The Cure for Loneliness

Why deciding to stop teaching is steering me toward teaching

Photo by Lukas Rychvalsky on Unsplash

It’s been a while since I wrote here. I’d like to explain.

After a long period of stagnant growth here on Substack, the truth is I pretty much gave up on it. In fact, the only reason I didn’t write a “goodbye” post and close things down was simply because I never got around to it. It’s ironic: My apathy about this Substack is the only reason it still exists. My inattention to the act of quitting has, so far, kept it alive.

The problem was that while some people can keep going for their own reasons, I am not one of them. I need to feel like I’m making a difference. If I’m not, I’d rather try something else that might work better … and for me, for Substack, the handwriting was already on the wall.

When I stopped writing my daily Noticings, nobody seemed to care. When I then quit the Art of Noticing podcast because numbers were so low, the same non-thing happened. After that, there wasn’t much left. I loved the shit out of (and still love the shit out of) the One-Drink Book Club podcast, but beyond that all I was doing on Substack was writing occasional posts that weren’t terribly popular. My numbers were actually inching down: unsubscribes coming faster than new subscribers.

What, I asked myself, was the point?

Stronger writers might have pushed on anyway. Not me; I’ll admit I need an audience. So when it started to seem like I’d become part of the background noise on Substack instead of a meaningful signal, it was time to go.

And that’s how things stood, with “Write last post” bumped back over and over again on my to-do list, until a bad day last week made me reexamine everything.

I still don’t know if I’ll stick around on Substack, but I’d like to write up my experience for you either way. Because maybe some of you have had bad days like mine, and maybe some of you can relate to what changed my mind … and sent me right back into something I was sure I’d finished with forever.

Big badass man.

I’ve been at this “internet” thing since the blogging days. I’m old school, yo.

Through all of it, I had a reputation as a hardass. I didn’t show vulnerability, pretty much ever. (Except when I wrote this post and a paid subscriber asked for her money back, saying she couldn’t take creative inspiration from me if I was flawed.)

Everything I wrote in the old days — and to a large extent even here — came out as advice for other people even though it came from my own experience. I had a way of transmuting my mistakes into lessons without actually admitting I’d learned anything … or, you know, admitting I had emotions about those mistakes.

But now I’m 48 fucking years old, and I’m tired of pretending to be bulletproof. I’m a far cry from the guy who couldn’t believe he’d turned 35, now plenty comfortable where I am and a lot less tolerant of bullshit — especially from myself.

Interestingly, the switch in attitude I just described happened to line up with a big life change. At the same time as I was giving fewer shits and reminding myself that I wasn’t always a badass (and fine with it, because of those fewer shits), my author business moved from partnership to complete independence. A lot of you old-schoolers know me from The Self Publishing Podcast, The Smarter Artist Summit, Write. Publish. Repeat, or any of the other dozen non-book things I did with Sterling & Stone. But after the change, I had nothing to do with any of that.

I was out, and I was on my own … and at first all was dandy.

The death of author education

“Having nothing to do with any of it” was fine by me. Ideal, actually. I love writers, but over the years, serving writers had slowly moved from something that had context and made sense in my life and business to something without context that didn’t make sense at all.

Still, I continued on inertia rather than conscious decision-making. Even though author education had stopped being part of my business years ago, what was the first thing I did when it seemed S&S and I might separate? I started this Substack, speaking to authors.

And even though I was no longer writing books like Write. Publish. Repeat, hosting conferences, or selling courses, what else did I keep up? I kept doing content marketing for those businesses that no longer existed.

In February, I spent a lot of time trying to be accepted as a speaker for the upcoming NINC conference. Why? Even setting aside the obvious, my people are at Author Nation, not NINC. I wrote guest posts for writer blogs — something that takes a ton of time and brainpower and steals time from writing books, which are the cornerstone of my business today. Why was I doing it? Guest posts, written for authors, used to be part of that “content marketing” I mentioned: a way to interest people who might one day become my customers.

There was no reason for me to do any of it other than 1) because I had something to say or 2) to be cool to the community. The problem was that although I did have things to say, it was my fiction readers, not other authors, who I should have spent that time speaking to. And although I like giving back, the scales were out of balance. If I was just being a nice guy and trying to help, there were better ways to do it — ways that didn’t take up literally half of my time.

So I cut the cord. I told myself and others that I was done with teaching. I had nostalgic affection for it, but it wasn’t part of my business anymore and therefore didn’t help pay the bills … at a time when a lot of bills needed paying. I liked helping and inspiring authors, but I don’t have the luxury right now of “just being nice” with half my time.

My books needed me more, especially since I had to republish all of them after the separation. Rebuilding myself has been a year-long effort. I didn’t have time to spare. Not if I wanted to survive in this increasingly tricky environment we face today.

So I stopped writing guest posts, turning down a few people who asked. I stopped writing this Substack. I stopped the Art of Noticing podcast and the accompanying Noticings posts. I stopped writing nonfiction. All education became suspect. In the name of triage, it had to go. I became a disciple of Seth Godin’s The Dip, with its message not about the endeavors you choose to pursue, but instead those you should quit.

That’s the “long story” of why I haven’t written lately on this Substack. It just didn’t seem to make sense. I was a little disillusioned with my stagnation here, but it’s not like I stopped out of frustration or bad feelings. I stopped because just like all the other “author education” stuff I’d spent ten years doing with S&S, it simply didn’t fit anymore. People say you’re supposed to align your actions with your goals, but that’s not what I’d been doing at all.

It was a death of my prior self, in a way. Most of the people who know my name now know it from things like the legendary Self Publishing Podcast, may she rest in peace. Going forward — unless you’re a fiction reader — nobody will know me from Adam.

My time belonged completely my books after that. I’d been a teacher, but I was no more.

But there was a problem.

All I had on my plate was my books. I’d become an author and nothing else.

It was exciting, even though it was stressful. I’ve written about 150 books, but even the “consolidated 67” I took with me in my amicable split from S&S were plenty to keep me stupidly busy at the start. I needed to build two new websites. I needed to move all the books from old dashboards to brand new ones … many platforms, many formats, many files to wrangle. I learned at least 20 new pieces of software that I’d never used before. I even learned all about VAT, the European tax. And fuck VAT! VAT is terrible, and confusing, and nobody should ever have to deal with it.

But over the past month, that startup work has finally begun to slow. As I get more done, there’s less left to do, and what remains isn’t urgent. I’ve even had a little bit of time to write — something I’d sidelined while I got my shit in order. I’m not back to writing novels yet (probably with Sean; our “amicable divorce doesn’t extend to co-writing), but I did start a little vote-what-happens-next short story with my readers … and that’s been crazy fun.

There’s a lot less mandate in my days now.

I work on things that might need doing, but could also wait. I write a little, but nowhere near as much as I used to (for now). Mostly I obsess about my sales — not because it’s my True North, but because I’m a tiny bit terrified by how things aren’t back up to par yet. It’s a slow thing, beginning again.

Stress. Time. Frustration. Ideas that fail, because most ideas fail and only a few take off. And so there I was last Friday at the end of a day where nothing had gone right, where everything had taken ten times as long as it should have and still it confused me, where I found myself bitchy and pissed off and yet no one thing seemed to be to blame.

Can you relate? You’re bothered by something, but you can’t pin down what it is. I’m the touchy-feely one in my marriage, but my wife is great at reflecting me back at myself, parsing what I think I’m saying and telling me how it actually sounds coming out of my mouth.

She said, “You’re lonely.”

That was not cool. It was also entirely true. Even now, writing this, I’m tempted to erase the short paragraph above and say something else instead. “Lonely” is a playground emotion. It’s what little kids feel, not adults and certainly not bulletproof badasses. I don’t like telling you about it. I’m only doing so because I suspect I’m not the only one.

Yes. Okay. You got me, okay? I’m fucking lonely.

I’m what they call an ambivert: somewhere between an introvert and an extrovert. I love being alone but I also love being with people. During Covid, I very much missed hand-shaking. A lot of people are grossed out by the idea (maybe rightly so, from a sanitary standpoint), but I need human connection and — yes — literal human touch. I need to be with people sometimes. It’s just how I’m wired.

I used to be around people all the time, and the absence of it is likely part of the problem.

Sterling & Stone, which I used to be part of, is all about collaboration, connection, and the sort of “people time” that you’d THINK would have been perfect for me. It wasn’t, though, because it directly contradicted the other strong need I have: to control my own business and be responsible to absolutely no one other than me. S&S, by contrast, is highly, highly collaborative. If you’re the kind of writer who digs that kind of thing, you should absolutely drop Sean Platt a line. But I was not that writer. If I could have hung out with the gang only socially, that might have worked … but there’s business to do, and nobody has time to hang around not talking about it.

So there I was, with what felt like an impossible task: to marry my need for extreme independence (I do almost everything myself and want it that way) with my need for people. How was I going to do that? I have social friends, and I have my family, but most of the time I’m alone in a room. It’s that “most of the time” I needed to address.

Conferences are my happy place. They’re a way to talk about the things I love with like-minded creatives while remaining a solo operator, but the problem is there are only so many conferences and all of them cost money. I didn’t want to join a writers’ group because that’s too close to collaboration, and because those groups tend to be hit or miss: You can end up with assholes, or you can get a group to which you give a lot more than you get.

Sean and I still talk, and we’ll talk more once we start writing together again … but still, it’s occasional. The One-Drink Book Club is just about perfect for me (I get to talk about books and writing with my friends without any business entanglement), but ODBC is only an hour a week.

I needed more. I needed something that was baked into my day in some way: an entire element in my world that would add a whole new dimension.

My super-smart spouse had just the idea … and it was so fucked up.

Teaching. Again. But not how you think of it.

This is the part of this long-ass post where I stop narrating and venture into the realm where nothing is settled, where I have no idea what’s next, and where I don’t even know if the next steps will happen … or can happen at all.

But let me tell you about it anyway.

What she suggested was that maybe I should teach a college course.

It’s nothing like the teaching I’ve done before. Teaching online was rewarding, but it remains true that I probably don’t want to do it anymore … unless I do it very, VERY differently than I have in the past. (I’ll explain what that means in just a second.)

Teaching online doesn’t satisfy my “people” requirement because it doesn’t put me in a room with others. Zoom sessions might feel different for you, but for me they’re still just me behind my computer: The same-old same-old with no change of scenery, no going-out-in-the-world, no exploring new things beyond these four walls.

Personally, I loved college. I know how antiquated, inefficient, and larcenously expensive (and unjustifiably so, in a lot of cases) it is, but I still love it to death. There’s a feel to college to me that can’t be pinned down. I love how learning surrounds you. I love the vibe and sense of possibility you feel: all those young people nearby experiencing adulthood and true independence for the first time, but with a big safety net. I loved being a student, but even back then I told myself I hoped I’d return one day — maybe to audit classes for kicks, or maybe … just maybe … as a professor.

I never pursued that path, but I took my time leaving school. Despite starting with a year’s worth of credits, I still took five years to finish college. I then went to grad school, although that didn’t turn out as well. One thing led to an entrepreneurial other and I ended up here three decades later. I have zero credentials to be a teacher, but now I’m wondering if I can do it anyway.

(NOTE: I’m not sure why I’m sharing any of this, now that I’m this far into it. I guess my thinking is, “I was going to kill off this Substack anyway, so why the hell not?” Maybe you’ll get value out of this story even though I’m just talking about me. Who knows.)

I’ve done some research. Everyone says you need at least a Masters degree — ideally a PhD — to teach at a four-year college. I have neither. You may need some sort of teaching credential, and I don’t have that, either. What I do have is lots and lots of real-world experience. I could teach creative writing. I could teach “the business of being an author,” whatever that means. I don’t have traditional teaching experience, but I have a ton of non-traditional teaching under my belt. I’ve also run conferences. Done a lot of speaking. Shit, I’d hire me, but unfortunately I’m not the one doing the hiring.

And I mean, I don’t want to go full-time. Not even close. I want to teach a single class. If it goes well, I’d teach that same single class again next semester. We’re talking 2-3 days a week, at 1-2 hours a day, for ten weeks. From what I read, that might be classified more as “guest lecturer” than “professor.” But maybe that’s good. Maybe it means my non-degree-having self has a chance.

People have suggested I try high school. Um, no thanks; I only want to teach people who truly want to be there, not kids just satisfying a requirement. People have also suggested community college, and that’s a possibility, but it’s not ideal. I want the immersive, big-campus, lived-on feel of a four-year. Maybe that makes me a snob, but in this case it’s very much the feeling that matters.

So who knows.

I’m still kicking ideas around. Seeing what’s possible. I know several people who’ve done some version of what I have in mind, though they DO have the proper degrees, and I’ve lined up times to pick their brains.

One thing that occurred to me is that if the local education folks prove stodgy, maybe I could try running my own “college” course online as a way of proving myself and building a traditional syllabus: a course plan I could use as proof-of-concept to convince a college later.

If I did that, though, it’d be nothing at all like an online course. I’d go out of my way to make sure it felt more like college than some thrown-together info product. I’d have to … I don’t know … have it meet three days a week for ten weeks or something. Live, not recorded. With a real syllabus appropriate to a traditional course. With live interaction, hand-raising, questions, maybe office hours. I have no idea. If I consider this, which who the hell knows? I just know it’d have to be “college, but online” as much as possible. You can think of it as “everything but the actual lecture hall.”

Or maybe this entire thing will flop. I sincerely have no idea. I may be getting all excited about an idea that feels like the perfect solution to my “isolation/loneliness/ambiversion” problem only to discover later that it’s not possible. A month from now, I might be right back where I started. I might still need a way to have my cake and eat it too, with even less of an idea about what to do.

Or, I might find a college interested in a career author who knows what he’s talking about regardless of the usual degrees.

Or maybe I can guest-speak in a class just once. Maybe twice.

I seriously have no clue. This is new, so I’m sharing … even if the story has no ending.

Okay. Now what?

I don’t mean “now what?” for me in my pursuit of this brand-new idea. What I mean is, “now what?” for this post.

Maybe there was a lesson at the beginning, when I started typing, but whatever point I had is gone now. It’s become me talking about something I might like to do: no answers, no resolution, not even a decent course of action.

So maybe I’ve wasted your time. Maybe you’re reading this last bit and saying, “Well, that was self-serving and useless. Maybe you should have just shut the Substack down like you planned, asshole.”

So I don’t know if this was helpful. I don’t have a conclusion for you. But I do think we’re all a bit lonely in this world, and maybe it’s useful to explore a question even if there’s not yet an answer.

We’ve examined it together. We’ve gotten it out into the mutual open, even if the details here were mine.

I don’t know, my friends, how to end this post.

So I’ll just end it. And I’ll thank you for reading it, for better or for worse.