thought this was interesting and want to weigh in as (i think?) one of the earlier people to widely disseminate lowercase-confessional-style writing on this platform. a lot of my first essays were all-lowercase, which has incited a great deal of criticism on many platforms for many years (I didn’t see that coming when I started doing it, and I think part of why I kept doing it was out of annoyance at the pedantic backlash). now, my essays are generally capitalized, which is genuinely mostly because at some point the in-substack writing tool started auto-capitalizing. the fact that it used to not auto-capitalize was also pretty much the main reason why I used to use lowercase! but it’s also for a few other reasons, which I’ll reflect on here if anyone cares abt That Sort of Thing.

a reason I’ve given before is that, particularly when I started on here, I didn’t want my essays to feel like professional, institutional pieces of writing (I already worked full-time as a magazine writer when I started my substack, and actively wanted my work here to feel different than that). I wanted them to feel more like the tumblr posts I’d grown up reading and sharing, or like long-form tweets. i wanted my blog to feel like a casual forum instead of like a literary journal or something, without entitlement or hierarchy.

I still make posts that lean towards that form — that feel like “blog posts” instead of “essays” — and many of those are still in all-lowercase, because I like it and it just feels right to me. i really like the visual-aesthetic legacy of girls posting, and am really glad to participate in that posting form through lowercase; I think it adds tangible artistic value to a lot of the work that uses it. but I think as my essays here started being more serious, requiring more effort, and feeling like a greater part of a wider mainstream writing career, I began to naturally/instinctively capitalize them. I think my essay about Amber Heard was the first I made a conscious choice to capitalize properly, for distinct reasons that are probably self-evident. (potentially interesting fact: I think my first draft of that essay was all-lowercase except for Heard’s name, which I capitalized.)

BUT, when I reflect on my earlier posts, the ones I made here when I was 19 and 20, I think there was maybe another subliminal reason for the no-caps thing, related to that first reason but never explicitly stated: I think that writing and sharing long-form writing is basically just embarrassing, and I lived in fear of being seen as pretentious, self-important, so narcissistic that I actually believed anyone cared what I had to say. Because it literally is self-important and narcissistic to believe that people should care what you have to say! and writing long-form is embarrassing! It requires a lot of extended effort, often for zero tangible reward and low artistic return, sustained only by the completely delusional belief that Your Voice Matters. not to pull a libfem buzzword but I think women are particularly susceptible to feeling self-conscious about “taking up space” in this way (and are materially more likely to receive social punishment for seeming too big for their britches — I receive/d this criticism constantly) and I think my blog style was, in part, an effort to say I don’t think I’m better than you, I don’t even think this is smart or important, i basically just did it by accident, I’m not a professional, i’m not pretending to be something i’m not, please don’t make fun of me, etc, etc.

I don’t know exactly how to feel about this. I honestly don’t think it’s really a bad thing, and I don’t wish I’d like bossed up and turned on auto-caps as an epic feminist move or whatever. I actually like that that work contained some formal reflection of my own conflict about engaging in that type of work at all. and I like its separation from serious professional writing! I like that it alienates some people from taking it seriously. but I guess that’s also kind of the argument for bimbo feminism lol. Pondering....