Moving my Blog to Substack 📣

to make way for more writing!

What the River’s Been Bringing

The river churns and thunders lately, with disasters and upheavals spinning our heads. I write this with well-wishes for all of you who read it: may you find a rock of calm in the midst of the rapids.

My own rock, these days, has become less (than it used to be) about mentally coping with hard times, and more about connecting with myself—noticing my feelings, speaking up and reaching out for what I need, and ultimately, being my own ally.

That has led me to begin making various self-advocacy-related changes in my life, including:

• going back to therapy

• starting back on an antidepressant

• seeking outside housekeeping help

• learning about neurodivergence and how I’m autistic and that’s okay

• availing myself of sensory accommodations such as sunglasses and earplugs whenever I want

• setting TV-related boundaries in our house

• setting various other boundaries with my kids, husband, and other people

• and the list goes on…

and now, that flow of change is finding its way to my blog.

Blog Changes

First, I’ve decided to move my blog from WordPress to Substack, because now that I’ve finally heard about Substack, I really like the ways it’s designed to support writers. I’m starting over with my subscriber list, leaving behind my count of passive followers on Wordpress for the possibility of more active connection with readers on Substack.

Second, I aim to start sharing a wider variety of content, in order to give freer rein to my creative expression. I’ve got a lot of writing pouring out of me these days—as songs, poems, and prose, in addition to my ongoing fiction projects—and it seems that sharing my writing helps to keep it flowing. My quiet, minimalist approach to blogging in recent years (which itself was a conscious change from my eager-puppy early days of blogging) has echoed my personal growth work of learning to listen to my own inner voice. But now that I’ve learned to hear it better, it’s got things to say!

Coming Soon

Here are some of the sorts of things I’m planning to post on my new Substack blog (which will still be found at annaeplin.com):

• regular updates about things I’m reading, writing, and learning

• brief essay-posts about what I’m learning in areas of life that interest me, such as:

  • parenting

  • marriage

  • writing

  • neurodivergence

  • rationality

  • recovering from rough religion

  • mental health/inner life, including topics such as:

    • mindfulness and radical acceptance

    • self-respect and assertiveness

    • empathy and compassion

• poems (as before)

• “kid moments” (as before)

• photos I take of nature, because I enjoy, in my own amateur way, trying to capture some of the astounding beauty of the world around me

• possibly some fiction at some point (but mostly I’m still keeping my fiction close while I conjure my stories and hone my skills)

• and—I’m particularly excited about this—my songs! 🎵 I’m in the process of making videos of myself singing and playing my songs, and I’m planning to share them on my new Substack blog (and my Instagram account as well). The videos will be live, unpolished, and not in any way perfect musical performances, but they will help to channel the flow of my songwriting, which keeps on coming at top speed these days. (Down the road—or, down the river, as it were—I hope to make an album with the help of my musically super-gifted sibling who is also a whiz with audio engineering.)

Some Final Thoughts

The more I grow (and age!), the less I care about appearances and surface-level congeniality, and the more I care about true connection, with myself and with others. I think that art is the closest thing we’ve got to being able to experience someone else’s experience, and therefore that art can connect us in a way that nothing else really can. So that is my highest aim with this blog and with all my writing: to express my experience for the sake of connection, which itself can yield all manner of goodness.