity in and dependence upon systems whose values and philosophy I don’t agree with.

How can I write about my life, or an experience, or something I love without recognizing and naming all these underlying things?

While all this was happening personally, the cultural discourse has been fraught with loathing (directed towards self and others) which breeds censorship and its contemporary (though now mostly out of favor) manifestation, cancelling.

Like I mentioned earlier, this essay has taken some time to write and so cancelling is now water under the bridge. I would argue that where we are in this cultural and political moment, with Donald Trump as the POTUS and the rise of far right political groups in liberal democracies around the world is in part a response to intra-Western cultural shaming and cancelling. Telling people their culture is bad, trying to shame them into better behaviour, does not create positive social and political change. What it creates is anger, discontent, and an understandable desire to pushback.

When we loathe others or project onto them self-loathing (desiring them to hate themselves for how terrible they are, or more pernicious, to hate themselves for the happenstance of their birth) we dehumanize them. Whereas the desire for them to be repentant or seeking a restoration or redemption is humanizing. But you don’t facilitate repentance, redemption or restoration by annihilating someone with words or actions.

What does this have to do with me?

In the era of social justice social media, women like myself were told to be quiet or to use our voice or “platform” for valid and progressively-approved causes. Otherwise sit down, shut up, and let someone else more disadvantaged speak. Like somehow the boundary-less Internet is a zero sum space.

Not to put too fine a point on it, I am a straight, middle-class, middle-aged woman of Northern European descent (i.e.:white), and I could read the room.

And the room was on fire.

The words I wanted to write about my life got stuck in my throat. The ones that squeaked out required so many caveats and disclaimers. Everything felt weighty and weighed down.

As a writer I was supposed to be using my platform for causes.

But I came to realize that there is always a cause for which others think we must, if we are good and just, raise our voice, raise our flag, and raise a banner.

There was pressure to be a voice for the cause du jour.

But what if I just want to be a voice for my own life?

Using Instagram to move past self-censorship

In the thick of grad school and while my life stories were getting bogged down in the heaviness of my website mechanics and my overthinking, I turned to Instagram Stories as a publishing platform. Posting there felt reminiscent of the early (and more joyful) days of blogging for me. I called it microblogging.

A big part of the reason I did this on IG was because:

1. people are there reading it, and
2. IG Stories in particular are ephemeral. Gone in 24 hours.

There could be typos, but more importantly I might say something stupid or culturally inappropriate for a radical/progressive person to speak out loud but it would be gone in 24 hours before I could be pilloried for having uttered such offense. (If I hear the phrase “to call-in” one more time…)

The ephemerality of IG Stories allowed me to slowly stop self-censoring and to gain my voice back. It allowed me publish without worrying too much about the repercussions. It gave me a freedom I had lost.

What was I censoring exactly? Simply the stories of my life.

Everyday life things that I felt compelled to swallow in a discourse concerned with more monumental causes.

Deciding how to live (& write)

Like many other people, over the last few years I’ve been wrestling with what my response should be to “the times we live in”.

After living my twenties and thirties in an information bubble where I didn’t interact much with the news, I’ve been trying to stay abreast of geopolitics, Canadian politics, ecology, etc. With paid subscriptions to reputable news outlets, the availability of podcasts and YouTube, and studying for a Master’s Degree in a sociological program, I can now check off Informed and Critical Thinking Citizen.

I have gained a lot of knowledge but I have determined that my own contribution to the many, many problems is not more information sharing on social media; slides with numbers, data, harrowing images, and calls to action. That is the work of many writers, god love ’em.

But I’ve grown tired of the pressure to use social media and my voice to amplify crisis, or even policy solutions to that crisis. This is not about (insert latest crisis here). This has been the discursive tenor since 2016, ratcheting up in 2020 with the pandemic and the killing of George Floyd.

It feels like we’ll be in cultural and geopolitical crisis mode for a long time. Where is the place of my writing in that?

Collectively we’re not going back to ignorance or those early days of blogging and social media where we just talked about our lives. And I’m not suggesting we collectively should. But talking about my own little life is the thing I want to write about (and make videos about).

I started this essay talking about the drop in my confidence during my forties. It's possible that losing my confidence was just another perimenopausal symptom.

Here’s just one example of how I know I’m on the other side of that now (not the perimenopause, the low confidence). I don’t care about anybody else’s opinion about what my writing should, or shouldn’t be about. Relatedly, I don’t care if online peeps can easily quantify and categorize me as playing on the right team.

If you know me personally, you’ll know where I stand on things and you’ll see my values in action whether we’re talking about trans-rights, political ideologies, Palestine, or climate change.

And if I feel called into a political fray again, like I did with the Canadian pandemic mandate protests, I’ll write about it, as it relates to my life. But if my daily life is mostly about this home, the people on this property, my activities and actions in my community, well, that’s what I’ll be writing.

For me, the response to “the times we live in” is to live a life that sustains me and others, to work at building in my home, on this property, and in my community, the kind of the world I want to inhabit. To metaphorically set the table for my loved ones and to the extend the table.

This goal does not preclude organizing and agitating for policy or political change. The freedom that I and others have to do the above rests on policy and politics and therefore political action/involvement is necessary.

Now that I’m done school I intend to get more involved in community actions and initiatives but at this point I don’t feel a pull to write my life story around that. This might change, but I’m not going to write about that from any sense of cultural, social-mediated shame around what “good, socially responsible” memoirist writers do.

Take for example, the work of Glennon Doyle, and those on the lower rungs of influence who direct their life story writing towards activism. A position I totally admire and envy with regards to having influence on policy and policy-makers, but also recognize as an outgrowth of that particular writer’s personality, as much as anything else.

(I should note, as a Canadian I don’t feel the same despair that many Americans do right now. I don’t live in that political context and it therefore doesn’t color my life and my writing in the same way.)

Silence on my “platforms” about the cause du jour does not mean I’m scared to speak out, that I lack courage, or that I don’t know about the atrocities and that I don’t stand against them.

The question is: what does “standing against” or “standing in solidarity” look like?

What does it look like in my life?

My confidence is restored enough now to say that whatever it looks like, I’ll be the one to define it.

Unapologetically, I will continue to build a home, on this land, that is a refuge for myself, my husband, my family, and other people that come into our lives. I will cultivate care, beauty, and belonging here.

This will be the work. This will be the writing.

This could be a stage thing. I’m about to turn fifty and women of this vintage and older often speak about feeling zero guilt for living their own truths, taking care of themselves, and enjoying life. And they say all this not as uneducated ignoramuses, but as women with some life wisdom.

Let's wrap this up.

I’m coming up on my 21st anniversary of public introspection and story telling about my life on the Internet.

I plan to keep doing it. In part because I like the constancy of this routine and it brings me comfort the same way my other long-running habits do.

But I’m also carrying on because I refuse to swallow my life stories in service to some larger cultural or sub-cultural agenda.

I plan to continue my blog and pursuing other online content creation, such as YouTube vlogging. And now, I’ve started a Substack to move my microblogging off Instagram and onto something more permanent and less algorithm/advertising driven.

I hate how cliche this is going to sound (because wow, is this ever on the money for everything I’ve read about turning 50) but I’m really feeling the “zero fucks given” rising in me about my writing and publishing.

I appreciate you being here, reading this. And if you want to read more writing check out my Substack.

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