Newsletter Clarity Power Fantasy

There’s been a moral imperative for me to switch platforms for this newsletter for a while now — uh, did you guys know there are Nazis on here? (you did)

Despite a fairly clear values mandate, I’ve put off switching from Substack to Ghost, for months, avoiding this relatively simple task.

My procrastination was motivated by a secret fantasy: a newsletter-related power fantasy.

I’ve had this fantasy for the entire 9 years I’ve written this newsletter — one day I would wake up and, like flipping a light switch, the point of this newsletter would magically become clear.

On this day that I’ve so often imagined, all of the other components of this newsletter’s *brand* (or lack of brand) that I’ve ignored would also become clear and, gasp, even wilder — actionable.

I would figure out a new name for the newsletter (not one from a YA novel with a connected theme I've never explained coherently), a calendar, a social media schedule, and – I don't know, a logo? The kind you get because you pay someone you know who's good in Canva $200 or so to mess around with templates. The REAL newsletter stuff.

In my newsletter power fantasy, once I had that aha moment, I would say:

"Yes! This newsletter is definitively for Chicago politics and nothing else."

or

"Yes! This newsletter is for me crying about my dead friends sporadically every time I have a breakup, and nothing else."

or

"Duh!  This newsletter is about writing about whatever pop culture I'm obsessed with at any given moment, sometimes, when I feel like it, whether it has emotional resonance or not.”

(FYI, my pop culture hyper fixations right now include: Challengers, the jokes in Bodies Bodies Bodies, Game of Thrones, Ted Lasso because someone told me to watch that and to stop watching Game of Thrones and they were right, this depressing Nina Simone biography, anything Hunter Harris writes right now, and the naked dancing scene at the end of Saltburn.)"

Or even, the ultimate fantasy:

"This newsletter is for all of those things – AND I've finally found a seamless way to tie the themes together in a way that is neither incoherent nor vaguely professionally inappropriate."

Though my newsletter clarity fantasy is vivid, it’s not reality.

I've been writing this newsletter consistently inconsistently for almost 9 years, dreaming variations of my newsletter clarity fantasy the entire time.

I could do this for another 9 years without ever having a sudden moment of thematic clarity!

Which means I couldn't put off a platform switch anymore.

So, while I wait for that single moment when I become fully self-actualized and clear on my goals (both for this newsletter and in life), I’m sending you this email as I prepare to switch to Ghost.

It helps that I’m avoiding a different deadline for a different project today, one that has its own longstanding clarity power fantasies attached.

That’s sort of how it goes, huh?

The sudden aha moments of power fantasies never really show up, but at least deadlines do.

What’s your favorite current banal power fantasy?

Does it also involve Canva?

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If you're reading - thank you. If you're a paid subscriber, THANK YOU.

More soon, probably something sad — but from a different platform.