What I Learned After One Year of Writing a Newsletter
What it taught me about creativity, comparison, and showing up anyway.
Today marks the one-year anniversary of this newsletter!! It’s been a ride. A happy one. Never, in a million years, would I thought I would be writing and enjoying it.
I don’t have a crazy one-year anniversary story, of huge growth and full of stats. But I’m happy that for a year, I’ve been consistent with my writing and schedule. Even when I wanted to stop and crawl myself into the depths of earth—thinking, what was I even doing starting this newsletter?—I kept going. I’m weirdly overly reserved, and sometimes I just want to dig a hole and disappear. But I didn’t. I kept hitting publish. So yeah, I’m proud of myself for that.
Also, hitting this milestone got me thinking of two things:
The Beauty of Just Trying
Can we indulge ourselves in the pleasure of doing something only for the sake of pleasure? Does that make us not ambitious enough? Do we all that start on this platform need to show we are the best, and hack our way up? And this can be beyond using Substack. Just an activity you pick, do we need to be in that mindset of I need to beat everyone up? Or can we enter from a place of curiosity and openness? No expectations beyond having fun. No strings attached. No rat race. See maybe not everything has to be optimized.
How good it is when you offer yourself the chance to try something new, even if you think you suck, just try things for the sake of enjoyment. I mean, ain’t going to lie, the rat race of how many subscribers you have and all the numbers and stats (that if anyone on this platform knowns pops quite often on notes) sometimes it gets to me, as the known game of comparison enters. But for the most part, I’ve kept the promise to myself to take this place for me and let it as an outlet and place for exploration: just letting thoughts and emotions come and fully explore them. A place where my mind can wonder, create narratives and stories of emotions. And for keeping that promise to myself, I am also proud.
The Art of Showing Up
It is better to focus on the inputs than the outcomes. Great things can happen if we free ourselves from the overload of reaching certain metrics, and making all our life a constant statistics dashboard.
Even if you need to keep the metrics, it is better to focus on what you can do. You can’t control the outcomes.
Let's say, I wanted a 10,000 subscribers (overly exaggerated, but I’m making a point 🫡) by the end of the year. How to get there? There is no certitude that that will be the number, maybe it’ll be far less, or not, but that is not in my control. So I find it is better to think in terms of what do I want out of this. Beyond the number, what is the true essence behind the shiny object.
Focusing on the why, the purpose of your goal, will help gain more clarity and put a better system in place.
The outcomes will come, not all as you expect and in the timing you planned, but they will unfold. So keep showing up.
Because it’s the process that counts, and it's what makes life worth enjoying.
If you chase one metric, and then the next one and so on, nothing will ever be enough, there is always a higher one to achieve. And life passes you by without notice.
You can’t spend your life waiting for one condition to be met, thinking things will get better then. Another condition will always arise, and the cycle will continue forever.
It leaves you with a sense of fatigue, like nothing will ever be enough. You’ll never do enough.
But when you focus on the process, however hard or rocky it may be, you can still find joy and fulfillment. Not because it’s always easy, but because you’re present. When you allow yourself to see the beauty in your present life, and behind the struggle is the effort you're putting in, the growth that’s quietly happening beneath the surface, then life starts to feel more meaningful.
The outcomes don’t get to decide if your life is worth living. They don’t get to choose your happiness.
In the end, it’s not about reaching the destination, but it’s more on becoming someone along the way.