Can I Publish my Therapy on Substack?

Welcome to the space between the final draft and my therapist's office.

The other day I was talking to a friend who says I shouldn’t publish her name online. So let’s just call her Schlaura. Shmaura. Yeah, Schlaura.

“What’s the problem, again?” she asked.

“I’m writing a book of essays,” I said. “I want to develop a readership before I submit this manuscript. I don’t think Harper Collins is going to care that my therapist loves my writing. I need more people.”

“You read your work to your therapist?” she asked.

Schlaura always focuses on the wrong details.

“Sure.”

“Isn’t that a waste of time?”

I didn’t feel like getting into that. Therapy relationships are complicated. You’ll know this soon enough because I intend to write about, and regret writing about, my therapy. Right here on Substack. (Incidentally, my therapist also would like to remain anonymous. So let’s just call her Fran, I mean, Schlan. Yeah, Schlan.)

“I don’t get how to write stories online,” I said to Schlaura. “I’m writing a book. People read books. A book is a thing you hold that is made of paper and glue and cloth. You look at it with a light by the bed.”

“Can we talk about me now? I’m bored.”

“I honestly want a relationship with readers,” I went on. “I just don’t think that anyone wants to read the first chapter of a novel online. And writing in a more casual tone makes me feel like…” I trailed off, waiting for Schlaura to prompt me to continue. She didn’t. Laura is busy raising three little kids, working a full-time job, and ignoring my medical advice. She totally needs an MRI.

“I don’t want to get an MRI,” she said. “It freaks me out. Do you think they could leave my head sticking out or does it have to be my whole body? It’s just my lower back that’s killing me, not my head.”

“Your whole body,” I said.

“When I was sixteen a horse kicked me in the brain,” she said. “And I had to get an MRI, and I was terrified. The doctor was tiny and bald, and I swear to God, Amy, I thought he was an alien from outer space. And you know what the scariest part was? I was happy to go.”

She went on about how, before the horse kicked and dragged her, she knew the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s entire canon. That’s all gone now. This is an interesting story, but mostly I am thinking about how translating all this to Substack doesn’t amount to much more than a diary entry.

If I’m really being honest, I would admit that I wouldn’t want to publish anything that I wouldn’t show my most brilliant friend, my harshest critic. I think that cuts to the heart of the problem. I don’t want to look stupid when I know I can do better. I know I can write better if it’s bound up in cloth with glue and nice paper and in a stack on your bedside table.

Can I even write smart? Who knows anymore. It’s been so long since I last published anything.

In theory, writing online is an amazing idea. All these readers out there that you’d never otherwise reach unless you went through the whole rigamarole of publishing a book. A direct line between me and all of you.

Then I start a website or publish a blog or sign onto a Substack, and all these anxieties and fears burst forth and soon I’m so stricken I can hardly focus on eating my twenty-ounce bar of Dubai Chocolate first thing in the morning before I head off to teach my immigrant students (I teach English as a Second Language in a public school near you. With this being only my second post, Substack does not yet provide for a yearly salary.)

A friend of mine texted me recently, “My husband always has a vulnerability hangover after he posts on Substack.”

I thought that was such a good way to put it. Vulnerability hangover.

Maybe all the writers on this forum feel this way. I don’t know. I don’t really know any writers on Substack (yet). Also, writers don’t really talk about their deepest feelings in person. That’s why they are writers.

“You know what I hate?” I told Schlan.

“What,” she said.

“I hate worrying that I’m going to look stupid.”

“You’re not stupid,” she said.

“What else are you going to say?”

Schlan laughed. This makes me feel good. She never laughs to be polite. If I’m not funny, she just looks at me behind her owlish glasses and blinks. Say what you will about people, but when they laugh, it’s real. Laughing is one of the most genuine things we do as human beings, unless you are an actor on a movie set.

“You know what else I hate?” I told Schlan, not bothering to wait for her reply, “I hate worrying that I’m going to look stupid. It’s like worrying about how you look. Everybody worries about that. I like to think of myself as someone who is painfully original, extra-dimensional even, beyond the orbit of common insecurities. I hate thinking that I’m just….”

I searched for the right word. Being a writer, I have all the words. Except I could not come up with anything.

“Human?” Schlan suggested.

These therapists. They really know.

Maybe the whole thing about writers and online publishing is that sometimes it’s a place for sketches and outlines and charcoal drawings, and at other times it’s to produce paragraphs like this:

Sometimes I would drive across all three bridges into the dark evenings, the Bay Bridge, then the Richmond, circling back over to Golden Gate, to home again, where I lived with Michael in Glen Canyon. I felt I could drive forever. I parked outside 24-hour diners, stopping for pie alone in the booth, reading books by Carl Rogers, Melanie Klein, maybe a little Freud. She sat with me in my mind’s eye while I scraped the gelatinous cherries from the wet crust, devouring everything. Night after night I drove, stopped in diners, eating almost continuously, trying to seal a gap I could not name.

Schlaura said, “You know, some days you’re going to produce a steak with the whipped potato and chopped chives, and other times it’s a turkey sandwich.”

“Say more,” I said.

“That was it,” she said.

“My Substack could be like a buffet?” I offered. “Sometimes a bit more literary, sometimes just kind of, familiar and loose. Or worse, a total mess?”

Maybe I don’t care about having thousands of subscribers.

Now that’s just a big fucking lie. Of course I care about having readers. What the heck else am I doing this for?

My cousin David once told me that if you’re not trying to make money as a writer, then you’re not really a writer. I was quite offended to hear this at the time. At the time, I was of the mind that a sublime piece of writing, shoved in a desk drawer back in 1982, is as valiant and powerful and noble as any bestseller. Us writers are above marketing. We answer to a higher call, and blending money with art debases us.

Like therapy, sort of.

“Selling your writing is sort of like selling relationships,” I told Schlan. “I mean, how do you commodify love?”

“It’s not all about love,” she said.

“It is for me!”

We had a big fight after that. I’ve been seeing my therapist for a lot of years. We’ve had some doozies.

I transcribe a lot of my sessions. Maybe I’ll post the transcriptions here. Is that what Substack is for?

“Please Jesus God,” Lynn said. “Please do not post your therapy on Substack. You’re trying to build a career.”

Fine. Not today. But I might eventually. There’s a weird compulsion there. To air the gnarly shit. To get more readers. Not today, though.

I keep thinking about that line from Toy Story when Buzz Lightyear’s nemesis tells him he should prepare to die.

Not today, Zurg!

In 2014 I had a website and a blog. I had about a thousand subscribers. I was working on a memoir. Eventually I had to trash that memoir. And the blog. Memoir is actually harder than it looks. Where do you start? What scenes do you create? How do you write dialogue about something that happened twenty years ago? Trust me, you need dialogue in a memoir. It ain’t all exposition. You’ll kill your readers.

My previous two books were middle-grade novels. I’m trying my hand at writing for grown-ups now. We’ll see how it goes. If the essays go well, I’ll keep with that. Until I feel like writing fiction again.

But for now, here I am, staring at the blinking cursor. Cursing the cursor.

“Just keep writing,” Lynn said the other day. “Some will land. Some won’t. Not everything has to be polished silver.”

She did not say “polished silver.” She is not a writer.

I’m a writer.

I’m a writer.

I’m a writer.