Today I made seven meals before breakfast. Today my wife and I bought lattes 45 minutes before either of us usually check our email. Today we took our three teenagers back to physical school for the first time in 524 days.

Today I set up our new-to-us pop-up camper, in a fashion not designed not to catch the eye of the neighbors who bought a new-to-them boat a few weeks ago and have conspicuously been shining it up ever since. Today I picked my son up from JV soccer practice at 5:00, made dinner, and drove him back out at 6:30 to help his coaches trim the soccer field because I’d convinced him of the power of showing up—and they took note when we were one of just a few families who’d bothered.

Today we got an alert that our eldest had missed a class and nobody knew where she was and we couldn’t get a text through to her and we had no idea what was happening. Today I laid a hand on my wife’s shoulder in a vain attempt to comfort her as she shook, crying under the strain of everything that was going on. Today my wife finished a presentation for her job’s annual board retreat, for which she’ll already have left by the time you read this.

The Facebook rumors said a statewide group called “Moms for Liberty” was going to blow up this week’s school-board meeting—hundreds of angry, roving anti-maskers swarming our little town’s high-school auditorium and decrying our district’s newly reinstated indoor mask mandate.

I arrived just minutes before the scheduled start of the meeting, and when I registered for public comment there were only a dozen or so names on the list above me. I walked in and saw only a few dozen people, total. No signs, no chants, no angry horde. But everyone who had shown up, showed up ready for a fight.

Mask discussion was not on the agenda; the superintendent and board had already made the decision. But from the first words of the first public-comment speaker, it became apparent we were all going to have to be angry about it anyway.

I’ve only been hated on-sight by a bunch of strangers once. Only one time in my blessed, privileged life have I ever been made to feel utterly unwelcome the instant I set foot in a space because the people there saw I was the wrong kind of person.

And I loved it.

It was the summer of 2011—June 22nd, to be precise. Or maybe it was the 23rd by that point in the evening, who can say? As far as evenings go, it wasn’t very precise.

A few weeks ago I stepped out my front door to run a couple errands, checked my phone, and saw an email that froze me solid.

“After reading it and taking some time to consider it carefully, I’ve decided the article is not the right fit for [our] audience,” it read. Still stuck on my front porch, I frantically scanned the rest. An editor I was working with for the very first time, at an outlet I’d been excited to break into, was telling me the story I’d just filed had missed the mark so badly there was no point in giving me a second shot. They were simply offering me a kill fee and moving on.

In over a decade of freelancing, I’d only been offered two kill fees ever. Once, the entire website got shut down just after I’d filed. The other, the editor changed their mind on the angle so many times that the story had become moot by the time I finished my third rewrite.

In the past year I’ve launched a twice-weekly national podcast, been diagnosed with ADHD, written a bunch of cool features for premium outlets, and done a host of interviews on radio/audio/video shows.

But it seems like no more than 72 of my 10,000-plus Twitter followers ever found out about any of those things. For a professional creative who’s spent over a decade building his Twitter account as his main self-promotional tool, this is a problem.

About four years ago, I thought making a newsletter might be the only way writers could build an audience without being beholden to the whims of vulture capitalists. I thought it…but I didn’t do it.