Dry Spells: A Substack Note Experiment
What happens when I ditch my Substack article queue, drags a journal to a park bench, and spends an entire spring afternoon turning off filters and turning on live Substack Notess
Today, I sat in the sun in a park, with a physical journal. I ignored the queue of half-finished Substack articles sitting in draft form. And I spent the afternoon publishing five raw, unpolished Substack Notes. No polish. No professional distance. No expert framing. Just the actual texture of what a professional dry spell feels like from the inside. Transcribed and reframed in near-real time. This is what happens some days when you have too much free time, too much caffeine, and few guardrails.
This was not a content strategy decision. It started as an escape — a deliberate refusal to produce the careful, value-dense articles that usually live on this publication. But somewhere between the physical journal and the Substack Notes feed, it became more layered than that.
I was journaling. Simultaneously reframing those entries for a live audience. And writing commentary about the act of doing both things at once. Three streams in parallel. My friend called it meta-journaling — a commonplace book feeding into micro-blogging, with a process note wrapped around the outside. The irony: sitting in a public park, discussing these multiple layers of a paper-to-laptop-to-screen exercise with strangers walking past. The experiment was already recursive before I’d finished Note 1.
On the surface, the five-part series was about professional dry spells: how they mess with your head, how silence gets misread as a verdict on your worth, how LinkedIn has become a platform where urgent human needs shout into a structural void. All of that is real and I stand by it.
But the deeper current running through all five was something I hadn’t quite admitted to myself until I started writing it down publicly. I had been resisting a pivot I already knew I needed to make. The dry spell wasn’t punishing me for the wrong choices — it was pointing, with increasing insistence, toward different ones.
The zero-ledger networking thread that emerged in Notes 2 and 3 was part of the same diagnosis. By stripping the transactional layer off my LinkedIn activity — passing useful things directly to people who needed them, with no expectation of return — I wasn’t just killing time. I was practicing a different mode of professional engagement entirely. One that felt less exhausting and might actually suit the next chapter better.
Is Substack the right venue for this? The honest answer is: I don’t fully know. Does Substack Notes exist for spontaneous and conversational experimentation? Well, let’s see…
BE4SI has always been a publication built around careful, substantive writing for a professional audience. Publishing raw journal confessionals in the Notes feed is genuinely different — a different register, a different implied contract with readers.
What surprised me was how well it landed. The DMs came in. People recognized something in the roughness that polished articles don’t always generate — which suggests the usual trade-off between depth and accessibility may be more negotiable than I’d assumed.
Here is the thing I kept circling in Note 5, and that I want to say plainly now: the dry spell was not a failure state. It was not silence as punishment. It was the space required for a particular kind of clarity to arrive — the kind that doesn’t come when you’re busy performing competence.
The absence, the inertia, the awkward stillness of a fallow season: all of it was pointing at the same pivot I’d been sidestepping. A move toward larger-scale, longer-term work. Fewer clients, not more. Deeper engagement, not broader reach. An end to chasing a game I’d already helped to shape in a previous chapter of my career.
The dry spell didn’t cause the pivot. It just kept lighting the way toward it until I stopped being too busy — or too proud — to look. Today was, in a strange sense, the first day I looked properly.
The five Substack Notes that became this article are linked below
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