241: Finding Freedom and Financial Reciprocity through a Paid Newsletter with Nic Antoinette

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They are paying to support this thing that they already like. Like they're not expecting you to become a different person now that they're on the other side of the paywall and just really investigating what are our assumptions on that and what do we expect of ourselves And I'm not willing to exploit myself for my work, exploit myself for money or if I were then I could go get a different job and if it's not feeling good for me then eventually I am going to wind up presenting it. So.

This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Welcome back Free Timers. I am so excited to have a long time blog friend even though we don't use that word anymore. Nicole Antoinette here with me today. Nicole is a writer, long distance hiker and former indoor kid who never imagined she'd wind up spending months of each year pooping in the woods. In 2017, stuck in a loop of codependency and people pleasing, she set off to find her self belief and inner resilience by doing something she did not for one second believe she could actually do and the results are two adventure memoirs. She also has a weekly substack called Wild Letters and we last spoke on pivot episode 342 and I meant to ask Nicole about her books and her hikes and the journey through the great outdoors. We ended up talking so much more about the inner journey of navigating life as a creative business owner. So I thought it would be fun to continue the conversation here on free time. You're going to hear about the sabbatical she's currently on, making an exception to record this, changing her substack to entirely paid over the summer and her mantra, which is actually what I want to start with Whatever comes through me comes for me for first. So, Nicole, welcome to the show.

Thank you. What a delight to get to hang out with you and talk about all of these things to which I feel like there are no answers, but lots of good questions.

I remember bumming around San Francisco in 2009 and all of us were blogging and you would make fun of me. You're like, this Jenny is not life after college. Jenny, whatever you had seen online was a little different when we were actually out hitting the town. But I digress. You said this line for the pivot conversation and it has stuck with me ever since. What comes through me comes for me first. Tell me more about that. What does that mean to you?

I feel like I've said that in other places before and have never been asked more information about it. So this is the first time I think I will try to articulate it. So bear with me. I have been writing and sharing personal stories, like personal essays, blogs, newsletters on the Internet since 2007, which at this point just feels like such a wildly long time. Basically my entire adult life, been writing about myself on the Internet. And it's the type of writing that I know the best, that I love the most, that I love to read the most, is this real time personal storytelling. And I've often thought about why in all of the different iterations of content, creative work, tiny business ownership, all of the different offerings and programs and things that I have created and retired over the years, why writing has been the through line, why is that the thing that really sticks, and it has been the only thing that has come through every iteration of creative work with me is personal storytelling. And I've often asked myself, okay, well, if I like to write my way through things. Writing really, for me is a way that I understand myself. It's a way that I understand what's happening to me, what's happening within me, what's happening in the world, world. But for some reason, that's not something that I can really do in journal format. I've often tried writing my way through hard times by myself, and I do have somewhat of a journaling practice and list making and I have as many notebooks as the next person. But it's not the same. There's something that feels really necessary for me about that full completion circle of writing about the thing, sharing the thing with the people, and then being in conversation about the thing, or hearing from people that it resonates with. And it's sort of that like cyclical loop. So I'm aware when I'm writing to share stories, you mentioned my substack right now, that's where I'm writing and sharing. I know that it's going to be read by people, so I am writing for them. But it's always been the case that whatever comes through me to share with the people seems to come for me first, meaning that I'm writing for myself first and foremost. And in any iteration of my life where I felt like I was writing for other people or starting to try to write what I thought people wanted to read, it always fell flat, and the writing was never good. And so I just keep coming back to that as a touchstone of whatever I feel like I need to write about. For me, whatever I'm exploring within myself, that's usually where the heat is and where I try to stay with my writing.

I love that phrase. That's where the heat is. And it's so true, because when I try to write for other people, it usually comes across as flat or it's advicey. Whereas what's coming through me and what you're saying, what comes for you first is often the more challenging side of things. So one of the things that came up in the pivot conversation was unbeknownst to each other, you, me, and Tara McMullen all were experiencing a bit of burnout around managing community and holding space for our extended community through our various platforms toward the end of 2020 and into 21. And none of us communicated at that time. But we've all been online a similar amount of time, and only now having had Tara on the podcast to talk about when she shut down her community, what works, and pivoted to what she's doing now, which I love. And then you also recently shut down your Patreon and pivoted solely toward the substack. There's this sense of rawness, I think, sometimes of what's coming forward for you first. And while it does feel good to share, it can also be really challenging to kind of share out loud and also hold the space and create community for so many people at once. So that's a very long winded lead in to just ask, how did you know that you were kind of burnt out from running the community in the incarnation that it was just before you shut down Patreon. So there must have come a point where you realized, this is too much for me or I've shifted or I need to do something differently here. And I'm just wondering if you can take us to that moment.

Yeah, Something that I wish was not true about me is that when I am on other people's podcasts or in conversations like this, I completely black out on whatever it was that I said. So forgive me if any of this is repetitive to what we talked about last time. So I ran a Patreon community for six and a half years. It was the longest standing single offering that I had at the time I mentioned, you know, that I've always been writing, but it kind of pops up in different ways, whether that's a blog or a newsletter for some of that. I was writing specifically just for the Patreon community, and Patreon made up the bulk of my income. And I think maybe a year to a year and a half ago, I started to get the feeling that it was just an offering whose time had come to end. One of the things that's always been true about me, or I guess maybe not always been true, but at least for the last 10 years, in my personal life, in my work life, is I can get sort of this like Spidey sense of when it is almost time for something to wrap up. And I like to try as much as possible to have graceful and slow and non urgent endings of things and to end a project before I wind up really resentful of it. And that way of being was definitely learned the hard way from lots of time, particularly in my early and mid-20s, where I let jobs and relationships and all kinds of things go on way, way, way too long, until I wound up being really miserable and had to kind of scorch to earth my way out of it, which was really stressful and chaotic and unpleasant. So I try as much as possible not to do that. And so it's not like something happened where I thought, I don't want to run a Patreon community anymore, or where I really had the knowing of I'm burnt out on this particular way of doing things. It was more of just a feeling that, as I mentioned before, that the heat was starting to go out of it, but I hadn't reached that point yet. And so for me, I really started to put together a longer term plan of what are the things that I still want to offer to this community or do in this particular iteration of online space before it starts to wrap up. And I had some plans and my thought was to wrap it up towards the end of this year, end of 2023, maybe late summer, early fall at the earliest. I really like to give people time and advance notice of any of these kinds of changes. But what wound up happening for me is at the beginning of June I had what I can sum up as the beginnings of a mental health kind of crisis, mental health collapse, a really strong reemergence of depression that was worse than any that I had experienced in a really long time. And it became really clear to me with how low my capacity was and how much I needed to just focus on my own wellbeing and recovery, that anything that could go, needed to go, essentially. And so I wound up ending the Patreon community pretty abruptly at the end of June. And at least the outward messages I received from people were incredibly supportive. And people really understood that sometimes you have to do what's best for your mental health, even if they wind up being disappointed. So it wound up ending this year, just not in the way that I had expected. And what I realized during that month of June when I was having such a hard time is that I was experiencing depression and some mental health related stuff. And then I was also waking up to almost the realization of this emotional space holding burnout that had been true for years. I just hadn't been really consciously aware of it. It's kind of like everything hit a tipping point at once where there was this sort of work related burnout and then there was also the depression and there was a real Venn diagram overlap with those two things, but they were also separate and needed to be dealt with on their own. And just in terms of the order of priority and stop the bleeding first. I decided to focus on the mental health before I even really started thinking about what is the next iteration of my business going to look like and what do I want it to look like. And I really gave myself permission to put all of those questions down and just shut down as much as possible and take the summer on an almost full sabbatical. I was still writing for my substack because like I mentioned, writing is a lot of the way that I understand things. And I know that I would have felt really isolated and it wouldn't have been supportive for me personally had I stopped writing. But I switched my substack. So for the summer, for July and August, I only wrote for paid subscribers because what I knew that I needed was a much smaller audience. Because part of the burnout was that I was feeling really overexposed after so many years of sharing so many things and so much of myself on so many different platforms to so many thousands of people. It just really felt untenable to me and I needed that smaller container with more trust and Something about that financial reciprocity also felt really good to me. And so that was the decision that I made. And so we're talking now sort of beginning, ish, beginning middle of September. So I'm really just starting to come out of that period.

Well, thank you for sharing. Just the journey that you've been through this summer and the mental health stuff, I mean, is so, so difficult, especially when if you don't know exactly what catapults you into it, you also don't necessarily know what's going to get you out of it. And it sounds like one of the triage things was this shift off of Patreon over to Substack and then within that going to Paid. And I've been following since you made that choice. That's right. When we reconnected for Pivot, you might have shared the numbers publicly before on your substack. You don't have to. You can skip over them. But how many people are on your list versus how many get only the paid messages that you send?

Yeah, I'm trying to think of when I started Substack and now I don't remember because like I said, I've had a newsletter in Summeration for a really long time that I can't always remember which platform it lives on. But the way that it was set up prior to making this decision is that I was writing personal essays once a week and those were going out to everyone. And then they were two features that started out as free that became paid only. One is that I do a monthly column that's essentially like a curated link roundup and sharing space for people in the comments. And then I also do a monthly Reflections podcast with my friend Julia Hanlon. That's sort of a very real time look at what's working, what's not working, what are we focused on during the month? And I had moved that over from Patreon. So basically free people got all of the writing, paid people got all of the writing and those two additional things. And I don't remember what my list size was before I made this jump. It was 4,000 something, maybe 4,200, 4,300. I honestly try, as I know you and I have talked about offline, I try not to pay too much attention to metrics because it's really easy for me to get obsessive. The same like I went through this period of time time with social media as well, getting really obsessed with follower accounts, getting obsessed with likes and engagement and all the things that the powers that be at These platforms want you to get really obsessed with, and that winds up taking away from the writing and from the community space. And it makes me. It almost turns into something dehumanizing where I'm looking at people just as like this, a mass of readers that could potentially turn into profit for me instead of as actual people that I want to be having these conversations with. So I don't have specific numbers to give you, but now I think it's a little bit over 5,000, maybe 51 or 5,200 people subscribing. And before I made this decision, I had in the low 200s, I think, of paid subscribers, maybe close to 250, and now it's almost 600. I was shocked by how many people in just the last couple of months decided to opt into a paid subscription, which obviously you can never pick the brains of everybody who decides to sign up for something. So I won't know the reasons that the people made those decisions. But my theory, my working theory thinking about this over the last couple months is one, I shut down pretty much all of my other public platforms. So I've quit social media, hopefully for good. So I'm not on social media anymore. I don't have my Patreon community anymore. So people who are interested in my work in general, substack is really the only place. So I think that funneling created an uptick in subscribers. The fact that I was only writing for paid people, I think that that gave people a chance to decide, oh, is this something that I want to continue reading over the summer? And for those people for whom the answer was yes, that they were able to do that, I think possibly also because I was publicly admitting to having a hard time that it was a way that people who had been around in my corner of the Internet for a while to show some support in a tangible way. And then since coming off of that period of time where I was only writing for paid folks, the new flow that I've decided on is people who are subscribing for free, get one essay a month, and everything else is for paid subscribers. And so when I announced that, I had another little flurry of people converting, because I think anytime you make a decision like that, you're essentially giving people a chance to have a little fork in the road of, is this something that I want to continue getting or not?

We'll be right back just after this.

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When you said early on that all of a sudden the financial reciprocity felt so freeing and it feels so energizing. That has been my experience too, since starting rolling in dough inspired by you and really seeing that I actually don't want everything I write and share googleable and just public out there on the Internet anymore. Maybe at one time, but there's a real sense of psychological safety behind the paywall, as strange as that is to say. And so it's really not surprising to me to hear that so many people, maybe not the majority of your subscriber base, but that so many people said, oh well, if this is the only way I can keep reading Nicole's brilliant and honest writing, count me in. And it is a fork in the road. And it was fun to see you just say, oh, this actually feels really good. Wow, I'm really enjoying this. There's something energetically that shifted.

It really surprised me how differently I felt about the writing after making this decision that I didn't expect how much more fun I would be having doing it. And obviously when one goes on like I've been less busy in the last couple of months than I have pretty much been in my entire adult life. So I've had plenty of time to think about these things, especially after getting over the hump of trying the antidepressants, finding one that works for me, getting to the point where I'm no longer depressed and just feeling grateful all of the time to not wake up every morning and feel despair. TM so it's like now I'm in the point where I'm past this depressive episode, but now able to look at some of those questions of huh, what do I want my work life to look like going forward? And what kind of writing do I want to do? And a couple things that have come up for me. I almost feel like this has been the final phase of a certain kind of ego death that I'm experiencing. And what I mean by that is for the last couple of years I think that I have been grappling with the fact that I do not want and have never wanted a capital C big career like a career. I've never wanted that. It's something you and I have talked about in the past. I've never had a corporate job. I've never had a quote normal 9 to 5 work for somebody else job. I've always done either cobbling together a couple of different part time things or seasonal things and then starting in 2010 self employment. And I think I've always felt some shame around the fact that based on what we are told success looks like, that my goals weren't big enough or that especially in sort of this self help coaching space and I know that I'm painting with a really broad brush here, sort of this dialogue around if you aren't going for really huge things then you're playing small and that that's a bad thing. And if you don't want your words to be shared with hundreds of thousands or millions of people that it's because you have a fear of visibility. And I don't think it's as binary as that. I don't think it's either you're scared of visibility or you're not. I think that there's a lot of nuance in this. But something that I really don't hear people talking about and haven't heard people talking about is the fact of building a right size work life and a right size life and work. I don't like the word balance, but balance. And I finally feel like the last bit of shame that I had around that has fallen away. And I don't know if it was this experience this summer, but I'm really comfortable now saying going viral sounds like an absolute nightmare to me and friends that I know that has happened to. You know, whether it was social media viral or something that they post that they wrote or something have kind of horror stories to tell behind the scenes. Which doesn't mean that it doesn't further potentially some career aspirations or that you couldn't get a book deal off of it. And I'm sure some people like it, but I honestly don't want it. And I was reflecting this summer on I've been writing, like I said, publicly online for 16 years and almost every single time in any iteration, whether it was A blog or a newsletter platform or something. Anytime the list size started to get to like three or four thousand people, I noticed myself pulling back and feeling uncomfortable and making a change. So I had a list size that was about 5,000 people. This was in maybe early 2015. And I took a break from work and then wound up bringing my newsletter for paid people only into my Patreon community and was all of a sudden writing for 400, 500 people. And it felt so much better. So it's like I've almost given legitimacy to this for myself or been able to legitimize the fact that this is how I have always felt and it's not because of some fear or maybe it is, I don't know. I'm not willing to pull at that particular thread because those just aren't my goals. And what I want is to make things that feel good to make with an amount of people that I can like wrap my head around that number and that I recognize a lot of the names on the email list and that we build some kind of relationship that isn't just this weird parasocial thing. And where I earn what is enough money for me to not just scrape by. But as you know, that's a question I think about a lot is how much money is enough? And I'm trying to answer that for myself that can I do this type of work, earn what is enough money, but not constantly be chasing more, not chasing more money, more accolades, more followers, more shiny bylines. Because personally I don't care about those things. And so I feel like right now I'm in a phase of building whatever is next around a really different set of success metrics that have always been true, but that I haven't allowed to be true because I felt like it said something bad about me that I.

Didn'T want more slow standing, clap a hundred percent. I love what you're saying. And I have had to really quiet my self talk around that too, that oh, if I don't want a big team, it's just because I have limiting beliefs, you know, as a people manager or a business owner or it's some ceiling that I have. I've thought about that too, around how big my base of subscribers or readers is. And I'm like, on the one hand, what I would consider a lot is kind of an arbitrary number. But on the other hand, there is a certain number that's more manageable where you can actually keep up with comments and emails that people might send or notes and things. And I Do think something can get lost when you scale so big that all of a sudden you have three assistants that have to like respond to things?

I mean, that's the. Growing a big team or growing any sort of team is a great example where I have never wanted that. I've worked with people on a contract basis, right? Whether that's for podcast editing or other things, or design work. But I have never, ever wanted to hire someone or to have an employee. And I remember a couple of years ago I had signed up for a really large online business membership community and sort of education portal that was all about growing your business. And the way that it worked was that there were essentially like different levels and you would get curriculum and complete certain things and then that would graduate you to the next level. And I was never able to graduate from the first level because two of the core parts of it were that you develop a flagship offering that's truly scalable and that you make your first hire. And I'm honestly, at first I was like, wow, I've really wasted my money joining this year long thing and you know, paying upfront for it. But what I realized was it was so useful for me as a reflection tool to look at all of these hundreds of people who did want to be what I consider to be more true entrepreneurs in that sense, that they want to grow something that either they could sell or that didn't require their physical presence every day. There's a lot of reasons why that would be of benefit to someone who wanted a different lifestyle than what I wanted. And what I realized is I don't want that at all. I actually am not an entrepreneur in the way that I think about it. I'm a writer. I want more of that like writer, artist, creative maker, business model where I don't want to remove myself from it. I'm not trying to have the four hour work week. I'm not trying to have like business that grows and grows and grows and like ticks away behind the scenes whether I'm there, not like that. What is exciting to me is doing the work, is facilitating the spaces, is capping a Zoom at 50 or 80 people, because any more than that, I can't energetically hold that kind of space. And so all of this was really useful for me to really distill down what is the kind of business that I do want. And I think of it in my head as a tiny business. That's usually what I call it. And more and more I'm thinking of myself as a writer, as a Working writer now because bulk of my income is coming from substack, which feels an unbelievable blessing that I'm grateful to every single day. But it's again been freeing to be like, I actually don't have to want to hire someone. I will tell you the rapid fire decisions that I made in June to shut down so much of my business, I don't feel like I would have been able to give myself permission to do that if I felt like someone else's livelihood depended on me. And what I want is time autonomy. I want creative autonomy and I want a sort of nimbleness. Is that a word? I don't know. Yeah, I want to be able to be nimble. That okay, if I want to go on a hike for three weeks and I can just shut down the couple of things in my business, like, it just feels so much more right size and so much more sustainable. And I'm not trying to grow for the sake of growth. I'm getting pretty close to having set numbers of how much feels like enough money for me to earn next year. Not forever. As our life circumstances change, obviously our financial needs change as well. But once I feel pretty sure about that number, then I will put together, I guess loose business plan for next year of okay, how can I earn this amount of money and then stop working and then just like practice satisfaction with what I have. And it all feels so refreshing to me.

These permission steps are so important. Me too. At some point going to do either a post or a podcast episode on why I created a job for myself because my business could have gone the route of super scalable corporate clients, build out a sales function and I'm like, if I wanted all that, I I'll just go get another job. I don't want to do all those things that would lead to this million dollar revenue and all this like, I just saw what the future beheld. And I don't even know if that's a word, but I didn't want it. So now with writing and podcasting, it takes so much more of me, but I'm so much happier. One of the things you wrote in June that we also touched on briefly in the pivot conversation is this line. You do not need to cannibalize your healing for content. Now I want to ask you about this because one of your other posts is called this is why we tell the Truth, the generosity of being honest. And what I'm finding is that there is a middle path where at least for me, I am honest and I'm sharing my experience, and I'm very similar to you, I need to write my way through and out of things, especially when shit really hits the fan in my life or my business. I must write. It's just the thing I do. And at the same time there's this fine line of going, oh well, that post was a hit because it was so vulnerable. And then not going that direction of cannibalizing oneself or almost like a race to the bottom, turtles all the way down, of how vulnerable can we all be? To the point where you wouldn't believe some of the stories I've heard from the stage or online, where it's like, tmi, tmi. Just like stop right now. It's too much. And you can tell that they're kind of doing it for the clicks. So how do you walk this line for yourself of what feels good to share versus what might be cannibalizing your own healing or process?

I'm nodding so vigorously at everything you're saying. I will say upfront, I don't have a here's the three steps I put each thing through to decide if it's for the people or not for the people. Right? So let's just like get that out there. It's a great question. It's a question that I have been asking myself for 16 years. Essentially, what is the balance between honesty and privacy that exists? I will say the thing that helps me the most is that I feel like I'm in an ongoing conversation about this topic with myself. And a lot of the way that I do my life and my business and my writing is based on just a felt sense of what feels good. And I know that might not be useful advice because it's not necessarily replicable, but I can feel within myself if I am ready to talk about something or not, if I'm ready to share about something or not. Sometimes I don't know that that's true till after I've written it and then I reread it and I'm like, eh, this still feels a little bit tender. So there's plenty of times where that happens and I'll either save it in a drafts folder and maybe I'll come back around to it later when that feels more appropriate to me to share. Or sometimes I wind up scrapping it. Right. Just because this idea of what comes through me comes for me first. Yeah, it comes for me first. So I got what I needed from it. And maybe then the people don't get it. So that certainly happens. I think that a misconception that a lot of people have about me, whether this is the many podcast episodes that I've made over the years or about my writing, feedback that I get from people is, wow, I really admire how you can share so vulnerably. I could never do that. And something that I always say to people is, it's actually not vulnerable for me. It's that you and I have a different not metric of vulnerability. But maybe I'm talking really openly about money. Right? Or about depression. And someone reading that thinks, I could never share about this because that would be way too vulnerable. It doesn't feel vulnerable for me. Things that actually are really vulnerable, I'm not parsing them out in my writing. I'm talking to my partner. I'm talking to a therapist. I'm talking to a trusted friend or mentor. That may be just that. There are fewer of those things for me than might be true for an average person. And whether that's a chicken or an egg situation. Right. Have I been writing about my Life Online for 16 years because there's so many topics that I'm happy to talk about and comfortable talking about? Or do you get more and more comfortable talking about them because you've been talking about them? I don't know. So I think that that's also helpful to keep in mind. I am not interested in trauma porn or performative vulnerability. Like you said, for the sake of clickbaits. It feels gross to me. It feels gross when I'm on the receiving end of it. I don't want to put my readers through that. I don't think it serves the purpose. I'm not looking for, like, a shock and awe situation. I actually find that what I'm the most interested in as a reader is what I think of as mundane honesty. That it doesn't have to be the most shocking thing that ever happened to someone. Not that those stories don't deserve to be told. But I'm interested in how do people talk to themselves when they're feeling jealous? How do they get through a period of time where they're feeling shame or going through financial insecurity or they behaved in a way that they wish they wouldn't. Right. That there's just the kind of stuff that happens every day that is really interesting to me. And so I think that there's a lot of ways that we can be honest and we can tell the truth, whether in real time or otherwise. But with keeping those boundaries, this was true earlier on in my 16 years of writing. Now I think it's a little bit more of an intrinsic process. But I would write a piece and then ask myself questions like what am I hoping to gain from sharing this? Is it something that I am doing for my ego, that I hope it will make me look good? Do I want to look smart? Am I trying to be witty and impressive? Am I trying to get a lot of comments? Am I writing this because it feels true and good to share? Do I want to connect with people about it? Right. There's lots of different reasons and maybe multiple reasons for the same piece of writing. And all of that questioning over time I think has led me to more of just like a felt sense of this feels good to share or doesn't feel good to share. And also I think it helps if you have some kind of a guiding mission. Feels too lofty. But mission for the publication or the book or whatever the larger container is for the writing. For me with Wild Letters, it's a weekly newsletter about self exploration and building a right fit life. So lots of different things can fall under that umbrella. The question I usually use when I sit down each week is what am I exploring within myself? And then whatever comes up, that's what I write about. But even with a potentially vulnerable topic, you can come at it from so many different angles. So sometimes for me it's just really understanding which parts of this feel like they're digested enough to be shared with the people and which parts don't. And then I kind of go with that. I don't know if any of that answers your question.

Oh yeah, it makes so much sense. And it reminds me that's my main goal with rolling in dough is just helping fellow business owners feel less alone, especially when they're riding the roller coaster of, like you said, financial insecurity. Things kind of going sideways. Things that I feel we don't talk enough about publicly because don't want to turn into a self fulfilling prophecy. It relates as well to a post you wrote about spirals of intimacy and the subtitle of that one was who has access to which parts of you and when and why. And I feel like part of having the guiding mission is also answering this question about any one of us our own spirals of intimacy. And I feel like the journey that I don't wanna put words into your mouth but that you and I and so many people I've been talking to lately have been on is kind of fire hose mode when we're younger of like putting it all out there for everyone. And in a way being socialized as writers online that it all gets blasted out and then social media comes along and expects us, which I opted out of long ago to post. I mean, everything large and small, like, oh, don't even get me started. But what's happening now, I feel, is a sense of reclaiming actually everything I create is not for everyone. And everything I create for year 18 going into 19 is not going to be free. There's something so refreshing. It's less a sense of entitlement, I think it's more a sense of stepping into, I don't know, not being a martyr to the content machine any longer. Like, oh, I'm supposed to just work myself into the ground for free so I do all the right things so the things will grow so that somehow, some way, someday I get paid. What's happening now, enabled by the software and the culture of something like substack. I'm not saying it's the only one. Patreon was doing this well even before substack, but like creating a culture of actually let's pay each other and support each other and exchange value and therefore the spirals of intimacy. I find myself wanting to reward that financial support with the intimacy that I might not otherwise want to share anymore online for free for everyone.

I feel like my mind is going into so many different. Like there's so many different directions that we could take what you just said than not wanting to be.

Okay, good. Cause I don't know if that made a lick of sense either.

It did, but I'm actually feeling a little bit deer in headlights. I'm like, oh my gosh, there's so many things that I want to say. Where do I want to go with the time that we have left?

All the things.

Okay. Something I feel like is really important to me is trying to get out of this all or nothing black and white thinking, which was my default for a really long time, and giving myself permission to slow down and look at the nuances and the situations of both. And. And it doesn't have to be door one or door two. You know, what if you turn around? What about door seven? What about door eight? What if you don't go through a door but you go down the stairs? So I think it has been easy for me in the past, taking social media as an example, to say I'm either going to use social media in this share everything, all the time, influencer style model, or I'm not going to be on social media at all. And there's so many options between those two. Things if we're willing to be an honest conversation with ourselves about what does and doesn't feel good, what our aims are for being in any particular space, and to really be more thoughtful and to give ourselves permission to essentially create our own mini job descriptions in any of these places. So when you mentioned the question about how do you know when you're cannibalizing your life for content, something that I thought about a lot this summer, because I know for sure that writing personal essays feels really good. That's not a question for me. So then I had to sit with what is this feeling of overexposure? Where's this coming from that I feel this way? And one of the things that I realized was that I don't enjoy, or at least at this current juncture and haven't for a while enjoyed sharing photos of my life on the Internet with strangers. And when I first started my substack, the other personal essay style substacks that I followed, they all did that with their post. They had a photo, maybe it was like a selfie or a photo of them on a hike they'd been on, or a photo they had taken, you know, that was of their real life. And there's nothing wrong with that. That's great. But when I started my substack, I just sort of defaulted to, well, this is what you do. This is the way that you do it. And so I was sharing photos there. And then obviously Instagram is a photo sharing platform, maybe more of a video sharing platform now, but I was never super comfortable with that. I'm not a photographer. I don't gravitate toward taking a lot of photos. And so one of the things, the switches that I made this summer, besides quitting Instagram, was that I stopped using photos on substack. And the way that substack is set up, your homepage looks nicer if you do have some kind of image attached to it. Just the way that they magazine style their posts. And so what I realized was that instead of sharing photos, that I could share art. And so I picked an artist. It's two artists, this company that I love called Abacus Corvus Artwork that makes these beautiful prints, some of which I have in my bedroom. And I reached out to them to essentially ask consent for can I share photos of your work? And links back to your work this summer with my posts. And they were excited about it and were into the idea. So I made that switch. And it is wild, Jenny, of what a difference it made in how much I enjoyed substack when every week I wasn't, like, trying to scroll through my photo album and trying to figure out which aspects of my personal life would pair best with this. And maybe this all sounds like, silly and, like, too small of a thing to be focusing on, but it was a good reminder for me that it's not always the throw the baby out with the bathwater, whatever the expression is, that I love the writing piece, so just stop doing the part of it that I don't like, which is sharing photos. And I'm a lot more comfortable with vulnerability in writing than trying to be. There's something that feels really cannibalizing to me personally about sharing photos of my home, my hobbies, my relationships, my partner, my breakfast, my pets, my literal face and body in order to sort of, like, get, I don't know, subscribers, followers, people to like me. There's, like, something about it that started to just feel really gross to me personally. And I say all of this not at all to shame anybody for whom that feels great. That's awesome. But just to provide another example of you can sort of pick apart, what do you want to share with who and why? Because all those same photos that I don't want to put up for strangers on the Internet, for example. I got married a couple of months ago, and the way that I knew that I was finally really, really ready to quit social media for good was that there was no part of me that wanted to share any photos from getting married on the Internet. And nothing does better in quotes, right? Like, performs better than weddings and what? Like pregnancy announcements pretty much on social media. And so I'm like, oh, I've finally reached the point where this isn't a type of validation that I'm looking for. But I sent those pictures to friends and family, right? So it's not like I don't want to share myself, but there's only certain aspects that I'm willing to have be part of my job. And as I'm in this phase now of essentially rewriting myself a new job description for the next iteration of my business. It's like picking apart these things that maybe feel too small to look at, but I'm realizing that so much of how I feel about my work is in the details.

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I've never felt comfortable posting selfies of myself. Just like why I don't want to. And again, not to judge anyone else, but there was never a compelling reason for me to do that. And similarly, when Michael and I got married, we wouldn't post a single photo online, not a single announcement anywhere publicly. The very first wedding photo that I ever shared, and it was only one, was just beneath a paywall of one of the early rolling in dopos. And that was five years later. And there was something that felt kind of freeing of like, okay, for the first time ever, and yet it's only for paying subscribers. So it's still not available online for somebody to see one of the most intimate days and moments of my life. It's just not for public consumption.

It isn't.

But if you're paying, that means you're supporting me and my ability to continue doing this work. And for the first time in five years, it felt really nice to be able to share that moment with this small inside group of people who have really put themselves out there to say I support you and I thank you for what you're doing. Again, it's not to punish people who can't do that right now or want to keep listening, reading for free. But it's just that there's extra icing on the cupcake for the ones who do because they're the patrons, they're the ones sustaining making any of this possible for me as well right now.

Yeah. And I think there's even some interesting self exploration and nuance in that as well. At least that I am doing because and this isn't what you're saying, but I think that there is a part of me that could go almost too Far of these people are paying. I owe them everything. And I think that there have been periods of time in the past where I have felt that way. And so it's useful for me to also continue to have those boundaries of it feels so good to be in this financial reciprocity container with the writing, but then to realize people have decided to pay for this because they want to read this writing, listen to this monthly podcast, and get this monthly link roundup. That's it. I actually don't have to over give on top of that as a woman thing. I don't know if this is early iterations of online business marketing advice that was used. Give, give, give, give, give, give, give. I'm sure it's a combination of a lot of different things, but something I'm really trying to check myself on is this is enough. I'm very, very clear on what people are buying into when they pay for it. If that sounds like something that they want, that's awesome. And I don't have to keep giving more and more and more. And I think some of the emotional burnout that I felt, it's not because people were asking for more and more. It was because I. I was too porous with my own boundaries with that kind of stuff. And so some of that has been a right sizing for me. So my paid subscribers pretty much doubled over the summer making this decision. I have a friend, a good friend, who we have a weekly call. She's also a writer, like an author of multiple books and a substack writer as well. And we have a weekly call where we talk about friend stuff. But we have. We check in on our writing and we have this real breakdown or she helped me break down. I was feeling like, oh my gosh, there's so many more people paying now. I have to really show up. I have to really deliver. The writing has to become even better. And she was really helpful in talking me down from that. Being like, they are paying to support this thing that they already like. Like, they're not expecting you to become a different person now that they're on the other side of the paywall and just really investigating what are our assumptions on that and what do we expect of ourselves. And I'm not willing to exploit myself for my work, exploit myself for money, or if I were, then I could go get a different job. And if it's not feeling good for me, then eventually I am going to wind up presenting it. So I think that that has been helpful for me to reflect on and then also Something that I really bumped on with going paid only over the summer and then changing it so that free subscribers get only one post a month. Is that something, as you know, that's so important to me and has been for years, is financial accessibility in my business and trying to set up my offerings and payment structures in such a way that I don't believe that financial resources should be the sole determining factor in what people can access. And so that looks like sliding scales. That looks like different forms of scholarship. And that's something that I have built into every single offering that I have. And yet, as of right now, I haven't set up a way for people who aren't in the position to pay the $5 a month or $50 a year for substack for them to be able to get it for free. And I don't know why that is. Maybe it's because I'm not trying to expand that audience any more quickly. Maybe that's because I do feel like it is an affordable offering. But even that, like, it's not affordable for everyone. There are plenty of people that can't afford to pay $5 a month or $50 a year for that kind of stuff. And so I'm sort of grappling with where is financial accessibility going to come into play with substack for me going forward? And I don't. No. But I don't really know what my kind of TLDR point on all of that is. But it's just like really thinking through who gets access and why. What do we feel that we owe each other? And what has helped me is to come to the conclusion of people who are subscribed for free are getting an essay per month. So essentially they're subscribed to a monthly newsletter. That's great, right? They are subscribed. They get one thing a month in their inbox. If they no longer want one thing a month in their inbox, they are welcome to unsubscribe. If they want to opt into this other offering, that's the cost for it. And for right now, that feels really good for me.

Yeah. Well, I appreciate you sharing that. And it also speaks to going back to what you said of just not black or white, thinking around it, and that you do have a mission and you do. That is important to you to give opportunity for people for whom it's just not in their range right now. You just haven't figured it out yet. And so I'm sure you will like you always do. And I've made that Mistake too. I'll just say before we wrap up that whether someone is paying me $5, 50, 500, 5,000 or $50,000, I tend to almost unconsciously get insecure. Like I better do more and more backbends to make sure they're happy. And sometimes it's not always discerning between how much they've paid and those backbends. And then I've done it where corporate clients give me like an eye popping amount. And so then I still over give and do things that really erode my own energy and ability to sustain anything else that I do. And it's like they're not paying for me to do that. They're paying for the work, not for me to bend over backwards and like make up for again, what is an arbitrary dollar amount to them. It might be a sneeze off the budget, you know, it might be nothing. And so I've had to really pull back on that too and pull back on micro guilt or just feeling bad I'm not doing enough for this group or that group or this one, especially once people are paying, because I feel a real sense of obligation in a good way. But it can go overboard. So I just appreciate you sharing that 100%.

Yeah. And I think that it can come up in little ways too that for me, I didn't have comments on, on my substack for a really long time because I didn't have the energy with all the other things I was doing to respond to comments and be in that space. And when going paid, I turned on comments for paid subscribers. And that's been super lovely because like I said, I love being in conversation with people, hearing from people. And also I've given myself permission to not respond to every comment.

I need to do that too.

It's not sustainable. And also when in the past I have tried to do that, I'm not responding with anything meaningful anyway, if I actually have something that I want to say back, I can. I tend to be most active in like the two to five hours after a post comes out. People that are commenting quickly because you know it's on my mind, but otherwise I have given them a piece of writing if they would like to give a comment. Okay, but we don't have to just like back and forth and back and forth forever and it's not sustainable for me. And then I become resentful of the very reason that I want to be there. So.

And then what that has done for me in the past is I stop wanting to post because I know that I can't keep up with the comments.

Exactly.

And that's a really dangerous zone. So I have to do that because I'm early days on subjects. I have been replying to every single one or at least trying to. Cause I'm like, oh, they're here. I'm so grateful. I'm so thankful for this comment. And like, I want to honor that, but it's not sustainable because they start to pile up in my inbox and then I can't even see my inbox anymore. It is a sort of a champagne problem. But it can't get to the point where the obligation sucks the joy out to where you just don't want to do it at all anymore. That's the danger zone.

Yeah. Like I said, I want to make things that feel good to make. And if any aspect of it doesn't feel good, then it needs to change. And I will say one of my favorite things about myself is that my tolerance for feeling bad is incredibly low.

So if there's something that is not feeling good, it has to go, it has to change. And sometimes the thing that has to change is just my own expectations of myself. Like nowhere in on the about page or the welcome emails does it say that. What I promise you is that I will respond to every comment. It says that paid subscribers get the ability to comment. They get access to comment. They can talk to each other in the comments. Right. But I didn't promise that I was going to do that. And so where is this weird expectation coming from? And if other people are disappointed because I'm not giving them more than they think that they are entitled to, or if I feel that way about someone whose substack I read that I'm upset that they didn't respond to my comment. That's a me issue. I need to look at why I feel entitled to something that was never promised me at all. And keep in mind that like, there is always some degree of parasocial relationship. Like, I think I know that person really well when I don't. Like, I want to comment as if we're friends, but we're not friends. It doesn't make my comment not valuable to them. But like it's again, a right sizing of expectations that I think is really useful to keep in mind as the creators.

Yes. And I'll say that I put a lot into every essay and I edit it probably five to ten times. And my joy zone is creating the essay and pulling it out of my brain. I'm not that great at comments, I'm just not. It's just not my thing. Like, I'm okay at them and I'll be in there. But it's so true what you said of that's not what's being promised and I'm not even that great at it. The other thing I just want to say is I really appreciate you giving yourself the permission that you have a really low tolerance for doing things you don't like. Because I've used that to kind of beat myself up in the past. Oh, I have such a cushy job compared to so many. Like, why is my tolerance for things that I don't like so effing low? But it just is. It's like, I'm a highly sensitive person. I get allergic to things I don't like to do. Like corporate sales, outbound sales for pivot. Like, if I had a dollar for every person who told me to go be doing that during the pandemic. And I'm like, I actually can't. I would rather grind that entire part of the business to a halt than start getting on sales calls with companies. I'm sorry. Just can't.

And also, like, there are enough things in being a person alive in these times that you do have to do that you don't want to do. Like, why would I put that on myself for a business that I have in theory started because I want it to be more enjoyable than another kind of job. Right. I don't know. There's like something interesting for me about that and I do sometimes feel guilty when I say things like that of if I don't want to do it, I just don't do it because there can be a pushback reaction of must be nice for you. And I'm not saying everyone should stop doing things they don't like. I mean, do I wish that we lived in a world where nobody had to do anything they didn't want to do a hundred percent? And also, like, it is nice and there's a lot of sacrifices for it. I am willing to have not great health insurance and to have unpredictable income and to have some of all of these other things that come with it. Because I so value being able to be like, I don't like this thing, so I'm not going to do it anymore. That there always are trade offs. There is a price of admission and I'm willing to pay the ones that are involved in tiny business ownership.

And I actually, my body will revolt pretty quickly after, like, once I make a string of those decisions. Out of obligation or just berating myself. I mean, pretty quickly I'll get sick or just lay out flat.

It degrades the work, right? So then it's like, what are we here for in that regard?

Right.

The only way for me to be able to do good work, especially because the work is so personal. I know this sounds like such a delicate flower thing to say, but is for me to take care of myself in ways and I have really given myself a hard time about how much rest I need or how much of any number of tending things that I need and tell myself that I shouldn't need them. And I'll tell you what, that doesn't work. Not taking care of myself in those periods of time, I'm always like, okay, well how is this working for you? Is the work better? Right? Like it's not.

Yeah. Thank you so much, Nicole. I know it's a lot and I really appreciate your wisdom.

You've.

You really have been through it around all this and you're writing. The paid essays are so good and I'm so grateful to be one of your paying subscribers. Last question. If you could give fellow, I'm going to call them creative business owners permission to do something differently or drop something altogether, what would it be?

I think my permission slip would be around this idea that we talked about of not thinking that if you are going to use a certain platform or give a certain type of offering, that that means you have to opt into the way that other people are using that offering. If you want to facilitate something that's live on Zoom, but you absolutely hate making slides or doing that kind of thing, I'll tell you right now, I host things on Zoom all of the time that don't have slides that it's like, can you look at what is the heart of the thing that you want to do? What is this offering really want to be? Maybe it's a simple conversation group on Zoom that has 10 people in it that you know, doesn't require slides. Maybe you do want to be on Substack, for example, but you don't want to post photos. Or I think you and I could both come up with a lot of different examples. But I guess permissioning. I would love to continue permissioning myself and for other people to be able to look at. I really love offering this kind of coaching group, but I don't want to have a Facebook group attached to it. Okay, cool. So don't write that. It's like if the more in alignment and in integrity the offering is with where the heat is for you as the facilitator, as the artist, as the writer, as the creator. Even if it seems like there aren't the normal things that people quote unquote, expect to get. I actually think the end result offering is going to be richer and is going to be a place that people want to be more because there's going to be no aspect of it that you really resent and dread doing.

Yes. And therefore you will have more energy and want to keep going with it.

Definitely.

Beautifully said. I'll put all the links in the show notes, including to our earlier conversation, but is there any one place or give us your substack subdomain how to find you anywhere else you want to send me.

That's the only place, right? Nickantoinet Subsequent it's called Wild Letters. I'm sure you will link to it. I'm also just in general, very googleable. You can find me on the Internet if you so choose.

And you have at least two books. How to Be Alone and the new one.

Yeah, how to Be Alone came out in April. The second book is called what We Owe to Ourselves. They are both adventure memoirs, long distance hiking memoirs. The second one was actually supposed to come out in September, but going through this period of a hard time, a permission slip I gave myself was that all deadlines are arbitrary and I did not have the capacity to even think about launching a book. So I pushed it to January, which felt incredible. And I guess that's another permission slip is just because you initially said you were going to do something in a certain way or on a certain time frame. Could you consider that perhaps that doesn't need to happen? If that is feeling really oppressive to you?

So many permission slips. All deadlines are arbitrary. That's so good. So true.

Especially things like this. It's a self published book. I decided on that. Right. It's like just pick a different deadline. People will wait or they won't and they'll ask for a refund from the person that they pre ordered it from. Cool. That's fine, right?

And like who's not going to wait? That's the wild thing. It's all good. My friend Julie, many years ago in her book she calls it true urgency and false urgency. And nothing has more false urgency than thinking like your book needs to go gangbusters in the one launch week or the launch day. It's like books take years to properly get out into the world or not. Or you just set it free and let it do what it wants. To do when you don't do anything, it's all so arbitrary. It's like there's no need to just kill yourself for one week on the calendar. Why? Who cares? Like your book is going to find its readers. So I love that you did that.

I'm not willing. That was evidenced in my first book launch. I'm not willing to do it. So thank you very much for this lovely conversation. So good to catch up with you.

Likewise. Big thanks everybody for being here listening.

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