I’ve been online long enough to remember when Instagram was just photographs. Beautiful, simple, unfiltered photographs. You posted a picture, people liked it, you felt lovely. That was it. No reels, no algorithm to decipher, no pressure to dance or point at things. Just the quiet pleasure of sharing something beautiful with people who wanted to see it.
I loved that Instagram. I miss her.
Every platform I’ve ever loved has followed the same annoying arc. It starts as something genuinely good, a place where real people share real things and connect in ways that feel human. Then it grows, the advertisers arrive, the algorithm takes over, and slowly the whole thing twists itself into something that makes you feel like you’re losing a stupid game nobody explained the rules of.
I’m SO bone-tired of that game.
Enter Substack
I’ll be honest with you, and if you’ve been in my world for a while (maybe you’re an OG podcast listener - thank you!) you’ll know I haven’t always been a Substack super fan. For years I was (not that) quietly sceptical. The SEO issues. The closed shop feeling. The sense that it was really only useful if your ideal clients happened to be writers. I repeated these opinions all.the.time. with my usual level of slightly bossy confidence - opinions I’d mostly borrowed from other people, that I’d absorbed without actually doing my own digging.
That was lazy of me. And I was wrong.
Because Substack has evolved into something I honestly didn’t realise.
Here’s what I think makes Substack different.
Every other platform I’ve used has, at its heart, a fundamental tension between what I want to create and what the platform wants me to create. LinkedIn wants professional polish, no links and whatever formulaic posting format happened to go viral last Tuesday. Instagram wants movement and sound and a face staring directly down a lens every 48 hours. Even email, my beloved email, comes with pressure around open rates and subject line formulas / hooks and the right time to hit send.
Substack doesn’t seem to want anything from me… no, actually, it wants what I want. It wants me to write. To share. To connect with people who actually chose to be here, who pressed a button that said yes, I want to hear from this person, and then received exactly what they signed up for. No algorithm deciding that actually, fewer of them should see it today. No format wars. No rules about whether you should put the link in the comments or the caption or your bio.
Just writing. And talking. Just you, and the people who want to read what you write, and hear what you have to say.
Radical.
There’s something else too, the writers I most admire have all ended up here on Substack. For example, Beth Kempton, whose words feel like a warm hand on your shoulder, is here, and Rebecca Campbell, my spiritual teacher and the person whose books have genuinely changed how I move through the world, is here.
What strikes me about both of these women is that on Substack, you get more of them. Not a curated highlight reel. Not a carefully lit video optimised for watch time. You get the thinking, the becoming, the in-between bits that platforms like Instagram never had space for. You get the whole person.
That’s what I want to build here.
The version of me I want to bring to Substack is just... me. The woman who is writing her first book and finding it terrifying and bloody glorious in equal measure. The woman who now moves through her business by feel as much as by strategy, who believes in seasonal rhythms and refuses to buy into anything that doesn’t feel right. The woman who swears a bit and laughs a lot and takes her work seriously without taking herself too seriously.
That me belongs here. She’s been waiting for somewhere like this.
So… this is turning into a love letter to Substack.
Of course, it’s not a perfect platform or a guaranteed growth strategy or the next big thing. That doesn’t exist. But it’s a place that, right now, still feels like the internet at its best. A place where we can write something true and the people who needed to read it can actually find it.
I’ve missed that more than I realised.
Listen to this week’s podcast episode for more on this topic:
If you’re curious about building your own Substack, I can’t recommend Claire Venus highly enough, her Substack, Sparkle on Substack, is an incredible resource.
And if you want more of what I’m building here, hit subscribe. There’s a free tier, and a paid membership for those who want to go a little deeper. Either way, I’m glad you’re here.
I couldn’t agree more Gill, it’s a relief to find a simplicity and genuine way to connect without all the toxic noise and distractions.
Your appreciation for Substack comes well through your words. I miss old instagram too. I’d say with addition of notes, Substack moved closer to other platforms and became ‘noisier’. Using ‘subscribe’ rather than ‘follow’ makes it easier to curate whose writing I see.