I'll Be Honest
Because it's always been hard for me not to be honest, anyhow...
When I joined Substack just last week, I had known for a while it is a place to write because an acquaintance uses it. Months and months ago I was not ready to allow it fully into my field of vision. It was not until last week when I caught some content from one of my favorite creators on Instagram and she said at the end of her short, “To learn more on this subject, check out my Substack.”
I suppose that is really the moment I was meant to discover Substack… on my own volition and calling because, well, here I am.
I will say that until today and after already creating posts almost daily since landing here fully, I was not actually aware of how this platform is utilized by many artists, writers, thinkers and creators to further their businesses. I might be stubbing my own toe to say this but that is not exactly why I am here.
Oh, if I could only get my hands on all the creative stories and letters I used to write to my best friend in middle school. To think of oggling those unencumbered creative notes pulled into tangibility just for sake of teenage years and the silliness involved with having someone to write to that enjoyed receiving what antics I could come up with, and visa-versa.
All of those letters and writings—wherever they were at one time—are gone to me now, especially having moved cities, and with the way pages of past years of our lives somehow slip through the cracks… It is ok. As writers and as humans we are meant to grow and crack out of previous shells that might have kept our hearts safe at the time.
Fast forward to adulthood… around the 3rd year of my marriage (which would end by its 5th year)… already two toddlers deep and several different, very interesting job changes during the years leading up to when I had a gig as a hostess at a local barbecue restaurant. My supervisors bestowed mercy upon me and told me one day, that when I was not busy seating people or bussing the dining room, they would allow me to read and write at the hostess station… Say what?!
This began for me the best chapter of writing creativity I had experienced for myself in my life. I would bring whatever I could get my hands on to read each day, from Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (the most difficult text I’ve ever attempted to follow but it sharpened my reading skills for all other selections greatly) to George Bernard Shaw’s play Major Barbara to an HVAC textbook I found free at the local library.
During that time in my life, tribulation with a failing marriage, and as a fairly new mother to two young boys—reading and writing became my great escape from the themes I felt I had little control over about the way my own life was going.
I spent an entire year without a cell phone at that time. I would come in to work, set my chosen read on the left side of my hostess podium, and then fold up several paper children’s barbecue menus on my right—complete with a favorite pen at the ready.
Sunset after sunset here in St. Augustine, Florida, at that hostess station I would read a little each late afternoon to warm up my brain, until my heart’s content and then toggle over to write notes on what I was reading… such as vocabulary words or phrases I’d never seen, quotes I liked, ideas I wished to further express on. I hardly read a text straight through at that podium until The Old Man and the Sea.
I still say to this day that trying to work my way through at least several pages each night of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness sharpened my acuity to such a degree… when setting my sights on passages much easier to grasp like Ernest Hemingway’s writing... I sliced through The Old Man and the Sea like butter, I tell you! Only about 100 pages long, I read it front to back between seating guests and cleaning the dining room, in one shift, only!
When it came to the outdated HVAC textbook, I sure did get some strange looks and inquiries from my co-workers for that one… They weren’t exactly sure what planet I was from. My mind at that time had an insatiable appetite. I really did find it so interesting to learn the difference between fogs and mists and haze.
I switched back and forth usually from reading to writing and my notes might’ve been on any subject at all… regardless of the text I was reading—or very much inspired by it—about the world, perhaps, and my take on it.
I would go on adventures with my young boys during our days together and then come into work to create books out of the backsides of those children’s restaurant barbecue menus, writing from personal experience about our adventures. I always thought the best thing anyone could ever write about was their own experience because, well… we are all the experts on the subject of our own lives, aren’t we?
I would write a little at my podium, always standing, never sitting—then seat guests—come back, write some more until the whole dining room all-at-once was one big abandoned barbecue mess from many guests finishing in one fell swoop. I would write until I came to my next line of expression and be pulled away by my inherent hostess duties, depart from my podium, at times in the later evening go table to table with a busser’s tub, happily loading all the plates and cups just-so in my tub… as though each table of dishes was a puzzle to itself.
It was, in fact, an invigorating way to write.
I would speed-walk each tub fast as made sense back to the kitchen because, all the while, as I loaded each puzzle of barbecue mess into my tubs I was allowing a flow from my mind the entire time.
I didn’t need to think: What line would come next in my writing? It was already present, repeating itself in fragments until I could reach my pen and paper again to let it out. How it would be strung together came so natural into my mind—almost like a channel—and by the time I had a tub or two loaded I couldn’t wait to get back to my pen and podium.
This happenstance of always being on my feet as I wrote, using my job as exercise and to have good blood flow to my brain throughout the writing process truly produced some of my very best work. I recall the very evening one of my personal experience stories suddenly took a fictional turn toward its denouement. I was involuntarily composing in my mind as I whisked myself around the empty dining room.
It was the most exciting time as an amateur, hobby writer. It all just felt so… fantastic. In every sense of the word.
I enjoyed handwriting my drafts very much. It was 2013, more than 10 years ago, now. When I came home, I would take my barbecue children’s menu drafts and type them up, editing as I went along, onto a website which was new at the time called Bubblews.
Present day, Bubblews.com exists, no more. It is frozen in time. Its concept was to allow writers to make posts with a 400 character minimum requirement—that is the amount of about 4 typed lines—however, posts could be as long as you liked.
Every time a reader opened a post the writer banked a cent. If they hit “like” on your post, banked another cent. And if they commented, yet another cent earned. Writers were able to cash out once we hit $40 banked in our accounts.
It seemed like a great way to express myself in a place where someone out there would read my pieces for what they were, and to be able to pull in a few dollars here and there was a nice plus.
I wrote even a few series on Bubblews.com. I wrote all sorts of opinion articles and personal experience. I wrote an account of an paranormal experience that happened to me in a house where I lead ghost tours at one time in my life. My first personal experience with a fictional-creative ending to tie it all together… It was all there. But not one bit of it was backed up in any sort of separate computer file. And one day… I tried to log into bubblews… and it had been shut down, permanently.
Try it yourself—if you navigate there, you will see an imprint of what it used to be… incased into the internet… very much like the Kryptonian criminals who were banished to the Phantom Zone projector in the movie Superman II. (I was obsessed with the original Superman movies as a child).
Anyhow, I do have handwritten versions of my work from that chapter of my life—in pieces, mostly. Some major pieces missing, also, for thinking I wouldn’t need to save them… not knowing there was a chance they might be lost to the oblivion of the world wide web.
My writings from that era of my life reside now in a second-hand store briefcase (with one broken latch on the exterior but a load of character). Maybe one day I’ll crack it open again and see what I can make of it all. Once that loss of work was felt, though, admittedly… my heart was a bit shattered about it.
Soon after, in the story of my life my husband and I were separating and negotiating our (mostly) simple divorce. As a mother who enjoyed writing personal experience I did not feel called to document my thoughts throughout that journey for my children to happen upon later. So, I put down my pen. Since then I feel like I’ve lived even several lifetimes in just this one body.
So, here I am. Finding Substack was more like finding a little light that shines, still, after my experience writing on the internet before. That’s why I didn’t fully grasp how many creatives use this as a way to generate an email list of their followers.
I guess it was just delayed processing on the whole, but I didn’t realize even when I made my first posts here about my father’s artwork how this site was in fact emailing all of you every time. Laughing out loud at myself.
Originally I was asking for subscribers just so that I could show my father’s work around this site. Really, it was more of a call out into the canyon what the internet is to me and curiosity about what the echo back would sound like. Much appreciation to those of you who were called to subscribe for free. Thanks for giving me a chance to show up in your inbox.
The thing I know most about…which I could share without writing about myself first… is the massive body of art my father left behind. That is one mission in my life. It is a big one. A main idea. But it’s not the only one.
It occurs to me now: It is as though this was actually the family trade that my father left to me to steward without using so many words (at all, really) to tell me that. There was a reason he left his body of artwork all as organized as he could muster.
All the drawings pulled directly from his filing cabinets from our house in Orlando and placed into grocery bags when my parents moved very quickly in 2011, housed in banker box on top of stacks of banker boxes. All of the cassette tapes. All of the binders full of slides. All of the writings complete with his written consent to share it. The shoebox archive of his greatest completed oil paintings. All of it.
Without so much as telling me this is what he wanted— the way it was left—he told me without telling me. He knew one day I would take this up and make it something to be cherished, at least within our own family. And so I will.
That big project is not all there is to me, though. There is so much more. I am a storyteller at heart. I stay quiet often in social situations because I tend to monologue… Just like my father did, just like I see in my older son. We are all cut from a similar cloth. Just like my father said on the audio found in my initial post, “We all have something to say.”
My Dad said that if painting is not our medium to express, then find some other way. Writing, dancing, singing… Yes, I used to draw until I was nine or ten…until I made the decision to cauterize that avenue due to the misinterpretation of my father’s attention routed solely toward his artwork from my infancy and through my youth. And do you know what? That’s when I started writing.
I began with poetry. Forlorn, limerent, and hopeless romantic teen-aged poetry. It was a necessary outlet for me. And now, at this present time in my life… it has been too long since I’ve capped off my avenue to express myself fully. If I do not begin to express myself again, I’ve seen how it spills over onto everything and everyone I come into contact with as a weight that is not for them to fix nor to bear.
If you are a creative, you cannot so easily change your stripes. Expression must come, or it will be a slow and agonizing descent without a way to be the kind of human we were born to be. So here, and now… a new day dawns with me.
I have said for years and coined my phrase, “Every day, a new horizon.” That is because in my experience I wake up every single day and blink open my eyes to a brand new emotional landscape. I get to choose to love this beautiful life, hard as life may be at times… over and over, and over again until it’s done.
I will continue on in new and creative ways until my time is up. There is so much to explore. So much to do… also married with a particular focus on deeper self-care and rest, as well, as I pass through such ornate thresholds of my life.
I know who might be showing me the doors… but that story is for another day. It is only using my own volition that I walk through those thresholds meant for me—and that excites me very much.
Glad to be here. Thank you for subscribing. Now that I realize these substack entries are coming directly to you as they go live, I appreciate so much if you choose to stay. Thank you for reading and being here with me. Many more different shares to come. Let’s co-create this life together right here, right now and onward.
All the love,
Colleen Noelle