Why I am starting a Substack: The Short Version
I need an outlet. I feel like I have things to say, but nowhere currently to say them, so my thoughts fester unprocessed and underdeveloped. My main hopes are 1) that this will give me reason to write more consistently and 2) that other people might find what I have to say interesting.
I know that “interesting” can be a vague and uncompelling word, but it really is what I mean. I’ve spent the last decade-and-change afraid that my longer form thoughts come off as boring, pretentious, and, worst of all, annoying. It’s the result of a history of gifted trauma that I’ll explore more thoroughly below, but for now, it feels vulnerable enough just to let myself write at all. Of course I would love it if my writing could some day help people laugh, help them feel seen, help them process their own thoughts, etc etc etc, but the truth is that I’m not writing for other people right now.
I’m writing for myself.
The Slightly Less Short
Specifically, I’m writing for one part of myself that I think I haven’t done enough to nurture.
There’s a more in depth version of this to come with much more discussion about my ideas regarding a Collective Self and plural systems and split brain patients and all that goodness, but my current condensed self analysis goes as follows:
Every person is really a collection of different needs, abilities, tendencies, and identities doing their best to navigate the world together. There is infinite possible complexity, but for now here are my three approximate primary trait groupings as I see them:
First, there is Smart Sara. I was always a very gifted, sensitive kid with intense ADHD. I was lucky enough to have great parents and great friends, which helped a lot, but I never really fit in no matter where I found myself.
Second, there is Queer Sara. As a transgender person with a protean sexuality in an exclusively cis-het Texas social ecosystem, this was the most confusing, repressed, and frightening part of me growing up.
Third, thankfully, there is Social Sara. Even though I never had any intuitive grasp on the social systems and hierarchies around me, I was always good at listening to and reading individual people. I was definitely weird, but I was also funny and kind. I was good at communicating and deescalating, and people seemed to trust and respect me. For whatever reason, I was lucky enough to have a natural charisma that kept me relatively safe from social harms.
While I have spent the last six years actively nurturing Queer Sara and Social/Performer Sara, I have struggled most of all to fully embrace Gifted Sara. I’ll go into more nitty gritty details in a future post, but the basic gist is that I grew up learning a lot of bad lessons and developing a lot of social fear around fully owning or expressing my intellectual instincts. Largely, I spent the last decade and a half afraid that if I fully indulged in the kinds of curiosities, excitements, intensities, and conversations that felt natural to me, it would make me a pretentious asshole in the eyes of my friends.
In this Substack, I want to force myself to engage with that fear. I want to explore my most philosophical, curious, and overexcited impulses in rebellion against the protective mental alarms telling me to reign myself in. I want to finally accept this part of me and share it with the world, even though I am terrified that the world won’t like it.
In that sense, this Substack is really a Coming Out, but an intellectual one, rather than a queer one.
It might seem weird to think of it in these terms, but as someone who has come out quite a few times in my life now, it really is what it feels like. Forcing yourself to walk into the winds of shame and self doubt, to break free of the protective chains you’ve spent a lifetime unconsciously assembling.*
What to expect
This Substack, of course, won’t be all serious, because I am not that serious of a person, really. While I have lots of thoughts I need to express about giftedness in general and in my case specifically, I also have many other topics I want to explore, from cults to improv to anime to Latin poetry to politics to skepticism to LARP to fantasy to queer history to anarchism to, of course, GENDER.
Basically, I want to post about whatever happens to be interesting to me that week.
I might even post some of the fiction pieces I’ve been working on, though that might scare me more than anything else.
If you read this far, thank you so much! I hope you subscribe. It’s free. And it will make me feel better about what I’m doing. You don’t even have to read the articles if you don’t want to! Though of course I hope you do :)
Also, there is nothing in this world I love more than conversation, so please please feel free to respond to anything I write! Disagreement is always welcome.
*yes, I am imagining that last sentence as an anime scene. Specifically, I was imagining Yukihira Soma striding into the culinary unknown.