It’s November 2021… I’m in Miami, and I’m in my bullet journal.
You remember bullet journaling, right? Maybe you learned about it from a friend, but then you do your due diligence and go on early-2020s YouTube—only to find these artist-calligrapher creatives drawing the Sistine Chapel in their journal pages, with the numbers one to thirty-one running down the side?
And then the guy behind the whole bullet journal movement, with the name Ryder no less, comes forward and is all, “Wait, wait—BuJo is more than just art,” and you double-take because he’s calling it “BuJo” and openly talks about using it to solve his depression, ADHD, and inner peace using this Leuchtturm journaling book with dots.
And meanwhile, I’m all, dude, I just need to track my carbs.
Anyway: I was reviewing my month in my BuJo. One line per day, down the page, with lines such as: “Lectured at school, a student bought me bribery donuts.” “Shitty lecture day, WFH, Animal Crossing DLC.” “Thanksgiving, Death’s Door game.”
At the bottom, in capital letters: NOVEMBER IN A WORD: REBUILDING.
Under that, three habit columns — M, E, G, for meditation, exercise, and gratitude — and my scores for the month. Meditation, 20%. Exercise, 27%. Gratitude, 40%. In the box marked LEARNED I wrote, “A lot of my dailys are ‘I lectured and ate’ lol.”
Zero of that went into my Substack. In fact, Little Yellow Different was pretty much as far off my mind as I could imagine.
The numbers
If you go by my Substack archive, here’s my output for most of the last five years: Six posts in 2020. One in 2021. Three in 2022. One in 2023. Two stretches of absolutely nothing — 450 days from January 2021 to April 2022, and then 497 days from January 2023 to May 2024.
From the outside, it looks like I died or took a vow of silence or something.
It’s not that I was a monk in a monastery or anything. I was writing in a bullet journal, with a pen, on paper. I was with someone full time. We were both busy with our own extracurriculars. I was living my life in meatspace.
I was still dealing with things. I just dealt with them on paper, where nobody could read it. Now I deal with them here, and the writing is part of how.
Why November 2024
Technically, the silence broke in May 2024 with a couple of tech posts—one was about Tailwind, the CSS library. I briefly thought about focusing Substack content only on web development. I mean, look, it would have been different.
On November 8, 2024, I published After All These Years, Let’s Try Something New, and I turned on paid subscriptions. I was ten months into a job search with no leads. Two weeks later, I published 303 Days, as in, 303 days since I last had a job.
Hey, why not, right?
The restart post kicks off with Ernie-Aid. August 2001, I was made redundant from Trend Micro, and two internet friends (Philo Hagen and Choire Sicha) put together a fake telethon to help “starving Gaysians in need,” complete with a Macromedia Flash game where you’d bang a cartoon me with dollar bills like Whack-a-mole. It raised about $1k, which paid my rent, and I got a very brief mention in a USA Today piece. That was the first time I was out of work in the public eye.
I bring up Ernie-Aid partly because it was the last time I was publicly broke—the dot-com bust, my first layoff, the whole thing. But mostly I wanted the energy; it was so over the top, so unhinged, this group that all sort of knew each other. That guy, with the avatar that looked like a Chinese version of Dexter from Dexter’s Laboratory—he had all the energy in the world, and I wanted to borrow some of him back. Choire went on to become a big deal. Philo died more than a year ago. We were all twenty-five years younger.
The paid tier was supposed to be $5 a month. When I turned pricing on a second time, Substack made it $8, and people started paying $8 before I could change it back. So it’s $8.
Turning on paid was the commitment. The price was an accident. If you’re restarting, make it cost you something. Money, a public promise, anything that makes quitting again awkward.
I just started posting.
No apology post. No “sorry I’ve been away, here’s what happened.” The restart post had exactly one sentence on burnout, buried in the middle, and then it asked you for $8.
Old subscribers showed up anyway. People I knew, but some people I didn’t. One reader, Mukta, said she’d read my blog for years—my love life, my mom, my sister—and just wanted to know I was okay. If you know me, you know I do NOT take compliments well. But… I put that one on my About page anyway.
Your list is less dead than you think. You don’t owe it a speech.
I thought it would feel like 2004
I naively expected going hard on Substack to feel like the early 2000s. No, not the numbers. The feeling.
Back then I was in my early twenties with boatloads of energy. I thought about blogging every waking hour: what to write, how to be funny. My friend Kevin showed me one of the first blog ranking pages, a bare HTML list from before Google. Mostly guys, writing about RSS and SOAP protocols. And there, somehow, was Little Yellow Different. A guy writing about his mom. In 2004 it won Weblog of the Year. And sure, it was the Bloggies, not the Webbies, but I still sit with that. What does that even mean?
It was the first time I felt confident about anything. I was deeply insecure about a whole bunch of things, but at least I was funny. At least people came.
That’s not 2026. I’ve posted Substack Notes that two people saw. Literally two. And 83% of my paid subscribers are people I know personally. (Hi. Love you. Call me.)
I had to learn fast that I’m not finding many new readers. If I’m not okay with that, it’s bad days for everyone. So I have to be okay with that: different time, different writer. Also, nobody can run at that speed forever. That’s nuts.
What made it stick
Three years of chaos, no end in sight.
Since November 8, 2024, the archive holds 144 posts, and the longest gap is 16 days, over the 2024 holidays. I posted to LYD the week my father went on hospice, and the week I published his eulogy.
During a time of filling out forms, waiting in lines, missing deadlines, and not getting the jobs I hoped for, writing gave me what I desperately needed: something I knew I could deliver every week. Knowing people were looking forward to it helped a lot. Sometimes it was writing as therapy or a way to focus on something unrelated to the outside world. Other times, writing truly was thinking; a way to get a bearing on how I felt about certain things.
I use AI as a brainstorming partner, because deciding what to write about matters as much as the writing. Brad Root, an early reader after the restart, told me blogs would matter again once the internet filled up with AI slop. A year later, someone called me a slop cannon. So that’s going great.
I did let it write as me a couple of times. I noticed when everyone else did. The tell is any paragraph that opens with “Here is the part where…” I have never once started a paragraph that way. Now I see it everywhere and think, oh God, Opus 5. The posts are still up. The intent was mine. It still feels gross.
So now AI can suggest, sort, and nag. But at the end of the day, I still approve the sentences.
A normal week starts with a lead; sometimes it’s a template, like a guide or a listicle. If not, AI combs my daily journals for seed questions, points of view, and threads I forgot I left. Then I either do a voice interview with Claude, which is how this post happened, or write a messy draft and rewrite it.
The rewrite is where the week goes. AI and I both hunt for sentences that feel fishy. Editing takes longer than writing and uses a different part of my brain. Doing it weekly would have been unthinkable in the old days. Sometimes I get to the end, decide it’s stupid, and publish something I wrote on the fly instead.
Then I add an ElevenLabs voiceover, a couple of ChatGPT images, and pick the goofiest one. Now I have a Substack post that all my friends and exactly three strangers read.
So you want to start writing again
Now, what’s it all about: To make friends? To get better at writing? To use what you know to get work later? Are you writing about a thing, or about your life?
There’s no wrong answer, but the answer decides everything else. How often you post, how you sound, whether you charge.
My answer in 2024 was in the restart post: “At 47 — fuck my life, I’m 48 in a month — I still have things to say.”
Two years later, I still do.
I AM TURNING FIFTY YEARS OLD IN LESS THAN A MONTH.
That November 2021 page is still in the notebook. REBUILDING in capital letters, gratitude at 40%, most days “I lectured and ate.” I never stopped writing. I just moved it back where people can read it.
The lecturing’s over, but the eating shall continue.