A Welcome Letter

Reasons for starting. Hopes for the page. Things to look forward to.

Friends,

First off, thank you for being here.

I’ve been flirting with the idea of sharing my writing online for quite some time now. Whether in the form of journals, poems, or personal essays, writing has always been there to help me consolidate my thoughts, process life events, or put form to feelings I had hitherto thought indefinable. It’s functioned as a very useful (and very personal) tool to help me navigate the expanse of my internal experience.

But recently, anytime I sit down to write something, a silly sort of loneliness washes over me. I find myself not wanting the conversation to end when I close my notebook. I know how generative writing can be for me—and the prospect of it being generative for others has begun to excite me more than ever.

Of course, as many of us know, the light of our excitement has a nasty habit of casting an equally proportionate shadow of doubt. And this doubt has stopped me from sharing my writing up until this point. It’s all the usual nagging narratives… Is my writing good enough? Will people care about anything I have to say? What if my writing is trash and the internet clowns me?

At the top of my to-do list, I leave little notes of advice to reference throughout the day. One such note has been collecting cobwebs for quite sometime now:

A chance at connection will always outweigh the possibility of rejection.

I’m not sure what drove me to write that down at the time—but I think I’m ready to take it to heart. To me, the ultimate goal of expression is to connect. With ourselves. With each other. I suppose even collectively hating on something is its own messed up form of connection too.

At the end of the day, if my writing can function as even the smallest point of connection or introspection for folks, I’ll view this Substack as a success.

San Diego, CA. Photo by me.

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A Respite From Doomscrolling

If you’ll indulge me, I’d love to explain why I’m so amped about Substack—and why I think a social media platform with an emphasis on sharing writing could be very healing in the age of doomscrolling. (Pinky promise I’m not being paid to say any of this—I really am just excited to be sharing on here!)

As much as I love posting and interacting on social media, I’ve found myself longing for a more nuanced platform—one that has the ability to handle the complexities and contradictions of modern life.

We can cherish the opportunities of expression and connection that platforms like Instagram and TikTok have given us—while also recognizing the damage being wrought by their sustained and compulsory usage.

The largest casualty in the virtual war for engagement is undoubtedly our attention spans. Our brains are being recalibrated to prioritize media that can be consumed in thirty seconds or less.

I’m a firm believer that reading long-form pieces of writing (long-form in this day-and-age being even a 5-10 minute read) can significantly help heal the damage that’s been done to our attention spans—as well as encourage deep thought on issues that ultra-brief posts simply can’t do justice.

Ever wonder why the world feels like it’s going to implode anytime you go on social media? Part of the reason is because media companies know they can grab your attention much more successfully when you’re scared. Your fear is an incredible attention motivator.

Social media platforms become even more of a hotbed for fear when highly complex and multi-faceted issues are being distilled down to their most basic, most partisan, click-bait forms. When we ingest world-affairs in this way, it’s a lot easier for us to dehumanize, vilify, and feel more divided than we actually are. The more ignorant you are of an issue, the more scared you’ll be—and the easier it is for you be manipulated.

Don’t get me wrong. There is a lot going wrong in the world—but if we want even a chance to truly care about something, thirty seconds of information is simply not enough. Whether we’re reading about global politics, psychological studies, historical accounts, or far-fetched conspiracy theories—we cannot properly bring ourselves to a subject while wielding only a TikTok video and a dream.

In this way, reading on substack has been a great respite from doomscrolling. While not all posts are created equal, it’s been intensely comforting to read a person’s thoughts at length. Do I agree with everything I’ve read? Nope. But for the most part, it seems like a majority of folks on here take a lot of care in crafting their posts.

Do I think Substack is the panacea to all our digital (and cognitive) ills? Also no. But I do think we are in desperate need of a return to longer forms of expression on the internet. And it’s a large reason I’m so excited to start sharing on here.

Santa Monica, CA. Photo by me.

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My Hopes, And A Case for Grace

On any given day, more than a few weighty thoughts lumber around my head searching for some sort of outlet. Typically, these thoughts crash their way into the flow of daily conversation with friends (shoutout to everyone over the last month who endured me shoe-horning Plato’s “Allegory of a Cave” into our interaction…it will happen again).

At the very least, I hope this substack can provide an outlet for these philosophical thoughts, existential musings, or simple worldly observations. As a result, these posts will come in all shapes and sizes! In addition to long-form writing, I’ll be sharing some of my poetry as well.

At the very most, I’d love for this space to encourage the sharing of thoughts. I sincerely want to know what you (yes, you) have to say about it all. I understand it’s a tall order to ask of any comments section, but it’s my hope that each post can function as a corner of the internet where care, consideration, and egalitarian motives are on display.

On that note—at the risk of being too didactic, I’d love to share some considerations I believe could help us immensely in achieving this hope:

If you feel so inclined to partake in the comments sections of these posts—please remember to take a breath and ask yourself: “Am I engaging in this discussion to share and learn, or am I engaging in this discussion to win?”

I’ve found this question to be transformative across all levels of conversation. It pushes the dialog to achieve greater compassion and understanding. When we orient ourselves in this way, it releases us from our egotistical need to be right. Ultimately, this is how we cultivate a larger capacity for acceptance and forge a path to a more objective examination of any given topic.

Another invaluable tool of interaction we have at our disposal is grace. The ability to extend grace to another person is a uniquely profound conversational skill—one that is increasingly hard to employ on the internet, but one that our world on the whole is starved for.

On an interpersonal level, giving grace can unlock a person to you. Without it, they may have remained a closed door. In leaving that door closed, you’d be free to make up whatever narratives you wanted about about them—you could make them out to be some sort of boogieman or a prime example of what’s wrong with the world. But in doing so, you’d be keeping yourself in a box.

Achieving connection and fostering change becomes a lot harder when we write people off the moment they say or do something that rubs us the wrong way.

Now, I’m not saying giving grace isn’t supremely difficult. I also don’t think you should force yourself to interact with people who actively make you feel unsafe or unwanted. But when we deny someone else’s innate complexity and contradiction, we deny ourselves the same.

On a community-wide scale, the giving of grace could quite possibly mean the difference between wide-spread division or wide-spread compassion and understanding. Something that could stand to benefit us all. Maybe that sounds overly idealistic—but I truly believe in grace’s power for positive change.

(Sidebar: there are quite a few folks on the internet whose only goal is to be a troll and to piss people off. In those cases, giving grace might seem like a moot point—but perhaps the most constructive form of grace we can gift these folks… is to ignore them.)

Sequoia National Park, CA. Photo by me.

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And that’s all I have to say! If you’ve made it this far, thank you. I’m beyond excited to share more with you. I’ll have another post up soon—one I am currently having a ton of fun writing. Keep on the lookout for it. It’ll be titled: “I Hope Bad Things Happen To You”.

I plan to share more poetry in between these larger posts as well : )

As a little thank you, I’ll end with a small poem I wrote for a dreary day:

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The sun still kisses me 
On the coldest of days

When not one patch of blue
Would deign to meet my gaze

Yellow rays don coats of gray
And rouse my lips to bloom

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“The sun still kisses me”, by Blake Roman.

Written February 20th, 2026

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~ blake

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