Anca Dunavete

Picture taken in Milford Sound, New Zealand. Text originally posted here.

I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t

you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write

– Berryman, by W.S. Merwin (discovered here)

Dear internet friend,

My first Substack newsletter was called Copy & Coffee, as you might recall. It was a cosy corner of the internet where I shared lessons from my early days as a freelance copywriter. I was still figuring things out myself, but I was eager to connect with other writers and start building my voice online.

But something shifted.

Somewhere between juggling client work and drowning in too many open tabs, I realised it wasn’t just time to write new Substack posts that I was missing. I was missing my why. I didn’t want to talk only about copywriting anymore. If anything, I was starting to get tired of it.

The last thing I wanted at the end of the day was to write more about what I did. I just wanted to be done.

It wasn’t like I didn’t want to write at all. I just didn’t know how to make it feel more like me. I wanted to write about being brave and creative, about what happens when you choose to make things and keep showing up, even when it’s messy, slow, or doesn’t quite make sense yet.

Only, of course, I wasn’t being brave or creative. I couldn’t say no to clients or get them to give me any creative freedom. And I definitely wasn’t choosing to make things and keep showing up, unless you count tech-heavy articles and listicles. But I wasn’t sure how I was going to do that.

✦

Some months ago, I found myself deep in an endless Substack scroll (I’d exhausted Instagram and even LinkedIn by that point). I was reading essay after essay, longing for something I couldn’t quite name. All I knew was that being here felt warm and creatively energising in a way I couldn’t fully explain.

That’s when it hit me: I was missing the girl blog energy. (Not literally – I also found some brilliant male creators.) You know what I mean. A little chaotic, a little profound. Bordering on oversharing. Blogging for the sake of connection, not just conversion. Sure, we love conversion, but.

So I stopped scrolling (ish) and started writing. Editing. Collecting bits and pieces for my digital garden. Curating my never-ending swipe file. Digging through old drafts, noticing what I used to notice, reusing what I hadn’t used (which was most of it).

It took so long. I had so much to work through. So much left to read, watch and discover.

I also didn’t have a master plan. What did I want to do with everything I was consuming, keeping, deleting and creating? No idea. I didn’t have a final form in mind either – although, looking back, it should’ve been clear that Substack was the answer. I just knew I wanted to write again, ideally like that.

Not for content calendars, but for me – and maybe a few kind strangers on the internet. Just like I used to back in 2013, when my blog had its 15 minutes of internet fame, and I knew that feeling was what I’d secretly chase for the rest of my life in some form or another.

Not the fame (we’re pretty much genuinely talking about 15 minutes), but the delight of knowing my writing touched someone. That my art found its audience. That my soul found its tribe. So I let myself follow my intuition, knowing that when the time was right, the path would appear.

And then.

✦

Just the act of writing again – freely, imperfectly, without chasing an outcome or hitting a word count – felt like unclogging a creative pipe that had rusted shut. It was exactly what I needed to know what the next step in my creative journey would be. (Spoiler: to write & share again. Go figure!)

A couple of things I learnt along the way:

• One of the bravest things you can do as an adult is to try something new for no other reason than it calls to you. Ironically, it’s often in trying something new that you find your way back to yourself.
• You don’t need to monetise every creative impulse to make it worthwhile. Sure, it’s great if it happens, but it’s great even if it doesn’t.
• Doing something just because it feels good is reason enough. (Do not take this out of context. I repeat, do not take this out of context!)
• Whatever it is, make it exist. You can make it perfect later. (On that note, one of my favorite quotes is from G. K. Chesterton: ‘Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.’ I’ll talk more about this one later!)

We stop ourselves so often, afraid we’ll mess up. But no one’s actually keeping score of how we do things. People remember how we made them feel, not our typos, missed commas, or whether everything we’ve said made perfect sense or perfectly aligned with who we (say we) are. We contain multitudes, yes?

Also, every book you’ve ever read? Has typos. All of them. And no one ever says, ‘Careful with this one, there’s a typo on page 237!’ Because it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t devalue the story. It doesn’t cancel out the ideas or the magic. Readers care about what stays with them after they close the tab, the book, the browser.

I’m joking, no one closes their browser on purpose in 2025… right?

Yes, editing matters. Typos in every sentence? That’s a different story. But one or two? No one cares. So if perfectionism is what’s stopping you from making stuff, just know: the heart of your work is what matters most. The feeling it carries, the clarity, the resonance, the truth. It’s easy to forget and important to remember.

I’m trying to remember.

So here I am, writing a newsletter. For me, for you, for anyone who wants to talk some more about working and living creatively. Because what if it’s not too late to start again? I don’t think it is, by the way.

Welcome to my growing collection of essays on creative work and thank you for hanging out with me. If you enjoyed this post, feel free to subscribe, share, and say hello.

Anca x

PS: Read more posts like this one on Substack, where I write a weekly newsletter, Ancaffeinated. And, if you like it, why not subscribe? :)