At 40, you're at that point in your life where you have as much to look forward to as to look back. And I have been doing a fair bit of both lately which is, I think, quite uncharacteristic of me. I seem to have a lot of time to spare, time to reflect, to waste on Instagram. I even have a Disney+ account to watch The X-Files, something I never got to do growing up because we didn’t have cable.
I suspect my biggest gripes in therapy have been “what am I doing with my life” and how I am spending so much of my life on my phone. This Substack is hopefully killing two birds with one stone -- getting me off my device; and getting me back to writing. Ruskin Bond wrote his first novel when he was 17 and I can truthfully say that if I were to die tomorrow, my biggest regret is going to be that my biggest regret has remained the same for the last 25 years.
Having said that, I still do see this as just another attempt at blogging. I wonder how many people will remember Blogger. That was the first blogging medium I started on, so many years ago now. Then there were a couple of attempts on WordPress and at some point, I did have a Tumblr account. I don't think I ever went into Medium though I did consider it right now, as I was debating whether that might be a better option than Substack.
What will I write about? I don't know but I am going to start by posting some of my older stories. I do tend to write about things I know, places I know, people I know. Even when I write fiction, they are usually set in environments I'm familiar with.
Will I be regular? No clue. I probably don’t want that kind of pressure but I hope I will be. If nothing else, it should get me to stop complaining about being a consumer of content by being a creator instead. The one good thing, though, is that if this experiment is also a failure, it will fade into obscurity with no one the wiser.