Two Years of Feels Like Home
Celebrating my newsletter's second anniversary
“… noticing what we love in common, and studying that, might help us survive. It’s why I think of joy, which gets us to love, as being a practice of survival.“
— Ross Gay, Inciting Joy: Essays
Today marks two years of Feels Like Home. Since starting this newsletter, I knew I wanted to write about things I love and the people and moments that have shaped me. Columbus, Ohio’s own Hanif Abdurraqib showed me this was possible—more specifically, his essay collection, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us.
As I read Hanif’s writings about Carly Rae Jepsen, Allen Iverson, and Ric Flair, I saw a way to write that didn’t only need to be serious or about things I disliked. I could write about my loves. I could make connections between the things I adore and invite readers to love my loves as I gain a deeper appreciation for theirs along the way.
Two years feels like a million, and it also feels like the quickest breath. In that time, my life has taken new shapes—and, as it goes, so has the world. Feels Like Home was born from a desire to make it easier for the people who wanted to read my work to be able to do so.
Also, after a year of consistently publishing at least two essays per month on Medium and seeing my work go where I never thought it would, including Kid Cudi tweeting the piece I wrote about him, I was curious where writing could continue to take me.
In many ways, Feels Like Home was me continuing what I had started on Medium. I kept writing about my loves, bloviating on boygenius, The Bear’s Marcus episode, and even the “slams laptop shut til Monday” memes, which I actually hate, but even hatred has a hint of intimacy.
I knew I’d reach the people who had been keeping up with my writing, but I didn’t know I’d end up with more than 500 subscribers by the end of 2023. Around that time, I also applied to write monthly stories covering hip hop and R&B for a local online publication, Columbus Underground (CU).
Outside of the work I self-published on Medium and my newsletter, nothing I’d written had ever been published by an online or print publication. The words I wrote here, the words some of you read, got me hired to write for CU.
For those who don’t know, I didn’t study English in college. I don’t have an MFA. My entire career has been in social media marketing. So, becoming a freelance writer was never something I envisioned for myself. But writing about my loves made that possible. Y’all made that possible.
As I got a few CU stories under my belt, I reached out to Sav to get to know her better. While we planned a future coffee meetup, she invited me to write monthly print stories for (614) Magazine, the local publication she’s an associate editor for. We originally connected on Substack, but she kept up with my music reporting and believed I’d be a good fit for the magazine.
While the work I’ve gotten to do for (614) and its quarterly publication, Refined, isn’t anything I published here, I mention it because it started here. The essays I wrote for Feels Like Home made up the body of work that led to these opportunities. They gave me the confidence to say yes.
If 2023 was about maintaining what I’d been doing, 2024 was me getting a glimpse of how my writing could be more than I ever anticipated.
Feels Like Home helped me build community with other writers. Not only have I met folks through Substack who have become real-life friends, I joined with some of those writers earlier this year to start Locked In, weekly writing sessions and community for Substack’s Black, Indigenous, and Writers & Creators of Color.
Our hour-long gatherings on Friday mornings have transformed into a team of facilitators expanding our offerings to two weekly writing sessions and even a monthly curation of submissions from Locked In members called Unlocked: BIPOC Reads.
My work celebrates my people—those who held my seat, those who remain, and the ones who have yet to surface. And when Grandma Thelma, who regularly reads Feels Like Home, messaged me at the end of last year and said she hoped to hold a book of my words in her hands before she dies, I promised she would because I couldn’t think of anything more important than fulfilling her wishes.
I filled the book with pieces from my newsletter, including an essay I wrote about her and my grandpa—what I learned from his discipline and how she has stood beside him. Over the summer, I got an opportunity to read that essay to a room full of my people. It was the first time I ever read one of my essays live, and that experience gave me a glimpse of the rooms my writing might enter as I continue showing up, honoring the things that make me me.
I write so that we might see ourselves as part of a collective. There has always been harm, things that create distance between us and keep us from ourselves. And even amid wars, genocides, and daily acts of violence, there are certain realities that have always been true—one of which brings me back to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s words: “All flourishing is mutual.”
In other words, our lives are linked together. We are harmed through one’s harming and blessed through one’s blessing. With Feels Like Home, I shine a light on these bonds through connections in music, sports, pop culture, and more.
When we’re together, we’re at home. And I promise there’s plenty more space. Let me go grab the chairs from the basement. We can scoot over and make room. We’ve got a spot for you right here. Settle in and look around. My loves resemble yours no matter how different they might seem. Our obsessions declare our affections.
Author & poet Scott Woods, a mentor of Hanif’s and another one of the writers I reach for in Columbus, recently shared his year-end “gig wrap,” and I thought it was a cool way to look at where writing took me in 2024.
“This,” Woods noted, “doesn’t take into account all of the meetings, the hours of prep… the projects in progress, the things that won’t reveal themselves until next year, the things that started but didn’t take, the research, the self-imposed syllabi, the yadda yadda yadda.”
But my goal in sharing my 2024 recap is to celebrate how far I’ve come and gain a better sense of where I can be, knowing I will get there on my own time, in my own way. By the numbers, here’s how I’m ending my year of writing:
1 book published
5 magazine stories
10 music features
1,300+ new subscribers
18 new paid subscribers
3 newsletter collabs
2 revised, re-published essays
2 live essay readings
2 video essays
3 podcast guest appearances
20 Shut Up & Writes
Thank you for being here and noticing what we love in common. I’m excited to return to Feels Like Home in 2025 and see what we find in our surviving. Our loves will light the way.
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Thanks again for all the love and support, and I hope the rest of your year is exactly what you need it to be. See you in January!
Congrats on two years man! Love to see you flourish and fly.
Inspiration. Everyday.