One Year of Not Walking Away From the Thing I Kept Coming Back To

One year on Substack and what it taught me about the things we are meant to do.

Reading time: 3 minutes

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"A year from now you will wish you had started today." — Karen Lamb

One year. Still here.

I am writing this exactly one year after I made a deal with myself not to quit again.

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This is not really about Substack.

It is about accepting a part of yourself and finally letting it live, even when it comes with no financial promise and no guarantee of anything.

Before I started writing on Substack, I had launched at least five different blogs and websites.

A travel blog because I love traveling. An online marketing site despite having no expertise in online marketing.

A personal blog about my life that I abandoned before anyone could read it.

I purchased domains from multiple providers, set up WordPress sites, created Pinterest and Instagram accounts, and cancelled almost everything before it had a chance to become anything.

The pattern always ended the same way. Frustration, disappointment, and a quiet reinforcement of the belief that I was someone who quits.

Those moments did not feel like lessons at the time. They just felt like failure.

But something was happening underneath all of it that I could not see yet.

The last time I found myself on GoDaddy about to purchase another domain, I laughed out loud.

Not because it was funny but because I finally recognized what was happening.

Here we are again, I thought. The same idea, the same impulse, the same pull toward putting something out into the world.

It had come back five times already.

Maybe six. I had lost count.

That was the moment something shifted.

I had read enough about patterns and awareness to know that life repeats the same lesson until you learn it.

And standing there on a domain registration page for the fifth or sixth time, I finally understood what the lesson was.

This interest was not going away. It had never gone away. Every time I abandoned it, it simply waited and came back.

So I made a deal with myself.

I would purchase this domain one last time.

I would set up the account.

And whatever happened, I would not cancel it.

Not because I expected it to succeed quickly but because I finally accepted that I would end up here again anyway.

Quitting no longer made sense.

I set up Substack, linked my custom domain, and started writing without a plan, a niche, or any clear direction.

I just wrote what was on my mind.

In the first few months almost nothing happened.

A handful of subscribers, one or two likes, no viral moments.

And for the first time that did not bother me because the goal was not a result.

The goal was not to abandon the thing again.

That single shift changed everything.

When you stop trying to control the outcome and focus only on showing up and doing the work, the pressure disappears.

You cannot control how people respond to what you put out.

You can only control whether you keep putting it out.

So I defined a schedule, developed a routine, and kept going even when the ideas were slow and the weeks felt quiet.

One year later I have more than 500 subscribers, over 50 articles published, and a daily content practice that I maintained even on vacation.

But the number that matters most to me is not any of those.

It is the fact that for the first time in my life I did not walk away.

I am genuinely proud of that.

Not because of what the numbers look like but because I finally let something in.

An interest that had been knocking on the door for years, that I had turned away every single time, is now part of my daily life.

It makes me feel more complete than I expected.

If you have an interest that keeps coming back, something you have started and abandoned more than once, something you tell yourself is not important enough or practical enough or realistic enough, I want to say something directly.

It is coming back for a reason.

You do not have to make it your career or your identity or your income stream.

You just have to stop making it wait.

One year in, I feel like I have barely started.

But I am still here.

And that is everything.

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