So, it’s possible it was inevitable.
I’ve always had a complex that tells me I’m lazy. I can pinpoint the exact moment it started. When I was ten, I wanted to build a bamboo teahouse out of the - I’m estimating - 100,000 stalks of bamboo that lined the alleyway next to our house. With a tiny saw, I hacked down dozens and dozens and dozens of stalks of eight foot high bamboo, rooted four sturdy posts into the ground in the yard, and started building walls by binding the stalks to the posts with rags, because a hammer and nails would split the bamboo.
I spent months on it. I built walls about a foot high - I wanted it to be like an open-air gazebo I’d seen in a book on Japanese gardens. I could see myself and my two cousins sipping cups of jasmine tea as plum blossoms floated down around us. It would be perfect, and it would be MINE, and it would make other people happy.
But my real ambition was to put a roof on it. I wanted to construct it from bamboo as well, but I really had no idea how to make it both stable, attached, and unlikely to fall on my head and kill me. I did not have an engineering or even particularly crafty brain, just the big ideas of an imaginative kid. One day, as I was struggling to figure out how a four-foot-tall person could build a roof on a seven-foot-high gazebo, my mom said to me something I’ll never forget: “Your dad doesn’t think you’re the type of person who finishes things.”
NOW, before we get mad at my parents, who are WONDERFUL people who were allowing an insane ten year-old child to take up a huge chunk of the yard to build a bamboo monstrosity, I’m certain mom didn’t mean this in a bad way. She was, at the very least, a 45 year old woman with 5 children between the ages of 10 and 26, that she even remembered to speak to me at all on a daily basis is cause for celebration. She may have even meant it to motivate me to prove the idea of me as lazy as wrong.
It didn’t, though. I never worked on it again.
And there’s been an element of that in a lot I do, including (Hey Jessica, wanna find a point?) this newsletter.
When I started this, I had big dreams and ambitions that it would help support me financially while allowing me to work as an artist and entertainer, hoping to turn over the large numbers of people who follow me on twitter to people who would like to read more of my writing for money. That did not happen. It may simply be that my appeal as a writer is best suited to 240 character observations, and that I don’t deserve financial investment as a writer - I don’t discount that possibility. But in effect, it took an audience of 45,000 people and turned it into an audience of about 20. That is…abysmal.
It’s just as hard for me to stick to a project when I feel like nobody is either supporting it or enjoying it as it was when I was ten years old.
So I’ve decided to shut the paid version of the newsletter down. I am simply not doing justice to the people who have chipped in their $5 a month for my work, because it is such a small number of people that it feels like I can’t possibly be doing much good. I would rather send you all occasionally free newsletters that I don’t have to feel guilty about to everyone than continue to fail those willing (or able, don’t get me wrong, we’re in a pandemic) to support working artists.
Here’s the thing about that teahouse roof: nobody wanted to help me build it. Some artists work best in isolation, I am not one. When people pitch in to help me on an endevour, I am immediately excited to work on it. When calls for even very effortless things like hitting a like button or sharing my freely available work are widely ignored, I can’t believe I’m doing anything worthwhile. And that’s no one’s fault but mine, and maybe that’s not how artists should work, but I believe that thing that keeps many of us on the “starving artist” side of things is that we are rejected by communities rather than truly valued by them. I will gladly work for money or enthusiasm, but not for neither, not forever.
So I’d ask you, as I say goodbye to the paid substack model, to look at the amount of content you consume for free. Twitter posts by comedians or artists or philosophers, articles you read for free on struggling entertainment sites, music you can listen to on YouTube forever without buying a MP3. We all love free content, and we all need an endless amount of it to fill the long soulless days of this crisis. But we’ll lose it if we don’t offer help to artists who are trying to provide it. I’m not under the impression that my contribution is much of a loss for anyone — but there are other artists out there with better work who will also go, over time, if this model doesn’t change.
Please email me if you’ve recently renewed your subscription and would like a refund, I’m happy to provide it. I am deeply grateful to those of you who did support me in any way throughout this year.
Good luck out there.