A year of promoting the people who make the things I love

A few weeks back, I wrote an article discussing one of the main things that made me stop writing, at least for now.

You’d have to read the whole article to get the entire picture, but I think this section is relevant to today’s “announcement.”

I think all of this made me feel terrible most of all because my natural instinct is to promote the work of my friends and people who I think do great work. So it really hurt when it felt like almost nobody cared about what I was doing enough to do the same.

I said up top that I didn’t want to make this a “woe is me” article. But I feel like I can’t really emphasize the importance of the next part if I’m not brutally honest about how it made me feel. Because I’m sure others feel the same way. I felt like nothing I did mattered and I was wasting my time. It was particularly hard to see other people launch similar projects and see much higher levels of support from the same people I thought would be supporting me.

So like I said in that article, while I felt it was important to talk about how I felt because I figured other people felt the same way, I didn’t want it to be just that. So I wanted to follow up on that with something that is actually positive.

I recently bought a planner for the upcoming year. I obviously haven’t used it yet, so I can’t comment on how well it works or if I’m actually going to, you know, use it. It comes with a section to write a habit for each month that you want to cultivate and a checkmark for that habit each day. I figured out what my habit is going to be, and I wanted to see if other people would want to do it as well.

Every day, I am going to promote one person who makes things I enjoy. For me, that will mean promoting on all of my social media platforms at a minimum. I say at a minimum because I am thinking of other ways to promote them. I aim to be diverse in my recommendations in every way possible.

So that’s my habit for 2022. It should take me about 5 to 10 minutes a day. Join me if you like, but either way, please try to find a way to help the people who make the things that help us to get through this shitty time in history.