an update for paid subscribers

NOT a hiatus! mostly just a note!

Hi everyone,

I wrote some of this on my phone while crying in one of the too-expensive restaurants with the weird menus that only exist in the airport. I wrote the rest in the basement of my parents’ house in the middle of the night, in the old office with the twin bed where I sleep when I’m back home. Neither of those are particularly dignified locations in which to write anything, which is perhaps fitting because this is not a particularly dignified post!

I think I want to just cut to the chase — I am temporarily pausing billing for paid subscribers. This is not a hiatus, I’m not quitting substack, and none of your subscriptions will change. You’ll just be able to go a little bit without paying for them.

I’m sure many of you have noticed I haven’t been able to post as much on here as I’ve wanted to over the last few months. I’m also sure that some of you have noticed that most of what I have posted recently has been sort of sad and heavy. When I’ve felt able to write over the last six months, I haven’t been able to write much of anything else. And I really wish that wasn’t the case!

Despite what it may seem sometimes, I like to keep many parts of my life private (and it feels important to my increasingly tenuous sense of self-respect to spare some gory details) — so I’ll just say that for a variety of private and personal reasons, the past five-or-so months have been some of the most difficult of my life. My (famously precarious at the best of times !) mental health deteriorated to the point that I recently had to seek emergency psychiatric care, and I’m very happy to say that I’ve been getting incrementally better and hope to continue that way with the new treatment plan I’ve been prescribed — but, of course, the whole experience (along with the circumstances that preceded it) has seriously affected my ability to work. I worked very hard to keep the depth of this issue private, even from many of my closest friends, but I realize that’s also left many of you without an explanation for my absence. It’s been horrible to have felt an immense barrier preventing me from putting out writing on here to all of you — a kind of barrier I’ve never felt before, preventing me from engaging in one of the most meaningful parts of my entire life. It also happened to prevent me from doing my literal, actual job, which we all know is bad for all the obvious reasons. And in a cycle I’m sure we’re all familiar with, I started to feel a sort of paralyzing guilt and shame about it all that made it even more difficult to finish anything.

So I’m going to try to interrupt that cycle and also just do what I think is the baseline morally right thing by pausing billing for a little bit. I want to thank you so much for your generosity and patience during this period of my life, and hopefully also I’ll be able to give you all some stuff for free to make up for the months I’ve missed on here. To be able to maintain an income during a period where I was largely unable to work has been as close as anything can be to a literal lifesaver — it’s not at all lost on me how few people have access to that privilege, and how lucky I am to have had it.

Basically my plan is to try to put out work as normal for a month or so without you having to pay for it, get back to a slightly more regular writing schedule (as regular as it ever gets for me, at least), and then turn billing back on. I am perhaps also hoping that a little bit of forced financial pressure will encourage me to “get my ass up and become functional”, to paraphrase kim kardashian…

More soon — and truly, thank you so much again. I feel very lucky.

Xx rayne