I Almost Quit! Here's Why ...

The real reason I'm on Substack

I almost quit everything this week.

I have been going hard as a creator for five years straight. I started my first podcast as a passion project, I’d always wanted to be a journalist but being a teen dad forced me to quit college when the pressure was too high. So in 2019, I launched a podcast with my friends to see what it was like and I loved it. And to my surprise: I was really good at it!

For the next few years, I grew my hosting and writing skills on that little podcast until I got the courage to create content on my own. I made my first viral social media post about Coachella in 2023. I spoke about how the festival impacts the poor undocumented farmworker community that lives there. I spoke about the rich kids who fly to the desert to attend a festival where one ticket costs more than an entire household makes in a month. And people really liked it! The video blew up and so I kept doing more.

Since the spring of 2023, I’ve done my ‘Here’s Why’ series on Instagram. They did so well that I started doing blog posts because there was so much to talk about that I couldn’t possibly make that many videos in a week (in hindsight maybe I should have, damn!) And those posts helped my page grow even more; from 2,000 instagram followers in May 2023 to 36,000 followers today.

My videos were getting millions of views. Because of that I got the chance to partner with organizations like GLAAD, who helped me cover really important stories. We brought national attention to the death of Nex Benedict, a trans teenager in Oklahoma in February, 2024 who had been beaten up by a group of students.

I’ve been able to cover protests in DC, interview political leaders, host the red carpet at award shows. My most viral video by far was a conversation with comedian Dulce Sloan at the GLAAD Awards in 2024. Dulce spoke about racism and capitalism and that video was everywhere!

Last year I wanted to focus a lot on getting published. So I worked my butt off, writing pitches and sending them to as many places as I could that I thought would take me seriously. And some of those stories were published but a lot of them were not. I’ve started to feel lost as my page continues to grow and my numbers keep going up but it feels like opportunities are drying up. I’m not sure what’s next. And now I'm tired

of pitching to people that don’t care about these stories ..

of writing stories no one ever gets to read because they go cold waiting to be approved …

of chasing invoiced from companies that want to pay me for an article two months after I wrote it ..

of watching people get opportunities based on who they know …

I’m exhausted.

This week I almost deleted my socials and quit altogether. But I know that there are people who really support me and I don’t want to let them down. Or myself.

So Substack is my solution. I hope that on here I can connect with you, share more stories and if folks are generous enough to be a paid subscriber then I could also earn money from this. But really I just want to own my work and put it somewhere without asking for permission. Because I’m good at this. And these stories matter. And you deserve to read them.

Thank you for being here. I hope you’ll stick around.