1,200 people

On comparison, gratitude, and showing up for the people who are already here

Illustration by Aditya Sahu on Unsplash

Earlier this weekend, after scrolling through Substack, I just kind of mindlessly clicked around the way you do when you’re tired but not quite ready to put your phone down, and I stumbled across someone’s milestone post. They had just hit 10,000 subscribers. Before that, another writer celebrated 20,000, and they were officially going full-time on their newsletter.

And I just sat there doing the math in my head, the way I always do, like some kind of involuntary reflex I haven’t figured out how to turn off yet.

I have a little over 1,200 subscribers, and have been writing here consistently for over three years. By the numbers some people are celebrating this probably sounds pretty modest. And if I’m being honest with you, there are moments where it genuinely feels that way. It feels like I am running a race that everyone else seems to be winning, and I somehow missed the memo on how to pick up the pace.

I know comparison is a trap, and I’ve written about it countless times before. I have told other people not to fall into it, and yet here I am doing subscriber math like that is a completely normal and healthy way to spend my time.

The truth is that I actually love writing this newsletter. I love it when a post comes together, and I can feel that it hit something real. I love the comments and the replies and the little moments where someone says, “I really needed this today.” None of that has changed. But somehow, scrolling past someone else’s bigger number managed to temporarily hollow out all of that, replacing it with a low-grade feeling of not being enough.

And I think that feeling deserves a name, because I know I am not the only one who experiences it.

Here is what I keep coming back to, though. 1,200 people subscribed to my newsletter. They found something I wrote, decided it was worth their time, and gave me their inbox. That is genuinely one of the more personal things a person can do on the internet. Your inbox is not a place most people hand out access to freely, and 1,200 people decided that what I have to say belongs there.

When I slow down long enough to actually think about that, it kind of blows my mind.

I have had people reply to my posts telling me they read them on their morning walks. I have had people say they forward them to their friends because something I wrote described exactly what their friend was going through. I have had people reach out months after a specific post to tell me it still comes back to them. These are not abstract stats. These are real people with real lives who carved out a few minutes to sit with something I made. That is not nothing, that is actually everything.

I think the comparison trap is especially sneaky for creators because growth is so visible and so quantified. There is always a number, and numbers are easy to rank. It is a lot harder to measure the person who read your post at 6 am and felt a little less alone before their hard day started, or the person who forwarded it to their friend who was going through something similar, or the person who has never commented but has read every single thing you have put out for three years. That stuff does not appear on a dashboard, but it’s the whole point.

I am also starting to realize that chasing a bigger number without a clear reason for wanting it is kind of a hollow goal. Like, okay, what happens at 10,000? Do I feel better? Do the posts feel more meaningful? Probably not, because the people who are already here did not suddenly become less real just because I wanted more of them.

That said, I am not going to pretend I have fully made peace with this. I still notice when someone else hits a milestone. I still feel that little flicker of something when I do the math. I do not think that ever fully goes away, and I am not sure it should. Wanting to grow, wanting more people to find your work, wanting to expand the reach of something you care about, those are not bad things. The problem is when the wanting starts to overshadow the having.

What I am trying to practice is this: showing up for the people who are already here, fully and without distraction, instead of spending energy quietly grieving the audience I do not have yet. Because those 1,200 people made a choice. They chose this newsletter out of everything competing for their attention, and that choice deserves to be honored with my best work, not with me half-present and preoccupied with someone else’s numbers.

So if you are a writer, a creator, a builder of anything, and you caught yourself doing the comparison math recently, I just want to say that I get it. I really do. And your number, whatever it is, represents real humans who decided you were worth their time. That is the whole thing, that is what we are all actually here for.

And to everyone who is already here, whether you have been reading since the beginning or just found your way to this newsletter recently, thank you. You did not have to choose this, and the fact that you did is something I think about more than you know. I do not take it for granted.

Thanks for reading,
Max