Three Years of Feels Like Home
Celebrating my newsletter's third anniversary
I spent a lot of this year wondering if I was doing enough. Today marks three years of writing this newsletter, and I’ve done more than I ever expected. Recently, I’ve gotten a few times: “You do a lot. How do you do it all?” It’s interesting because I’m aware that I put myself out there maybe more than the average person. There’s this newsletter. I’ve hosted a local Shut Up & Write chapter for nearly three years. I just launched The Album Club here in Columbus, Ohio. I’ll still write for other publications as my schedule allows. But I’ve gotten to the point where it doesn’t feel like a lot because I’ve found my pace and began to understand what I can give to these different projects. However, we don’t live in a culture of maintenance. Capitalism values explosive growth more than holding steady.
To bring it back to Feels Like Home, writing online is this weird thing where you have numbers in front of you at every turn. The onslaught of dashboards plastered with graphs makes it glaringly easy to see when you’re growing or in decline. I came into this year with a little over 2,000 newsletter subscribers. Thanks to some amazing writers who recommend my publication, especially the premiere culture critic ayan artan, Feels Like Home added almost 1,000 more subscribers by the end of January. The growth continued into March. But by then, things began slowing down significantly. Where the first month of this year was a dramatic jolt upward, the following months looked more like a flatline.
I mention numbers because I couldn’t avoid them. Also, I didn’t want to. After a decade-long professional career in social media marketing and years of sharing my own content online, I’ve come to expect an immediate reaction to my work. I see patterns in these numbers and theorize why they went in one direction or another. One of the problems, however, is that the value of my writing can’t be determined by other people’s reactions. Of course, when the growth slowed down, my natural instinct was to wonder if I had reached the end. Do people care anymore? Am I publishing enough to stay on people’s radars?
I look back and want to laugh at how pitiful I was, but I also want to honor who I was when I doubted myself as a writer and who I will undoubtedly be again at some point in the near future. Such is writing in the digital age. It has often felt like a miracle that anyone comes across my work at all, especially when algorithms are so finicky and unpredictable. That’s what made me start this newsletter in the first place.
Throughout 2022, I shared personal essays on Medium. While I had some cool moments, such as Kid Cudi retweeting my essay about him, I relied heavily on social media to get the word out. This led to several instances where friends would tell me they regretted not reading something earlier; they just didn’t see it in their feeds. Moving to Substack was me attempting to make my writing more accessible for people who wanted to read it. Thankfully, people have wanted to read my work. Over 4,000 of you now.
While I still want to believe this is a miracle, Marissa A. Ross recently told me something I haven’t been able to run from. “I don’t believe this was a miracle,” she said. “I believe it’s a dedication to your talent & skills, giving it your energy, believing in yourself so much that you created public work that allowed others to believe in you too.” If I wasn’t crying enough already, Marissa added, “You have what you have because you fucking deserve it and worked for it.”
I’m not used to thinking of myself in this way. I learned to understand humility as thinking less of myself. But now, I find more truth in the definition that Krista Tippett shared with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon: “[Humility] is more about wanting other people to be big.” Inherent in Tippett’s reframing is an understanding that this amplification also extends to ourselves. Rather than withholding affection, I wish for love to be our universal language. We should be making more of each other.
Marissa’s vote of confidence reminded me that I’ve been at this for a while. I think back to writing raps in my childhood bedroom. The composition notebooks I’d fill with rhymes and random drawings. The prayers that became permission to voice my fears and befriend vulnerability. André 3000 talked about great things starting in little rooms. It’s those little rooms where I began finding my voice. Even with the constant hum of doubt that comes with knowing every in and out of my newsletter, Feels Like Home has been a great thing for me—a great thing born from time spent in little rooms. I trust it’s also been great for you.
This year, I tried to bring what happens in this little online room to actual rooms here where I live. Back in March, me and my friend rachel moss invited folks to Two Dollar Radio Headquarters to hear from some of our favorite writers: Jessica Jackson, Selah & Tomas Pacheco. It felt like home. Everywhere you looked, there was love. I’m hoping we can bring back Write Home in 2026. It gave me the courage to team up with my homies at The Scatter Joy Project to host monthly Album Club meetings. The confidence to know people will show up.
Alternative Press named Hayley Williams their 2025 Artist of the Year. In her interview, she confessed that she’s unconcerned with becoming a bigger artist. “I care about trying to figure out how to live a real life as an artist,” shared Williams. “The rest is like, ‘What can I do in person to make my community cooler?’”
I still love writing online. As long as there’s an internet to write on, I think that will always be part of me. If it weren’t for this, I wouldn’t get to connect with all of you. It’s because of the internet that my essay was able to get in front of Williams and fellow Nashville singer Joy Oladokun. I got to see what it meant to them and so many others. I take great pride in writing things that seem to emanate sincerity and warmth, especially at a time when our words, our art, and our very decisions have been handed over to robots.
This descent into the inhumane comes at a cost. Not only to ourselves but to our communities. AI is destroying water supplies in cities that need it most. At a time when we’re already lonelier than we’ve ever been, technology takes pride in keeping us isolated and dependent. I come back to this quote often and will continue repeating it. In the essay collection, Inciting Joy, poet Ross Gay writes, “Noticing what we love in common, and studying that, might help us survive.”
The secret of Feels Like Home has always been that I write about things I love, such as music, sports, movies, and TV. But what I’m really trying to do is raise our collective consciousness and deepen our capacity for communal care—both online and in the places where we live. If you’ve spent any time at all with this newsletter over the past three years, I hope it’s made you consider how your life is connected to someone else’s. I hope you’ve been able to see, as Robin Wall Kimmerer notes, that all flourishing is mutual.
The value of this newsletter isn’t a matter of charts and graphs; it’s that we continue reflecting goodness back to each other. If Feels Like Home can help things feel a little more human, a little more real, then I’ve done my job. I can live with that. I look forward to seeing the great things birthed from our little rooms in 2026. Thank you for walking with me. I’m taking off the last few weeks of 2025, but I’ll be back in the new year. Hope to see you there.
If you’ve enjoyed Feels Like Home and believe the art you love is worth paying for, you can upgrade your subscription here:
My most read essays of 2025:
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Congrats on three years! I really appreciate your voice. There’s a genuineness and heart to it that reminds me of Hanif Abdurraqib sometimes—with your own originality, of course. Keep it up!
I love everything about this. Grateful for your writing and the community you've built here through it. You've inspired me to start actually writing regularly on Substack in 2026. I say that now, but as a busy middle-aged family man and caregiver with undiagnosed adult ADHD, that could change in a few minutes. I really hope I can do it, though, and also get back into making music, riding my bike—basically all the things I fell out of when depression and an overall spiritual fatigue set in a little over a year ago. I want to age like a fine wine, not like a bottle of Coke that's been left open on a counter for too long. And you're a part of that. So thank you, Alex. I don't expect anything from anyone, but any and all encouragement is welcomed as I try to live more deliberately and fight the urge to quit in 2026.