Substack Might Just Be the Thing to Break My TikTok Resistance

writing into the silence and wanting it to answer back and tell me it liked what I had to say

So I've been writing into the substack void (including and mostly limited to friends and family I've forced onto this app) for a while now.

I like writing. I enjoy the process. I like creating something tangible and separate from, but intimately part of, myself. Something I can put my energy into that rewards me. Something I can step outside of and look back on later, knowing I've grown, recognising I've honed skills or gathered new perspectives. I like creating something, planting the seed of an idea that I can tend to — kneading, reworking — until I can hold the thing up and stand proudly behind it. I like being able to say: this is what I made. This is what I can do.

That feeling is foreign in my job as a model, where I am one element of the thing that is made. I am an ingredient in someone else's thing, and not as myself but as an imagined version of me, someone else vision. In modelling, pride is complicated — because the work is your face, your body, and your image. And being proud of how you look? That's vanity.

Because I am a woman, I have grown up absorbing this deep, subconscious knowledge that I'm not supposed to be proud of how I look, or at least, I’m not supposed not show it.

Models can’t really feel proud of their work when their image — used in a final product — isn’t even theirs anymore, not legally anyway. Models are barely supposed to admit it is work at all.; we know innately how to perform as women and as models, how to placate, and be likeable. We smile and say we're lucky, surprised, grateful just to be here.

my friend Tomathy mid fall in his Tabi boots, felt right

That may not be how it is for everyone, and I can’t speak for all models, but it’s how it feels to me.

Being proud of my modelling work also means that I care—and caring is dangerous, because modelling can be very unfulfilling, infrequent and insecure work. It's not the kind of work where the longer I am in it (read: do it), the more time I put in, the more value I amass. Quite the opposite.

I like writing more because of the context of my day job as “a model”— a state of being rather than anything else, where I’m constantly on call, constantly working, even though the actual paid work is anything but constant.

I like writing about things I care about. I like putting my brain to work. I like having something to say. But it matters to me if that isn’t worth anything to anyone else. I want to add something rather than to the clutter. I want my efforts to add value to the world, not just my own inner one.

I like writing. I want to write. But it appears I also want attention and validation. I’m not proud of that either—it’s just true.

I see people on Substack sharing their similar experiences: writing, talking, bearing their souls to no one—the only reply being the echo of their own voice, sounding high-pitched, diluted, and silly, bouncing back at them off their own Substack wall.

People post Notes acknowledging this experience. They make quippy, restackable statements about how they don’t mind, that it’s not what it’s all about, that they’ll continue to write and post even if their essays slip—naked and unafraid—into the void forever. The cynic in me doesn’t believe them. I don’t believe they don’t care, and I point to their acknowledgement posts as evidence.

Because Notes like these get attention, they act like bait, catching likes, shares and clicks. The cynic in me assumes they are fishing for the exact attention they say they don't need. Sometimes these posts, about not minding their writing goes unseen, are even paired with little “follow for follow”-style calls to action:

“Let’s support each other”
“Show me your work”
“Let’s connect”

You know the ones.

And all the people — like me — who write into the void and want attention too will comment, engage, link their latest post. I’ve done this. It’s shameless work, but I assumed it was how we nobodies got eyeballs.

I could be projecting. I could be wrong. I often am — because I am human.

I want to be valued and incentivised, financially or with a promise (that's all I need), to write. I don’t want it to be another hobby that distracts me from the constancy of being 'a model'. Of waiting. Of fruitlessly thinking about ways to control my position, manipulate a market to value me when I am one of too many.

There are so many young and beautiful girls in the world, and there always will be. Beauty will always be in the eye of the beholder. Trends will always cycle. Ideals will always shift.

I don't believe anyone in the modelling industry truly understands how or why we are organised. How one is chosen over the hundreds of others. How one girl is plucked from overpopulated obscurity and moved from humble bidder to lottery winner. I can only assume chance, timing, and luck do the brunt of the work here.

A few friends of mine have suggested the solution to my flatlining Substack career is TikTok. One of them has a large TikTok following and, from that platform, has built a career she finds more dependable, more lucrative, more fulfilling than modeling. She would know since she’s done both. She threw herself into modeling and, when she resurfaced, concluded TikTok’s pastures were greener.

Maybe she’s right. Even if the idea of looking at myself more—relying on my image as leverage, currency, value—in yet another market makes me squeamish. Maybe I need to suck it up and play the game if I want to figure out whether this is something I can actually do. If the inkling that I could maybe be good at this thing I haven’t yet entirely thrown myself at isn’t just delulu.

This morning, I opened TikTok, intending to poke around, see if I could get amongst it. I spent about an hour scrolling and can’t remember more than two videos from the endless stream.

A depressing thought.

I felt flat, numbed, after I put the phone down. Though honestly, that’s not much different from how I feel after an Instagram scroll either.

Thanks for listening, listening, listening, listening. (Echo joke.)

Yours truly and gracelessly,

Grace