Why I Started My Substack
And why I keep writing
It has been around six months now since I started my Substack and from time to time, I keep asking myself: Why am I writing this blog/newsletter? What is my motivation? What drives me to actually sit down in front of my computer and type, week in and week out, even when I have more pressing things to do?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining. I enjoy being here. I like doing what I do. But I also feel like it is important for me to step back for a moment and reflect on what propels me to carve out the time to write in the first place. And what better way to answer that question than to… well, write about it?
Okay, let’s start with the obvious: I set up my Substack because I wanted to write.
It’s not like I wasn’t doing any writing before. On the contrary. I am a historian by training, and writing has been a big part of my life for the past 12 years at the very least. Not surprisingly, most of the writing I do is of the scholarly kind. More recently, I have also been writing political and foreign policy analyses as a part of my day job.
I guess what I am trying to say with all this is that my writing has always been for a specific purpose, whether it was to finish my PhD dissertation, publish an article in a scholarly journal, or write an analysis of a recent political development for a think tank. I wanted to go in a different direction, though. After all those years, I wanted to write for myself for a change, without any constraints, limits, or expectations. And Substack presented the perfect opportunity for me.
Plus, I also wanted to go beyond the rigid academic style that I was trained to write in and try something different, something more relaxed and conversational, and see if I could handle it. In other words, I wanted to write whatever the hell I wanted, however I wanted.
This is also why I opted not to write about my expertise, which was the most obvious candidate for a theme for my Substack. As I said, I have already been writing about the history of the Ottoman Empire or the current Turkish foreign policy as a part of my day job for a long time now, and the idea of making this space about those topics, too, just did not appeal to me when I was starting out.
This posed a different problem, though: what the fuck was I going to write about then, if not about what I knew best? For a long time, I blanked out. I had this itch to start my own Substack but could not find what I wanted to talk about. After dillydallying for a while, I realized that I could simply start writing about myself and see where it went. Admittedly, it felt scary and uncomfortable, as well as presumptuous at first, but I went ahead with it, anyway. And this leads me to my second point, which is...
I write this blog/newsletter because it is a personal exercise in vulnerability.
I always had trouble being vulnerable. In my mind, I equated it with being “weak,” most probably because when I was a child, it was drilled into me, both implicitly and explicitly, that I had to be strong at all costs. Not surprisingly, I internalized this tenet and lived my life accordingly. I was terrified of showing any kind of weakness or displaying my emotions (for me, they were more or less the same thing), thinking that if I did, nobody would accept me. Even worse, I ran the risk of being actively rejected.
Closely related was the pervasive shame I felt whenever I had to open myself up, the underlying assumption being that something was fundamentally and terribly wrong with me and that I should do everything to prevent anyone from seeing the real “Doğa.” What’s more, there was probably a gender component to this too, which can simply be summarized with that time-honored phrase: “Men don’t cry.”
Given all this, it came as a surprise for me, too, when I finally decided to make my Substack (mostly) about myself and my healing process. In fact, the very first words I published on this platform were about how I have been going to therapy since 2018, a fact that nobody knew except my family and a number of my close friends.
Of course, I didn’t magically arrive at this point. As I said, there are years of therapy behind it. Before starting for real, I discussed it with my therapist, too, and told him that I felt ready to talk about my own experience.
I was also listening to a lot of podcasts back then on mental and emotional growth, which convinced me that my story did matter and that I could put it out into the world. I didn’t have any illusions about reaching a huge audience, but even if I connected with just one person whose experience resonated with mine, I would consider that a “win.” This is what led me to finally pull the trigger.
I would have loved to tell you that the more I wrote and shared about my own life, the easier it got, but that wasn’t (and still isn’t) the case. I still have dread and shame grip me whenever I get ready to talk about something private or something that I deem to be embarrassing. The good thing is, though, that I don’t shy away from these feelings of shame and anxiety and try to be as candid and unfiltered as I can in my writing. I have written some things that I have told pretty much no one before and put them out here on Substack, as well as posting them on Facebook and Twitter. This is vulnerability at its finest, as far as I am concerned.
Sitting down to write these weekly posts also allows me to reflect on and process my past, which is the final reason I ended up creating this space.
Since I started, I have written about a lot of different things.
I wrote about how I started therapy and what I learned from it at the end of 6+ years.
I wrote about my life as an immigrant.
I wrote about my personal history of reading and about how I have always loved spending time in libraries.
I went ahead and wrote about how I once tried to become a pick-up artist to get good at seducing women, something that I have never told anyone before except a few of my close friends.
And most recently, I wrote about one of the most traumatic experiences of my childhood and what I learned from it.
Working on some of these topics, I had to think hard about what they meant to me. What they meant to me then and what they mean to me now.
This also meant that I had to process them through a different lens, the lens of my 40-year-old self, which at times led to the emergence of new understandings, new insights.
“True healing,” Gabor Mate writes, “simply means opening ourselves to the truth of our lives, past and present, as plainly and objectively as we can.”1 In that sense, in addition to being an exercise in vulnerability, writing these weekly articles is also part of my efforts to heal and construct a better version of myself.
And that is why I am here.
Until next time!
Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal.
Doga, this hits home for me, and I relate on so many levels. I started my Substack for many of the same reasons as you: “Plus, I also wanted to go beyond the rigid academic style that I was trained to write in and try something different, something more relaxed and conversational, and see if I could handle it. In other words, I wanted to write whatever the hell I wanted, however I wanted.” I also wanted to have a space where I could be vulnerable, which is scary for many reasons (including professional ones). I stumbled across your Substack thanks to Notes, and I’m so glad I did. Looking forward to catching up on your archive (once the semester is over 🤣).