thank you + celebration sale <3
40000 subscribers. one million reads. one very lucky girl ...
a little over one year ago, i decided to bite the bullet and finally start up the blog i’d been thinking about since i was eighteen. i was broke and manically depressed and maybe, in retrospect, suffering from black mould poisoning — it had not been a year for the books, to say the least! but i did start the blog, and i called it internet princess (obviously), and this week, we hit 40,000 subscribers. so i am writing to say thank you, from the bottom of my heart, forever and ever.
despite how it might seem, i actually don’t share most of my life on the internet. even when i write about my own experiences with mental illness or relationships or anything else, i usually try to hold back on specific details; i’ve always been wary of giving too much of myself away to be consumed (and i also can’t imagine that it would actually be very much fun to read). my public life is a conscious performance much more than it is a diary.
but i do want to tell you that, for a variety of reasons that i promise are really mostly not that bad, the past year has been one of the most complicated of my life. i moved across the country for the third time in three years; i left my best friend and my apartment and my job and most of the people i love to go live in a big cold city that makes me feel crazy. i got diagnosed with OCD, which was a literal lifesaver but also a total nightmare (i am extremely therapy-averse so the situation generally has to get pretty grim before i’ll agree to talk to a nice middle-aged woman about it). i turned twenty-one but i still keep accidentally telling people that i’m nineteen.
i’m only saying this because all the difficulties of this year — the never-ending uphill climb of trying to make things work — have made the presence of internet princess in my life all the more precious. i honestly never could have imagined that i could be so fulfilled by or so in love with the work i do; if you had told me two years ago that my life would turn out this way i never ever would have believed you. i have never once stopped feeling like the luckiest girl in the world.
you have given me my dream job and you make me feel sane and you’ve created a community that i am privileged to be a part of. i don’t think i will ever be able to completely thank you for the gift you’ve given me, but i will certainly keep trying. i am so excited for the year ahead — i want to turn internet princess into something truly great and my head is full of plans.
and now, some internet princess behind-the-scenes facts:
i had always planned to call this substack “high maintenance machine”, after a mountain goats song. i changed the name on an impulse at basically the last second. i still love the name “high maintenance machine” because i’ve always felt like that’s exactly what i am — maybe a memoir title someday.
at least five of my subscribers are pretty famous and at least two are definitely very famous. i’m not sure if they actually open these emails. feel free to guess which celebrities are internet princess fans..
my most-read post is who’s afraid of amber heard, with 300,000 reads; it’s followed by standing on the shoulders of complex female characters, which has 217,000.
we also recently hit one million total reads (!!!!) which just bowls me over sometimes.
complex female characters is a fan favourite and has a very special place in my heart. i thought you guys might want to see the notes app file that eventually turned into that piece — i was back with my family for the holidays and i would sit in my pitch-black basement bedroom every night and basically just cry and cry without knowing why. one night i was totally spiralling and i scrawled this down and it sort of ended up giving me a whole career, which is funny to think about now.
this is probably a bit embarrassing to put out there but i prefer to think of it like a taylor swift style easter egg i have a note on my phone from pre-launch where i wrote that my goal was to get 1500 subscribers in six months. isn’t that crazy!! i feel so lucky every day.
the first nice thing i purchased with my new substack money was Replica’s Under the Lemon Trees, which devoted readers will identify as my current favourite / signature scent. it’s very sentimental to me for exactly that reason. it feels silly to say this about something you buy at Sephora, but as i picked it out and realized i could actually afford it, i remember feeling certain for the first time in a while that my life was actually starting to turn around. and i was right!
to celebrate this incredible year, i’ve decided to start up a flash sale on subscriptions. if you subscribe here, you’ll get 20% off your paid subscription — which will make it only $3 USD!
thank you again. your attention means the world to me. <3
p.s. if you have any specific internet princess memories, i would love love love to hear them.
my takeaway from this is that black mold spurs innovation
Who’s afraid of Amber Heard was awesome for me to read because at the time I was the only one in my circle who seemed to see how fucked up the situation was, which was really strange. That essay was the first intelligent analysis of it that I read and it was really nice to see that I wasn’t the only one who thought like I did. Also that Female Characters essay hit me like a truck when I first read it. Personally though your gift idea posts are my favorite