Why Substack, Why Now?

Musings on my history of writing, mental health, and what's led me to this moment. With a nod to the work of Art Brut and a trigger warning for themes of suicide.

I’m 44.

I know I look younger in my avatar. But, since we’re going to dig deep here, I’ll confess here and now. That photo was taken last year when I was a young, bearded buck of just 43.

It feels quite late to begin publishing my thoughts and stories for others to read. But, after a healthy dose of research yesterday, I discovered that Laura Ingalls Wilder published the first Little House on the Prairie book aged 65, while the first part of Don Quixote was published when Miguel de Cervantes was 57. So, perhaps I’m a spring chicken after all, with plenty of time to spread my wings and peck away at creating something coherent that someone, somewhere might enjoy.

I’ve always loved writing, words, and have long held a healthy sense of awe for anyone exhibiting smart wordplay. The ability to condense complex subjects into a few words and package them concisely in a neat sentence is something I’ve long striven for, usually ending in abject failure. My mantra seems to be, Why use eight words when I could use 80?

So, what’s led me here? And why now?

On your marks… get set… false starts!

Let’s begin with some background.

Between you and me, this isn’t my first writing rodeo. I’m of the Myspace generation. A recovering friend of Tom. A serial blogger, twenty years ago, when I consistently mixed metaphors in praise of Art Brut albums, Arrested Development, and the name Norbert. This experiment was short-lived, though. Once Tom sold to News Corp and rode off into anonymity with his share of $580 million in his back pocket, and people shifted from Myspace to Facebook, I took my writing to Blogger and wrote prolifically about non-league football for a while.

Indie darlings of this writer from 2005 - Art Brut (courtesy of Wikipedia)

Few read it, and that was okay. Indeed, it was a blessing, if anything. The posts were full of woeful puns, terrible attempts at cutting-edge parables, and half-hearted attempts at calling out many of the problems that inhabit the world of semi-professional football without ever truly committing to it.

In the years that followed, I continued to dabble. Never enough to call myself a writer until I became a freelance copywriter three years ago, but enough to develop my style, learn about the beauty of the Oxford comma, and leave a string of ambiguous, unfinished projects languishing in my wake.

There was the 30,000-word novel, set in the fictional northwest London suburban hamlet of Highstead Park in the late 1930s. An intriguing world that mixed appeasement of Hitler and Mussolini with darts matches in pubs thick with the florid aroma of pipe tobacco, and, shamefully, the occasional perverted and untrustworthy Frenchman. Thankfully, lazy and offensive national stereotypes are now a thing of the past in my writing, and I think the manuscript is best left unopened.

Then, there was the ambitious project of writing a match-by-match account of a non-league football club’s history in the 21^st century. Brilliant escapism during a mental health breakdown, but of limited value to the reading public as a body of literature. I got two and a half years and 80,000 words into the history before realising anyone wishing to read the volume would require a forklift and a paid team of professional page turners to assist.

Writing as therapy

For many years, writing prolifically would coalesce with periods of mental distress. Although my first diagnosis and period on anti-depressants came in my 30s, hindsight has shone a light on a series of debilitating depressive and anxious episodes from the age of about 11 onwards.

I first realised something was wrong when my relationship was breaking down, I felt a failure as a partner, a father to my two young kids, and an employee. I compared myself to friends who were earning sums I still haven’t managed to achieve a dozen years on, and considered myself a total failure. I’d never felt so isolated and alone. I was drinking to escape, to forget, to get through each day. Every time I fell asleep, I was relieved that I’d made it through the day. Every time I awoke the following morning, I simply prayed that I’d find the fortitude to make it through to bed again.

The fault for the breakdown of my relationship was entirely mine. My inability to communicate led to me displaying behaviours that I thought were coming from a good place but were, in fact, deeply manipulative. My sense of reality became more and more detached from what was happening. I was masking through my words and actions, all the while digging myself and my family into an ever-expanding hole.

During this period, I found a couple of places of solitude where I could find a sense of calmness. I spent a few weeks riding the London bus network. I’d sit upstairs as the famous red double-deckers lulled me into a mindful doze through the capital’s streets until I’d jolt awake, press the bell, and change routes.

My other haven was among the gravestones of the local parish churchyard. I’d hide from view behind sprawling willow trees and extravagant Victorian tombstones, lie down, and allow the birds to sing me to sleep.

The epiphany arrived one warm June afternoon. I was sitting in the churchyard reading Marcus Trescothick’s award-winning autobiography, which confronted and began to tackle the stigma of men’s mental health.

As I sat and read his account of leaving England’s tour of India in 2006, I found myself sobbing helplessly. He talked of his symptoms, his shame, and how he masked what was happening in public. The official reason given for his departure was a virus. However, the truth was that he was suffering from burnout and depression. It’s difficult to overstate just how important this book was. It empowered other high-profile cricketers, such as Steve Harmison, Jonathan Trott, Andrew Flintoff, and Michael Yardy, to come forward about their experiences with mental health.

Yet, despite this progress, there’s still so much more to do. Only last year, there was the devastating case of former England batsman Graham Thorpe – someone I spent hours watching nudge, nurdle, cut and pull the short ball effortlessly on TV – taking his own life at Esher railway station aged just 55.

Reading Trescothick’s book was the first time I’d ever heard or read anyone articulate what I was experiencing in that moment. I suddenly felt a strange sense of kinship, of not feeling alone. A realisation that perhaps I wasn’t just shit at life, I wasn’t failing, I wasn’t inferior to everyone around me. I mean, I was all of those things in that moment, but I was also unwell.

I went to the GP the following day, received a prescription for Fluoxetine, and began my relationship with various forms of talking therapies. I found a lot of mental relief in writing semi-seriously for the first time. Journaling, writing silly short stories – anything for a little escapism. For many years, whenever my mental health dipped, I’d withdraw into myself and use writing to try and articulate whatever was in my head. Or writing would become a vehicle to create healthier, more enjoyable spaces for my psyche to inhabit than whatever real life offered.

I still have most of my musings. Whether scrawled illegibly by hand or typed furiously into the screen of a Word document and saved on a memory stick, it’s all there, somewhere, buried in a shoe box or folder in a cupboard.

Pretty much all of those thoughts and documents are unfinished, including the suicide note I began writing, sitting at my desk at work one afternoon in 2014, feeling completely and utterly devoid of hope. I’ve never re-read it, but I still have it somewhere. There’s some kind of morbid irony in including something along the lines of ‘if you’re reading this, then for once I’ll have seen something through to a successful conclusion’ in an unfinished final letter to loved ones.

Thankfully, I didn’t see things through to a successful conclusion. Instead, I locked myself in a side office and reached out to the Samaritans.

Writing for work

Let’s fast forward to December 2021. We’ve had the pandemic, and I’ve been working in the rail sector for seven years. It’s been a great journey. I’ve found myself and, for the first time, presented my authentic self at work. As a result, mental health only occasionally hit the buffers, but my openness led to support and care from colleagues. It’s been two years since I received a diagnosis of bipolar II, and work has provided me with reasonable adjustments. However, with the post-COVID push for an office return gathering pace, I decide to take voluntary redundancy to find something I can do fully remotely and, ideally, work for myself.

But what?

During the closing months of the pandemic, I enrolled in an online copywriting course. There’d already been mumblings about a round of redundancies looming, and with middle management usually the first on the chopping block, I’d begun to plan ahead. Why not just monetise writing?

Although not certified, the course was excellent. I could learn at my own pace, receiving lifetime access to some really good material and peer support throughout. After three months and many excellent exercises, I felt I could make a decent attempt at writing compelling, creative copy. I’ve always loved alliteration.

I took 6 weeks off after banking my redundancy cheque and won my writing contract in February 2022. From that moment, I didn’t look back. By May, I’d won a five-figure contract writing about two things I had a huge interest in. Football and history. Other contracts included writing about mental health, project management processes, emerging technologies in the medical space, and ads for Australian funeral homes. The work was varied and enormously enjoyable.

Year 1 was good. I established myself and a core of great clients. Year 2 (2023) was even better. I created some highly profitable partnerships and hit my earnings targets. I also joined a local business networking group, which moved me closer to my goal for 2024 of working directly with local businesses and creating a positive impact in the local community.

Within a week of 2024 dawning, I’d lost my two biggest paying clients and 85% of my earnings. Both cited financial and economic challenges behind their decisions that saw them pivot fully towards AI-created content. That pressed the trigger on a starting gun that saw me slide from earning £3500 to £4000 monthly, to less than £1500, and by the beginning of this year, less than £500. In April this year, I earned a princely £43 through copywriting.

A blank page: The writer’s nemesis!

I quite enjoyed the networking. I met loads of different people across a massive range of industries. Yet, despite a lot of initial interest, it quickly became obvious that in the same way that I didn’t have the budget to commit to getting a new website designed or getting the scuffed alloys on my car repaired, other business owners didn’t have a budget for marketing. Sadly, good intentions don’t pay the bills.

In addition, pieces of 100% human-created writing were increasingly failing AI content checks. I sometimes used Chat GPT or Perplexity for high-level research on new topics. They were better than Google, although they always needed fact-checking. However, not once did I ever pass off AI-generated content as my own work. The absurdity was illustrated when I put the same article through two AI-content checkers. One flagged it as 97.4% ‘probable AI-generated’ writing, while the other cleared it without issue.

Meanwhile, the budgets for clients I did have were being squeezed. I was spending a couple of hours on pieces and receiving £20 or less.

Last month, I finally made the decision that, while I wouldn’t turn down the right job, I wasn’t going to waste my time looking for work that was unfulfilling, poorly paid, and trying to clear arbitrary AI checkers. I’d lost the love, I’d lost the motivation, and I simply didn’t want to write anymore.

I know I’m not alone. The Guardian ran a piece last week about how businesses turning to AI for creative work, such as writing and graphic design, is hurting livelihoods and decimating creative industries.

Thank goodness for those increasingly few clients who understand the value of human-based creativity. You know who you are, and you are cherished by all of us.

Enter Shikari Substack!

‘You should join Substack!’

It was a night time conversation that had begun with me climbing upon my soapbox at about 11:30 pm, talking about the abandonment of a women’s football cup final the weekend before. The suggestion came out of the blue, and as we talked, I reached for my phone to check it out.

Thirty hours later, I’d signed up and posted my first piece. A massive 3,163-word missive about politics, about men in decision-making positions, about hypocrisy, about women in sport, about history. And it felt good. I don’t mind that it won’t receive a huge audience. I don’t write for views and likes.

Instead, I felt a sense of accomplishment for posting something I was proud of and seeing it through to a conclusion. I’d gotten something off my chest, I’d managed to knit together different topics into a fairly coherent think piece, and stopped it from swirling endlessly around my head at 2 am on a Thursday.

I do have a lot to say. As I’ve aged, I’ve become more politically motivated. I’ve become more comfortable and confident in who I am, what I believe in, and most importantly, things that affect others.

And I love to write. So, what better platform for me than Substack? Rather than feeling frustrated, I once again have somewhere I can vent my spleen when I need to, or release my creativity when the mood hits.

It’s just like Myspace, just without the reassuring presence of Tom looking back over his shoulder at me, and me displaying greater maturity and self-awareness.

What you can expect!

It will be so simple for my feed to become a dumping ground for pieces airing my despair at the modern world. Just yesterday, my blood pressure rose upon seeing people I know sharing petitions on the UK parliamentary website aimed at removing government funding for people seeking asylum.

I felt anger, angst, and gloom at Keir Starmer firing the starting gun on rearmament with huge capital investment in the armed forces while forcing through cuts to foreign aid and welfare budgets, never mind seeing this as something to celebrate. I marvelled at defence companies like Raytheon marking Pride month for their employees while their Paveway II and IV laser-guided bombs are reputedly being used to bombard the women and children of Palestine.

Don’t get me wrong, I expect there’ll be plenty of that. I want to hold people to account. Especially other men who are so often the cause of society’s ills through our ego-driven words, actions, and intentions.

But I want to celebrate too. There’s so much good shit in amongst the despair and toxicity suffocating the world right now. People are doing extraordinarily brave, vital, and brilliant things that fly under the radar, helping vulnerable people across marginalised communities. People who are just doing the right thing because it’s the right thing.

And I want to write much creatively. Get back into the flow of exploring silly short stories. Or using experiences that have made me laugh like a drain or sob helplessly, and viewing them through different lenses. I want to finish them, share them, and most likely, forget them.

Since you’ve managed to stumble across this little patch of virtual real estate, I hope there’s something here you enjoy. Perhaps I’ll have written something that makes you think and ponder. Maybe raise a smile, possibly a frown, and potentially even a titter of amusement. Thank you for reading and engaging in whatever way you choose.

Yours, a 44-year-old writer (43 at the time of his avatar pic).