An update on paywalling

Which is really just an update on me?

This email is an update on my Substack (which is really an update on me).

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An update on my Substack

In summary:

• Starting this week I am paywalling certain (not all) new posts and creating content specifically for paid subscribers (Q&A, videos, email courses, etc.)

• I am spending more time here now, creating more offerings and in general focusing on the community that’s here (rather than trying to build a bigger one) + I’m going to be diving into topics and discussions that are sensitive and personal that I prefer to share with a smaller audience of invested folks

• There’s a discount code for new subscribers or returning subscribers. There will still be free content

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A year ago this week I removed my Substack paywall (you can read what I wrote about it at the time here). A portion of the decision had to do with the how much writing for money in the way one does on Substack negatively impacted my creativity and joy (my experience back then was more pegged to conversion than creation), and taking the paywall down was intended to free me from a specific kind of pressure that had become debilitating¹.

Not long after I took the paywall down I decided to step away from Substack entirely, and for about nine months I neither published anything nor consumed other Substack content.

Both of these decisions had a profound impact on not just my creativity, but my desire and motivation in general, as well as my overall well-being and quality of life. I cannot overstate how necessary taking total time off from both creating and consuming content from this particular medium was, and how much it renewed and rewired me (which is also a plug for how important it can be to quit the thing you think you can’t quit).

There’s a few reasons for bringing back paywalled content and the rest of this goes into those reasons.

The immediate financial impact of removing the paywall was positive. Some people sent me money via PayPal, many people signed up for paid subscriptions immediately (I think I even wrote about how overcome I was by how many people decided to contribute precisely because they didn’t have to anymore). That positive financial impact was also short lived. By making payment optional, I lost 34% of paid subscribers². Currently every post nets me losses—more people stop paying me than start—which means it’s financially disadvantageous for me to write here. And I really want to write here.

As such, starting this week I am paywalling certain (not all) new posts, creating content specifically for paid subscribers (Q&A, videos, email courses, etc.), and paywalling some of my archives.

While I have loved how it feels to give it all away and really loved how nice it was to not sell you subscriptions to my blog, the sad truth is restriction motivates people to pay far more than their conscience does in our current economic system, the honor system isn’t a reliable way to pay for my health insurance, and giving away everything doesn’t reflect the reality of my financial situation—like most people, I need to work and be paid for that work.

All that said, this isn’t just about the money. It’s about narrowing, deepening, investing in this space and what I share here, and protecting certain conversations.

A year ago I still craved scale. I wanted as many people as possible to engage with my work because I’ve been socialized to believe that is what success looks like. I don’t believe that anymore.³

As I’ve said here and here, many things have crystalized for me in the wake of the U.S. election and the wake of my own personal apocalypse that’s been going on the past four years. One of the emergent clarities is how totally uninterested I am in building anything that feels like a brand or that has me at the center as some kind of exceptional human, or charismatic leader. I am so, so over the aspects of my work that are about maintaining a kind of image or authority, a perfection, a standard-bearer, an example, which if you’ve been reading me for a while you’re hopefully aware of. I want to show up in this space with you how I want to show up in general—I want more depth and less breadth; raw over polished; connected and intimate and vulnerable (to the extent that we can do that on the internet) over accumulating views and likes and shares; more courageously and imperfectly and collaboratively; in wonder and with curiosity; less exceptionally and specially.

It’s taken me a really long time to understand that I am not for everyone, and that my work and writing and ideas aren’t either. I want to create things that I love creating, that bring some kind of joy or resource or value or belonging or relief or whatever to the folks that want it and need it, the same way I want to interact with work made by people who are doing it because they love it, because they have something to share and are glad to. I would rather have a smaller engaged audience than a massive one, and more of a community than an audience while we’re at it. (

Nic Antoinette

has been an inspiration here.)

I don’t plan to change my content and lens or the subject matter I’ve focused on here for the past few years. My work remains at the intersection of addictions/ drugs/compulsions; recovery/healing; individual/human collective/cultural development; transitions, change, and liminality; as well as (more recently) neurodivergence and burnout (and how these things all interact—burnout, addiction/recovery/sobriety, relapse/return-to-use, neurodivergence, nervous system management, wider culture, etc). I am releasing a 30-day Audible guide to help folks change their relationship with alcohol January 2nd (more on that on Sunday), I’m in the middle of writing a book on addiction. I’m very much in love with what brought me to this work in the first place over a decade ago. My purpose hasn’t changed. My idea of who I need to be to fulfill it has.

A lot of my internal work over the past four years⁴ has been about coming as I am and in service of the collective instead of coming as I think I’m supposed to be in service of an idea of a person I never was.

Elise Loehnen

recently said on her fantastic podcast (this one) that your individual vibration has to be higher than the thing you create, which sounds like such woo bullshit but is not. Whatever we make is an extension of ourselves. There was a time when my vibration was higher than the things I created, and somewhere along the way that got flipped—I got buried under it, dragged behind grabbing the tail of it, and it’s taken a long time to find my way back into the place where it feels like my work can be representative of something beautiful inside me and in balance with me.

In QLAW I shared the Pema Chödrön quote about our need to be both big and small at the same time (or “right-sized” in recovery speak). The changes I’m making are the result of my moving closer to that duality. I feel big enough and small enough to hold the space I long to hold. I’m not here to be understood better or to build something on my behalf that just replicates the same structures I know make us sick. I’m here to make something with what I have, and to let it go.

What this means practically:

If you’re not a paid subscriber, the price is $50 per year now, and from now through the rest of the year you can upgrade for 30% off, or $35 a year (for one year only; it will be $50 at renewal). Starting January 1 the price will go up to $55 a year, or $6 a month for new subscribers.

If you’re already a paid subscriber, hi. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I have give aways of my Audible guide for 200 of you (30 Days to a New Relationship with Alcohol, coming out January 2nd, email about it coming in the next few weeks), some advanced access to that guide, and some other treats like outtakes from that project or a little email course for the last week of December.

If you want to remain a free and casual reader, please note there will be free things still! Plenty! This is not a move to a totally moated experience and I am thrilled by your presence and engagement.

If you can’t afford a subscription, see footnote [5] below for how to get a comped one.⁵

If you made a donation via PayPal you should have been given total access a while ago. If that’s not the case, respond to this email and let us know.

Thank you, each of you, for being here. I feel extraordinarily grateful for this space, this platform, and you.

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1. I discuss at length in that piece that charging for my work on Substack also turned everything into its quantifiable/measurable bits and left me feeling like I was only as good as my last post/only as good as my circulation. A lot of that specific issue (defining worth of work through who pays for it or doesn’t or how many eyeballs are on it, or tying my own worth to how good I am at Substack) has gone by the wayside as well; this is from a lot of the processing work I’ve done over the past few years in my long transition time. I no longer feel like my worth is measurable in likes, dollars, virality or that my work is only good if it “performs”, and I am looking at my work as more of an ongoing experiment than a zero-sum game.

2. This is also due to me taking time off writing and pausing all paid subscriptions, and I’m pretty sure in general paid subscriptions are down for some of us who have been here a while due to there being so many newsletters now—it’s not only because paying to access my work became optional.

3. It is not that I don’t want my work to reach who it needs to, or for it to be wildly successful or even canonical—fine if that happens (and I’ve sold half a million books so to a degree, it already has happened). It’s that I no longer think my work has to help millions of people for it—or me—to matter, which means that I no longer prioritize scale, which means when I’m thinking about what to write, I’m not thinking about the thing that will blow up the internet, I’m thinking about what will help a single person. I read recently that donating $800 a year would be enough to save a life approximately every six years. Or: One human life is worth roughly $5,000. One. human. life. We are so fucked up in terms of what we think impact actually is. Impact is having a conversation with a person no one talks to. Impact is holding a door open. Impact is writing something that makes one person feel less alone. I am re-learning this.

4. I’ve discussed some of what this has entailed though not much; I’ll be sharing more about the things I’ve done in the past few years. Some can be found in this piece, “21 Thoughts on How to be Lost”.

5. Note: I have always given away free subscriptions to people who cannot afford it, that will remain in effect. If you cannot afford full access (as in it’s Holly’s Substack or rent or groceries) you can email contact@hollywhitaker.com with the subject line “Substack Subscription” and in the text ask for a comped subscription, stating you can’t afford the subscription (you can copy paste this: “I would love a comped subscription, I cannot afford it.”) Please no explanations for why; I’ve spelled out the ways to consider eligibility and you’re an adult human I trust . Please give us a few weeks to process each request (we’ll email you when we have). If you don’t hear back within four weeks, email us again.