Back in 2020, in the first bloom of the pandemic lockdowns with financial panic setting in, some folks suggested I start a Patreon to support my weekly newsletter. At the time, I backed away from the notion for very personal reasons, only to loop around and start Eclectic Projects on March 2021 when things felt a little calmer.
I’m doing a deep dive into patronage and subscription models for writers at present — partially as a way of distracting myself from the existential terror of looming thesis deadlines (I submit at the end of the month!) and partially because January to March of next year will be all about rebuilding what I’m doing here with some theory and focus behind me.
I keep finding myself going to reference and link to this write-up, but newsletters aren’t the best way of archiving information for later consumption, so I’m doing a repost here for linking purposes.
Full write-up is posted below, but the link above will take you to the 2020 newsletter if you’d like to see the response in context. Both my newsletter and this Patreon drifted a bit from the initial format I used three years ago, courtesy of life events, but I find myself oddly nostalgic about it looking back.
PATRONAGE
Last week, a friend of mine mailed back a response to the newsletter that ran something like this:
This is THE SINGLE BEST NEWSLETTER I GET IN MY INBOX every weeks, like clockwork, and I would happily pay for it. Why don’t you have a Patreon page!?!?
And it’s something I’ve considered in the past. The core reason I keep deciding against it is rather the same reason it took me four straight hours and seventeen drafts to draft a two-line reply to their email, which boiled down to: I got that social anxiety, bro, and it’ll sucker punch my writing process if given the smallest opening.
This is the somewhat longer version of that response, because I think it’s occasionally useful to talk about anxiety, and writing, and the way I move past things or manage it. Mental health is so heavily stigmatised that it’s easy to avoid talking about, and I like to do my part to break down that reluctance. Especially since social anxiety doesn’t feel like it should be a big deal for writers, given we spend the bulk of their work hours alone with a laptop or a notepad, ignoring the outside world.
But here’s the thing: Social anxiety loves a deadline and the weight of expectations the way a swarm of piranha’s love a fresh cow dropped into their tank. The deadline means you have a limited amount of time to get things right, and the expectations mean you have a chance to show your ass if you get things wrong. Transforming the newsletter into something I’m obliged to write because people have pledged money, rather than something I choose to write because I enjoy reaching out to people, is a fast ride to procrastination city and endless guilt about not doing enough.
Social anxiety also fired up when I tried to respond to their question. Most days, I do not spend four hours writing a single email. I point it out because that’s an aberration, and it highlights the way I can get derailed when anxiety catches me off guard, especially on the writing front. Part of the struggle came down to the fact that the person who suggested the Patreon is someone I’ve got a huge amount of respect for, and their esteem matters to me. Admitting to anxiety is hard in those circumstances, because I want to project confidence and competence.
Plus, in the back of my head there’s a little voice that thinks a Patreon would be grand—I’d love to be paid to write a newsletter every week, and spend my days researching interesting things to talk about. My primary goal in writing the newsletters is to produce a regular email that’s worth your time investment and deliver more than just a series of “buy my book” messages, and patronage would be a substantial source of external proof that I’m succeeding.
And that’s the thing about social anxiety: it’s simultaneously an alert that your brushing up against something you really value, and feeling the dread that pursuing that thing will reveal just how unworthy of it you really are. I’m borrowing this phrasing from Ellen Hendrickson’s How To Be Yourself, a book that framed the core issue in a way that helped me understand all the ways I felt social anxiety when nobody else was around.
Hendrickson argues that the source of social anxiety lies in the fear that something embarrassing, flawed, or deficient about us will become obvious through our actions—it’s not a dread of judgement by others, but the fear that the folks who judge us are right. And it’s a fear that escalates past the raw nerves everyone gets from time to time and turns into full-fledged behavioural avoidance—it’s better to hide or avoid such reveals of the truth, rather than taking the constant hits to our sense of self-worth and identity.
Obviously, there’s a lot of places where I don’t feel that anxiety regarding writing… or, perhaps, don’t feel that anxiety anymore. In Brian R. Little’s Who Are You, Really?, he talks about the aspects of our personality that are built on personal constructions:, we’re all constructing a series of hypotheses about ourselves and the world around them, then testing them against our experience. Building on the theories of psychologists like George Kelly, Little argues that our baseline assumptions about who we are changes in radical and counterintuitive ways when we pursue projects that are personally meaningful to us.
Which is how someone who feels huge amounts of social anxiety, like me, carves out a twenty-year career as a writer, teacher, and public speaker. I still get anxious—the night before I teach the first day of a class or launch a book is typically nightmarish and sleepless—but I’m typically confident once I get things rolling. I’ve been testing the hypothesis of can I teach/write for money for the better part of twenty years, and the results have been positive. I wanted those things, fought my way through the anxiety, and kept doing them long enough that experience and external feedback built up and shouted down the anxiety goblins whispering all the ways I shouldn’t do this.
The little sparks of anxiety are a reminder that I want to do this well, and the experience is the reminder that I can pull it off. I may have occasional bouts of imposter syndrome, but mostly I’ve got a sense of what I’m good at and what I’m not.
That confidence is highly contextual. When COVID hit, I discovered that my social anxiety fired up with the shift to online teaching because I could no longer see and interact with the students in real time. A huge part of my comfort with teaching lay in my ability to adapt to the demands of the class, and respond to particular needs and questions if I was pitching things the wrong way. I felt a similar discomfort when university marking moved online, and I spent more time to provide far less feedback because of the limitations of the online marking systems.
I’ve experienced the same issues when writing projects shift context on me. Writing stories I intend to submit blind is way easier than writing stories commissioned for an anthology, because the latter pre-supposes that I’ll write something good instead of judging the work on its own strengths. Writing my PhD has been an ongoing exercise in stress management because don’t have a decent feel for how the assessment works or what’s expected of me, particularly when dealing with the theoretical writing.
These things aren’t unmanageable—both my PhD and writing for anthologies are important enough that I factor in extra time in order to get the writing done—but it’s harder and slower and I need to be really rigorous about self-care. If I don’t, an entire month will slip by where I’ve fallen into depression and spent fourteen hours a day playing wrestling sims, Spiderman, and CIV IV on my computer. Then I’m behind on everything, and the anxiety cycle doubles down and whispers louder in my head.
Patreon wouldn’t be a big shift in context, but it would be enough to second-guess myself. There’s a freedom when you write a newsletter for free, both in terms of what you write about and in your ability to expand or contract the weekly content as circumstances shift. When my circumstances are already shifting fast—into changing employment circumstances, and from self-publisher into small press—that’s an extra layer of trouble I don’t have the spoons to navigate.