Substack is a performance and we're all the clowns
I make around 10$ from writing in a month. And yet, I still call myself a writer. Does that make me delusional? Writing is what I do best, apart from rapping; it’s the way I do to make sense of the world, and what is within myself, so naturally, I must be a writer.
I’m not necessarily Substack Famous, but I’m certainly known as the one calling the entire app a cunt, so that has to c(o)unt for something, doesn’t it? So I have no stake in the matter in telling you this little secret. All of those people who have made it on Substack who have reached thousands upon thousands of likes on multiple posts? Yeah, you know who I’m talking about. Well, you see, they’re caged, and maybe they like it, but I don’t.
Since early last year, I’ve been approached by 5 publications, both on Substack and off Substack, to write for them on specific topics. I have always declined. Not that I didn’t need the money, because as someone who is unemployed and going to university, I could definitely use it. But because they either wanted me to write about my outrageous sex life (I haven’t had sex in a year) or be meta about Substack once again. So let’s ring it back to being Meta on Substack, shall we?
Since the boom of this app, there’s been a tendency to cage writers in specific categories. You have the intellectual, in-depth cultural takedown, the sentimental ones who always make you feel like you’re reading The Perks of Being a Wallflower for the first time, and those who enrage you and live in impossible contradictions, like me.
To be fair, I’ve tried to be all of those types, and I like to believe that I can be either of those on any day. But I’ve been caged. It’s over for me, and yet, I’m not done performing.
You see, as a writer, an artist, I am a people pleaser at heart. I want to please audiences, make them think I’m funny, that I’m down to earth, that I’m approachable. I am catering to an audience, and sometimes, that means being the clown, and gods, I have felt like a clown here for the past 6 months, so I just stopped performing.
For the past 4 months, you see, I’ve been conducting an experiment. I wondered how many subscribers I would gain per month if I hit publish, then disappeared. What would happen if I stopped begging for attention on notes, stopped writing the clickbait articles that enrage you, the pieces everyone wants to hear from me, and just wrote what I wanted to read. And nobody moved, nobody clapped, nobody cheered, and some booing was even witnessed in the audience. I felt like a stand-up comedian completely bombing a crowd work set.
Because what we do on this app feels a lot like stand-up comedy. You have to grab the attention of the reader quickly; in fact, you only have the title, maybe a note of a sentence, or even less, and then at the beginning of your post, you have to be even more engaging, somehow revealing all the gory details of your life, in the most vile details, and it gets tiring.
Maybe I don’t have in me another disgusting sex story to tell you, or another Substack is a social media you cunt, maybe this is it for me. I don’t want to keep sharing all my intimate details online for clicks and likes, and most of the time I’m not a hateful cunt. I’m actually a rather nice person who helps the woman with the stroller down the stairs of the metro.
Substack, like every social media, is a performance stage where we put on a different play for you every week, and it’s exhausting as a writer on this app. It’s exhausting to come up with new stories, new ideas, new concepts, and not rehash what’s already been done. Thankfully, we’re all smoking weed, so coming up with new concepts isn’t that hard.
But pretending that this app is any different from TikTok or a curated Instagram feed makes no sense to me. It’s all the same in a different font. You can watch academic content on Tiktok, Sidney Sweeney drama on Tiktok, it’s all the same. So to everyone putting on their clown cap when they’re sitting at their desk to write another post that barely clears 10 likes, I wanna clap for you, because the grind is insane, and there’s little to no reward.
The clown cap is a hard one to bear, and the makeup itches on your skin and smears all over your hands whenever you touch your face, but you still wake up and do it, every single day, working on your craft. So, congrats on being a clown at an amusement park with children’s vomit all over your massive shoes.
Personally, I pulled back the clown costume, and do whatever the fuck I want now, to the pleasure of absolutely no one. I don’t even know what’s best, to be liked as a clown or ignored as a human?
From Marseille with Love
*vapes away*
I don’t open substack these days nor do I write that much here. Why? Cause of the same exact reason you’re trying to talk about in this brilliant article which came up in my notifications fortunately and the title forced me to click on it!
Every social media platform is a performance stage if you ask me! Substack feels more of a humiliation ritual cause often times we as writers pour our feelings out on here just to make others feel heard. But doing that makes us feel empty from inside. Especially when we don’t get the kind of traction we anticipated after that one dramatic post in which we dissected our own psyche and presented it like a three course meal for our audience.
That’s not the case with other apps like insta. You don’t have to be honest or even relatable to be successful there. People fall in love with an idea of you not how you think. And when our genuine hardwork on Substack gets treated like a meagre waste of time or just you’re doing too much for this silly app, it makes us feel like a clown. And yes we are clowns cause a clown never fails to put on a show even if they’re not feeling their best.
As a fellow writer, I can’t even express how much this post made me feel heard luciana! Thankyou for talking about this! Really appreciate it!
This motivates my decision to not come back on this app and do all that I used to do earlier because let’s be honest nobody cares for a writer who stays on this app for like a year or two. A time comes when the traction declines and we are left with whys and what ifs altogether. But yes this post inspires me to do the right thing. That is, only coming here when you feel like it. Not to perform, not to just try whether people still like you but to express just for yourself cause that’s what a true writer does!
Sorry if I said too much! This post was too good to post a one line comment for it lol!
Hi Co-clown. Good luck with Retirement.