Building a digital garden in my own back yard

I really wanted to love creating a Substack. I was looking forward to watering it, nourishing it, tending to it, and growing it, but something just stopped me.

A bit like finding a really gorgeous notebook that you can see the potential of, it’s frankly gorgeous, but for some reason just doesn’t feel quite right. I kept opening the metaphorical tab, pondering it, going to the checkout page, coming off it, going back onto it, but I never bought the notebook.

In my going back and forth, back and forth, I’ve been examining my own indecision, and I came to this realisation:

I’ve decided I want to build my own digital garden in my own back yard. Something a bit more wild, untamed, and less manicured.

And somewhere where I completely own my back yard.

The way I see it, Substack is more like a Botanical Garden. I enjoy visiting the many Botanical Gardens of Substack myself. There are a great number of people I love reading, and I look forward to finding even more fabulous people on there. It’s just that I don’t want my own.

(Well, I did kind of start one VERY briefly, and I need to figure out what to do with it!)

But building a Botanical Garden on Substack comes with a price of admission, and I’m not willing to pay the price:

I want to have complete ownership. I want to know without any hesitation that the garden will be watered and tended to with my own values. I want to have the deciding vote on the vision of my garden.

I’m very sceptical and wary of tech companies right now, and if something in my gut says no, even if I can’t figure out exactly what it is, I have to listen to it.

I like the idea of having a garden that is a bit out of the way, that it is something that is almost stumbled upon, rather than something firmly planted on the map. And something less manicured.

I know with Substack, I’d get caught up in the numbers, the likes and the external metrics of success. Even though I’d like to think I wouldn’t, I know I would try to please the algorithm.

Then I’d take too long to reply to comments and the gnawing guilt will keep me from going on Substack and writing anything. The garden would just become overgrown, but not in the wild, fabulous, intentional way that feeds the ecosystem. It would just become abandoned.

Don’t get me wrong, Substack is really tempting, and I can even feel it luring me back in as I write this.

I love the idea of people being able to find my garden and visiting easily. I’m honest about my dreams: I want my stuff to be read, I want to make an impact, and the allure of discoverability and virality is tantalising.

But I also have a hunch that those days of organic discoverability are behind us. The space is getting noisy, it’s more like a social media platform, there’s an algorithm, and how long before it becomes filled with AI slop?

In making this decision, I had to look at what I wanted it for in the first place. Substack’s main selling points are growing a newsletter and creating an income from paid subscribers, and I don’t want it for either.

I’m not interested in using it as a newsletter platform, I’ve got that covered. I’ve been writing my Sunday emails for 12+ years and I love the intimacy of them and my beautiful email community. I share the more vulnerable bits, and it’s a space I love to water. I also have no current desire to paywall this part of my work. While the idea of monthly recurring revenue from Substack does sound wonderful in many ways, it’s not a route I want to go down right now.

Part of having a podcast that is listened to by thousands of people(not a humble brag, just something very relevant to this), is that I have become very self censored in what I say.

I turn around each sentence from every angle to make sure that it can’t be misconstrued. I chew over every thing I say to make sure the takeaway can be as universal as it can be and does no harm. And while I stand by my integrity and values, absolute certainty and dissection is not the way to feed a creative soul.

In a way I’ve become watered down, and I know in creating my own mini-botanical garden on Substack, there’s a chance it would become another version of that and just become a beautiful but albeit highly manicured garden.

Maybe I’ll create a Substack for The Daily Pep and repurpose the episode transcripts for it? That feels like a better use for it and could be a win-win situation.

But for the foreseeable - and I doubt this will change, but you never know - my eclectic and eccentric collection of plants and the seeds of my ideas and all my weird and wonderful flower beds will live here.

I want to use my precious creative energy toiling my own soil.

So I guess this is my way of saying, welcome to my wild back garden. You are very welcome here. There are fairy lights, there’s a bench, and there’s even an indestructible hammock (which matters a lot to me as a fat woman!) It’s a joy to have you here and I look forward to seeing what blooms!

📷 credit Rachel Burt

I’m Meg, and I’m a coach + mentor for fiercely creative, wildly multi-passionate & fabulously weird women who want to get unstuck & quit being there own dreamshitter.

I’ve spend the past 10+years partnering with hundreds of creative and multi-passionate women to helping them cultivate the confidence, courage and clarity to create and sustain a fulfilling and
wildly aligned life they love.