A Year of Writing in Reflection

A personal post

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

It’s been one year to the day since I started regularly publishing to this Substack again. I originally started the Substack back in June of 2022, and then my mental health declined precipitously, which is not the best way to start a new project, especially one that demands weekly commitment. I tried to make it work, but eventually I had to start posting apologizes for not posting. Which is the worst kind of post to make. Content about non-content. But, thank God, things began to turn around for me last year due to a lot of hard work, proper support, and God’s help. And that turn around freed up a lot of space in my mind. Space that used to be occupied with rumination. Instead of spending time worrying about things, I could spend time contemplating things and writing about them. Which I did, starting on April 16th, 2024. Since that time, I’ve published 107 articles, all of which you can read if you’re a paid subscriber, which I recommend.

I am pleased with the variety of the posts I was able to write. Despite being a time of ridiculous political turmoil, I managed to only write a few articles on politics. I wrote on mental health quite often, building on my work in On Getting Out of Bed. I worked through T.S. Eliot’s “Choruses from The Rock,” which I particularly enjoyed. And wrote several articles on teaching, parenting, and loneliness. The top three articles were on the Etiquette of Speech, the danger of falling into an affair, and using AI in the classroom. I enjoy publishing in magazines, but I also enjoy the freedom to not have to have a thing that I write about. I probably would have more subscribers if I stuck to one thing, but oh well.

Also during this time I rewrote and revised Re-Collective Your Life, which I’m told will be retitled soon. Unfortunately, the reality of publishing is that the author’s pet title is almost never the final title. I’ll announce the real title of my fourth book as soon as I can. We’ve narrowed it down and I’m pretty excited about it. Anyway. My point is that I managed to do a lot this past year. It helped that I was on sabbatical, so I only taught a half-load, but I think the bigger difference maker was my mental state.

After I began writing regularly, you showed up. Thousands of you. Many of you paid subscribers. I can’t begin to tell you want an encouragement this has been to me in my writing and for my family. As you have read and shared and commented and funded my writing, I have felt motivated and confident to write. Where I was hesitant I had anything worth saying, you showed me otherwise and pushed me to strive for greater insights. So thank you. I take your support as an honor and a responsibility and I am deeply grateful for it.

In the coming weeks, the cadence of my posts will likely change. I will be receiving edits back for whatever Re-Collecting Your Life is going to be called and I need to get those back ASAP, so the regular Wednesday post I started a few months ago will likely disappear for a while so I can attend to that. I appreciate any prayers for that project. Getting edits back is always daunting. It can take me hours or longer to open the email. And then doing the edits is its own beast. I’m excited about this book, but for it to land right, I need to get the tone and examples just right, and that’s not easy to do. So much of even non-fiction writing is creative and intuitive. Finding resonance with an audience is no easy task.

Additionally, I should have a new book announcement to make soon, which is exciting. I’ll have more to say about that after we finish talks with publishers and sign a contract.

All of this would have been impossible for me to imagine accomplishing two years ago. In fact, my first draft of Re-Collecting was comprised of a series of forced paragraphs that technically were on the topic but did not flow or make a good book. As I said, I had to rewrite the book this last year to make it work. So I suppose what I’m saying is that I’m very grateful to God for such a dramatic improvement in my mental health. And I’m also grateful that you are with me to participate in this improvement by giving me a channel for my creative energy. It’s meant a great deal to me, really.

Of course, there’s always the looming possibility of relapse. That’s part of the reality of living with OCD which has no “cure.” But as I wrote about last week, I have tools and skills I never had before, so I’m not afraid. Most of life has no cure but courage, hope in God, and resurrection from the dead. And that’s fine.

I have high hopes for the next year. One of the reasons I’m grateful for Substack is that other social media platforms have completely lost their usefulness in sharing articles, which in my view is one of the few good uses of social media. So I look forward to another year of regular Substacks, writing a new book, publishing whatever Re-Collecting is called, and interacting with you. Your support and shares are invaluable. Thank you, again.

-Alan