I Will Keep Writing Every Day Until They Come to Take Me Away

Imagine the world where you want to live and then try to will it into being

Hello Friends!

I want to start off by expressing my gratitude to the Substack community. You have all been an enormous help to me as I try to wrap my head around our new reality. I still haven’t arrived at a place of comfort, but I find it’s better to be active than to sit around and wallow in despair.

Last week, I established a retirement account for my kids. I didn’t have a lot of money to put in there, but they can’t touch it until they’re 59 anyway. Perhaps it’s a little bit silly, but it made me feel better to think that they’ll have something even if they’re robbed of Social Security.

You see, this is how you overcome your anxiety. You fixate on the source of your worry and take appropriate action.

I’ve also been going through the house and getting rid of clutter. I tend to let things pile up. I decided to get rid of my treadmill since I’ve been running with my daughter lately. Yesterday, I disassembled it and a friend of mine is coming to pick it up.

As much as getting rid of that treadmill is good for my mental health, picking it up is good for my friend. He, too, will have something new to focus on and take his mind off things.

This is how we help each other. We establish connections. We reach out. We communicate. We persist!

I expect that I will more or less retire the “politics” section of this newsletter for the time being. Part of a writer’s job is to read the room, and I don’t think my audience wants to hear about that right now. At the same time, political commentary will always be a component of my work. But I want to pivot to productive social justice and hopefulness.

There’s a name that I won’t use anymore because I want to pretend that name doesn’t exist. I expect I’m not the only one. Moving on to more positive things…

Zoom meetings

A drawing my daughter did some time ago.

I had another zoom meeting last Friday, this time with author

JR Roessl

. I’ve worked with her on a couple of stories that were Boosted on Medium and she’s worth checking out.

I enjoy having the opportunity to talk with my readers, so I expect I’ll continue to offer Zoom meetings. Friday at 2PM CST is a good time because I’m already starting to feel tired from the week.

JR mentioned that she hadn’t been receiving the emails from my podcast. That makes me wonder about what happens when you add a new section to your newsletter. Is it the case that existing readers aren’t automatically added to new sections?

I wanted to give you all the opportunity to unsubscribe from the content you don’t want. I’ve been sending out 2-3 emails per day (I’m going to leave it at 2 from now on I expect), and I wanted to give you all the option to unsubscribe from a section rather than unsubscribe from the newsletter.

Using the same process, you can go in and see if there are sections you are not subscribed to. Here’s the tutorial:

The kerfuffle with the comments

Another reader,

Sarah3000

(she’s also producing excellent work), mentioned that when you hit the comment button in various emails, you were sent to my article about the 100 mile bicycle ride.

I think that happened because I’ve been cutting and pasting the footer into these articles rather than building them every time. I want to make sure you all have access to my Christmas tree of discount tiers. I didn’t realize that the comment button was linked to the article (in hindsight, that’s pretty obvious).

Well, of all the mistakes to make in the universe, that’s not the worst one.

This was a hard thing to figure out since I had been receiving comments even on articles with a bad comment link. Maybe it worked if you were on the Substack page, but it didn’t work if you were clicking on the email link?

Who knows? In the future, I’ll make sure to paste in the correct comment button. Thanks for pointing that out Sarah!

This month on Medium

I’ve been having a slow month on Medium as far as Boosts go, but the election has thrown everything out of whack. I did get one through last week which you can read here:

How My Wife Helped an Immigrant Child Overcome the Trauma of Separation

I want to write more stories where I detail the kind of preventable suffering that goes on in the United States which is directly due to inaccurate or hateful political rhetoric.

I think in doing this we can appeal to the human side even of people we disagree with. The way I see it, there’s this enormous gap between the reality people want to recognize and the struggles people have to endure. If we can bridge that gap and make people recognize the hardships people face, perhaps we can find greater agreement in a commitment to positive action.

Again… this is a strategy that might seem foolish, but it provides me with comfort in the short term and there’s a chance it might bring some benefits in the future. What else can we do?

Thanks to Jason Provencio!

On Saturday,

Jason Provencio

offered one of my articles to his subscribers as a guest post. I appreciate the gesture and the opportunity to meet new readers. If you want to read it, here you go:

Why I’m Advising My Children to Plan on Leaving the United States

That’s it for today everyone! As always, don’t hesitate to leave your questions and comments. Here’s (the correct this time) button:

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