Wait... I can explain!
On life, love, and the future of this newsletter.
Hello? Anybody still here?
I'm writing this at the San Diego Grand Hyatt Manchester, I’m in the Harbor Tower to be specific, one of two pastel-colored monoliths erupting into the sky, teetering on the edge of the San Diego Bay. I'm here for a conference related to my day job but decided to play career-roulette and momentarily duck my workplace responsibilities, whisking myself up the elevator and into the tranquil sanctuary of my room because of a sudden and overwhelming urge to return here, to MidThoughts.
Logging into substack and wiping the cobwebs off of my publisher dashboard to find my precious 28 subscriber count undeterred by my 8 months of cold indifference, still waiting for me despite my heartless and cruel act of abandonment is getting me all choked-up and emotional.
Well, Daddy's home little ones, and looking down at your big, watery, saucer-eyes and clenched lips, I'm overwhelmed with guilt. I hope you can find it in your pure and untainted little hearts to forgive me.
Regardless, I knew I'd come back here someday. Truth is, back in May I attempted to draft up a post titled Love Does not Exist in this Dojo, (Which I am 130% gonna reuse, so don't steal that shit) that attempted to explain why I went from log-flipping, Rocky Balboa levels of determination to see this newsletter to success, to a sudden, unexplained departure as cruel and merciless as the day my biological father walked out of my life forever (true story, bro).
Well, fast forward to the end of November, and I finally find myself with enough inspiration and courage to offer up a proper explanation.
I fell in love y'all. I fell into a syrupy, extra-sweet, watermelon Jolly Rancher type of love. A love born of fate, but with enough complications tossed our way in the process to truly test ourselves and make sure that the commitment level was real. More details to come as deemed fit and necessary, but for now... yeah, love.
But this post isn't about my love story. This post is about MidThoughts, a newsletter that as I stand here looking back at it, was my almost project. After spending over half of my life constantly dicking around with the idea of going all in on this writing thing, picturing myself as a milder, less fun Hunter S. Thompson, hopping in my RAV4 in thirst of acetaminophen-fueled adventure in the produce aisle. In that wild, writer's pipedream, MidThoughts was the closest I came to making those ambitions a reality.
Strangely, I feel as if I intentionally aborted in the name of love just as I was finally making headroads with this project. I was getting comments from other writers that I truly respected, and I had a couple of posts gain a readership beyond any of my feeble expectations. So when love entered the picture, that was my perfect opportunity to self-sabotage and find my exit ramp, relieving me of the burden of thinking up new content every couple of weeks while navigating a new and exciting relationship.
But now, amid this soulless trade show, rubbing shoulders with what feels like over 10,000 backpack-toting technology zombies, all typing notes they will never look at again on expensive, carefully maintained iPads connected to magic keyboards, I had the urge to break free from all of this digital noise and dull industry chatter to pull something out of myself that has been sitting dormant and unnurtured for months on end.
So that's why I'm here, liberated from all of the sleep-inducing talk of firewall appliances, and multi-factor authentication tokens taking place down below, returning to this space that once showed so much potential and promise to me as a creative endeavor at this time last year.
So where does MidThoughts go from here?
That's not an easy question to answer. But let me say first that I want to take another serious crack at this whole newsletter thing. The urge to begin writing stuff again has hit me hard and I'm trying to tame that skittish attention span of mine again. It's been full of that wild horse energy, all snorting and braying in open defiance, kicking up dust and causing trouble for me whenever I show up with the lasso and a gentle timbre in my voice to begin to calm and temper it.
I've been committing myself to hunkering down for writing sessions again. Rehabbing my creative self slowly, building back up to a respectable daily habit. Over the past several weeks 10 minutes of writing after dinner has grown to 15, and then 20. I've managed to round the half-hour mark and now am heading north, hovering somewhere around 40-ish minutes, five or six times a week.
I'm ready to take the plunge again, but I'm split on the direction I want to head in. The beautiful, sickly distraction of love and an eight-month break from keeping those writer's sensibilities sharpened on the whetstone of life have no doubt pulled me in other directions than I was headed earlier this year, leaving me a little conflicted.
I want to relaunch the newsletter. That much I'm certain of. I just don't know what that consists of yet. Do I keep the name? Or do I tear this vacant structure down like they did The Tropicana and rebuild it according to my new bubbling whims? Do I continue a focus on middle-age adjacent material, or do I expand into other territories? Common Substack wisdom tells me that expanding into broader topics is a bad thing. I should be finding my niche. But if not focusing on contending with middle-age, then what? Truthfully, I'm feeling a lot younger at 45 than the 44-year-old shell of a man I crawled out of earlier this year.
I want to maintain that playful, borderline-immature tone that keeps me smiling through all of the hopelessness that we face today, in a simmering, uncertain world caught in the swirl of the widening gyre. I mean, I have to. That's just who I am. But as far as where I want to aim that loaded cannon of silliness, I just don't know yet.
Just know that I'm on the way back. MidThoughts is on the way back, even if it's resurrected in a new form. I'm just doing some work on the back end here, hammering out the details of the contract.
Of course, if anybody is still out there all these months later, I'd love your input / personal experiences. Bonus points if you have your own newsletter and have faced a similar extended absence and/or mild change of heart in your creative compass.
In the meantime, just know that I'm still around, and am gearing up for something. Give me a little more time to figure out how to properly get myself back here in working order.
See you soon...
Congratulations on love … and the returning words. My thoughts, though you didn’t ask, is just write some stuff … no need to overthink what it is, what it means, what the publication is called … just write, right. All that other stuff will emerge. Oh, and engage with a bunch of folk about their words … it’s way more likely they’ll peek in at yours then. Have fun.