Very curious about Ved’s question below - why compartmentalize what you call the human from the professional. It’s a classical ‘male’ move and something i’ve spent my career (and substack) trying to integrate : the personal and the professional.
It’s their separation that leads to a lack of trust and authenticity I’d posit.
Congrats on clarifying and organizing, but think you could just reorganize your substack into sections that would be synergistic.
I hold you and your work in extreme regard, so your comment bears much weight with me. The last thing I want is to rob the writing of its authenticity or fall into old, tired archetypes of masculinity. 🙄 Since this is something you (and the others) have flagged as potentially suboptimal, I will be rethinking my approach.
I did give a little answer on Ved’s comment, but unfortunately can’t tag others in my response. So, here is much of the same answer but from a different POV -- A lot of my initial reasoning, as you correctly said, revolves around organization and clarification. I feel like Prolix was suffering from a kind of digital "urban sprawl" which was confusing to people and limiting the audience. When having conversations in the real world, it was difficult to describe exactly what I write about and it made me realize that I was, perhaps, trying to use it for too many things, rather than as a focused newsletter. Committing to a single lane feels clearer to the readers and more sustainable for me. While I played with the sections feature in the background for the last couple weeks, I wasn’t confident that I could execute this well, plus I was happy to reclaim some of my content into a secondary space that I have more control over since Substack seems to be evolving (understandably) into a different project than what it was a few years ago.
Thanks again for speaking up, and for all your wisdom and support -- it helps me stay on course! Seriously, I will be rethinking this and try to find a way that avoids the pitfalls you mentioned...
Very curious about Ved’s question below - why compartmentalize what you call the human from the professional. It’s a classical ‘male’ move and something i’ve spent my career (and substack) trying to integrate : the personal and the professional.
It’s their separation that leads to a lack of trust and authenticity I’d posit.
Congrats on clarifying and organizing, but think you could just reorganize your substack into sections that would be synergistic.
Just saying…
Hi Avivah 👋
I hold you and your work in extreme regard, so your comment bears much weight with me. The last thing I want is to rob the writing of its authenticity or fall into old, tired archetypes of masculinity. 🙄 Since this is something you (and the others) have flagged as potentially suboptimal, I will be rethinking my approach.
I did give a little answer on Ved’s comment, but unfortunately can’t tag others in my response. So, here is much of the same answer but from a different POV -- A lot of my initial reasoning, as you correctly said, revolves around organization and clarification. I feel like Prolix was suffering from a kind of digital "urban sprawl" which was confusing to people and limiting the audience. When having conversations in the real world, it was difficult to describe exactly what I write about and it made me realize that I was, perhaps, trying to use it for too many things, rather than as a focused newsletter. Committing to a single lane feels clearer to the readers and more sustainable for me. While I played with the sections feature in the background for the last couple weeks, I wasn’t confident that I could execute this well, plus I was happy to reclaim some of my content into a secondary space that I have more control over since Substack seems to be evolving (understandably) into a different project than what it was a few years ago.
Thanks again for speaking up, and for all your wisdom and support -- it helps me stay on course! Seriously, I will be rethinking this and try to find a way that avoids the pitfalls you mentioned...