Here comes the self-reflexive essay
Notes on “finding” myself through writing
This will perhaps be one of the first less “serious” pieces on my newsletter, as I am still navigating this odd platform and how I express myself on it. I’m back in Belgrade, my mother’s hometown, where I spent countless summers. I love Belgrade even though I hardly spend enough time here. There is something particular in the air of this city — not smog, but rather a generalized soulfulness — it’s the best way I can put it. The old town still holds the relics of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Linden trees that shade the boulevards make the sinewy roads look like those in a forest, the Dunav and the Sava, the two rivers that cross like the Tigris and the Euphrates, reminding in the same way of a rich history and culture, the birth of civilization. My favorite place, as unoriginal as it may sound, will always be the view of the rivers from Kalemegdan, the park where the medieval castle, and now as it was recently discovered, ancient Roman ruins, lie. I cannot call Belgrade my home, but it has always been a place where my soul could roam.
Despite this, I haven’t been particularly inspired to write. I suppose I’ve been busy with packing and enjoying the Easter holidays; and, I realized, it’s the first time I worried if I’ll make it for my self-imposed deadline. Before I discovered Substack, I had often thought about starting a sort of blog or website where I could publish my writing the way I do now, but I never followed through with the idea. At the time, when I was living in Paris, Substack was — and still is not — a thing, and I didn’t know how to get people to read my work, as I’m not particularly popular or anything of the sort. I never thought I’d be writing essays on a weekly basis as I am today.
Substack has made sharing my writing easier than I could imagine. It suddenly gave me the confidence that I could actually develop simple ideas I had throughout the day into something more. After all, isn’t the art of the essay, the art of trying, discovering, experimenting? Studying History in college definitely turned me into an academic puritan — still now, as I’m writing these words, I feel the intense urge of adding a footnote explaining the origin of the word essay and citing Montesquieu, et al. This urge, along with its twin Perfectionism, is the main culprit of the years I spent not trying. I do believe it is necessary to have a minimum of structural and logical integrity when publishing something. After all, we are all publishing our work here, whether we have 5 or 15,000 subscribers. Anyone could read it anywhere in the world. However, the range of content on Substack is mesmerizing, and in being so wide, it minimizes the need for proper sources, explanations or peer-reviewing. Substack is not an academic platform, nor does it intend to be. People can write and say what they want and still be “published”, whether you like it or not. It’s the beauty of free speech, I suppose. Writing on Substack can be the first step of a potential book deal, just as it can be a teenage girl’s public diary. It can be an actual news-letter, a scientific journal, an extra source of income just as it can be a single space where someone otherwise totally unknown is somehow super famous, or on the contrary is followed by only two friends. In short, like every social media, Substack has no boundaries and endless niches.
But what if you don’t want to have a “niche”? What if “finding a niche” limits what you have to say, how you say it, your expansion not just as a writer but as a person navigating this hyperactive double world of life within and beyond the internet? I first started Substack as an experiment, a sort of promise to myself to take my writing more seriously. Yet I let go of my academic standards, those I excelled at, and if there are so many successful newsletters that confidently post opinions that aren’t backed, where do our standards go? I’ve seen many posts, on notes or essays in newsletters, complaining about how academic and pretentious people sound on Substack, or on the other hand, very intellectually-sounding newsletters that are entirely generated by AI or by people who claim the title of historian without any accreditations. There’s also a surprising amount of very successful newsletters that make a point of never capitalizing their sentences (which drives me crazy, personally). This all seems to reveal the ubiquitous generational gaps between social media users, but also, how the platform itself can create a new standard or system of expression and ultimately change the way we choose to express ourselves.
Substack has totally changed my personal relationship to writing. First of all, I’ve never written more consistently in my life and writer’s block is no longer really a thing, at least for non-fiction. Knowing that I am accountable to my readers, that I have made a tacit promise, to them (to you) and to myself, has potentially made me a better writer, or at least a more prolific one. But because of this, I don’t have as much time to focus on my fiction projects, which is quite frustrating. However, it has been so exciting to compile my list of ideas for each new essay — if you know me, you can be sure it’s already quite long. What’s even more exciting is nurturing the little seed of an idea that first took root during a walk — or more often, right before I fall asleep (which has, admittedly, contributed to my insomnia). Every essay I write feels like the beginning of a huge thesis, and a million connections and other baby ideas come to mind, and then I must calm down because I have no time to write it all. Which makes me think that perhaps time is one of the unique factors about Substack that influences the way I write. The fact that there is this repetition and expectation, and that’s only way to get a following, makes my writing experience very different from that of editing a short story 15 times throughout two years. And unlike in college no one is really expecting from me — after all this is my thing, no one is forcing me to bombard your inboxes with existential dread and a flimsy personality. So what the hell am I doing here in the first place?
As you may have noticed, this newsletter doesn’t really have a polished “niche” — I write about some old films, but it’s not a film blog; I write about my life, but it’s not really a personal blog; I publish some serialized fiction, but nobody really comes to read it; I wrote about religion but it’s not my sole focus. I wanted this newsletter to just reflect the freedom of my mind, thus the name “No Man’s Land”: it’s an undefined space, belonging to no specific nation and following no one’s rules, where you can come and go at your own risk. However, I wonder how relatable such a marked refusal to belong can really be. Though we live in what is sold to us as an individualistic world, where each person is free to express themselves and be accepted for their own uniqueness, in order to be marketable and therefore visible, we must squeeze ourselves to fit in tags and categories that end up robbing us of that very originality. And yet there is only so much one can show of themselves online — just as our personas are forged to facilitate our way through society, so do they online. In that sense, the refusal of accepting that persona, or finding one’s niche, is not only detrimental but naïve. As you can begin to imagine, this newsletter has been making me question where I fit in this whole picture.
What kind of writer am I? Am I a culture writer? If that’s the case, I am certainly not a good one, as I am either too personal or too general… Anyway, do people really expect me, a twenty-five year old, to be at the same level as Susan Sontag or Joan Didion? (And ok, let’s just pause here for a second and ask what the hell this obsession with Didion is all about on this platform, did she code it? She is not the only woman who wrote essays!) Perhaps it would be more fitting to just stick to writing about my sex life (or, rather, lack thereof), and just girlie things without caring about my grammar and the logical reasoning behind my opinions… Which wouldn’t feel very sincere. Someone once asked me why we write, whether it’s to earnestly express ourselves or to be read. Aside from the stupidity of that question because the two acts are physically and logically inseparable, we write to be read, whether it’s by our future selves or a mass of hysteric Booktokers. Who we want to be read by, is a more interesting question, and defines much better who we are as a writer. So perhaps I should focus more on you, dear reader, rather than myself — and by getting to know you, I might just get to know myself.
There, I guess I solved my problem. I can sleep now, or at least try.
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But how do I get to know you? ….