Building a Weekly Newsletter From Scratch While Living With Anxiety
The first email I ever sent out went to fourteen people, including my mum, my old high-school friend in Perth, and a barista in Fitzroy who had asked for the recipe I mentioned in a blog post. I had written three drafts of that first issue on a Tuesday night in my Brunswick flat, surrounded by half-empty flat whites and a notebook full of cross-outs. The truth is I built the whole thing while my heart rate was doing that thing it does when a deadline meets an anxious brain.
This is the honest story of how I went from a blank Substack page to a regular weekly newsletter that lands in inboxes across Sydney, Melbourne, and a surprising number of readers in Hobart. It is also the story of what anxiety tried to do to that process, and the small, unglamorous systems I built to keep it from winning. If you want to know a bit more about the person behind the keys, you can read the about page.
The Spark That Started It All
I had been blogging for years, mostly short essays about mental health and pop culture. The newsletter idea arrived during a long walk along the Yarra, the kind I take when my thoughts are spinning and my body needs to move. I kept thinking about how social media felt like shouting into a hallway, and how an email list felt like sitting down with someone at a cafe. I wanted the second thing.
The hardest part was not the idea. It was believing I was allowed to send something into the world without being qualified, certified, or absolutely certain. Anxiety tends to demand certainty as the price of doing anything. So I made a different deal with myself: I would send one issue, badly if I had to, and then decide whether to continue. That small permission slip changed everything.
Picking a Platform When Decision Fatigue Was Already High
My first evening of "research" turned into three hours of browser tabs, a knot in my stomach, and absolutely zero decisions made. Every platform claimed to be the simplest, the most beautiful, the most writer-friendly. I closed my laptop, made a cup of tea, and came back the next morning with a shortlist of three options.
I ended up choosing a platform that had a free tier generous enough for a beginner, decent deliverability rates, and an interface that did not require me to learn coding. Cost mattered too, because I was running this on a freelance writer's budget in a city where rent eats most of it. The point is not which platform I picked. The point is that I made the decision in under forty minutes by asking three questions: Can I afford the upgrade later? Does it integrate with the tools I already use? Will my anxious brain be able to log in and post without a manual?
Writing Around the Panic
Most weeks, the writing part is genuinely joyful. Some weeks, opening the document feels like staring at a locked door. I have learned the difference between writer's block and anxiety dressed up as writer's block. The latter usually arrives the night before a deadline, with a side of nausea and a strong urge to cancel everything.
When that happens, I lower the bar. I write a list instead of an essay. I record voice notes on my phone during a walk around my neighbourhood and transcribe them later. I paste in a paragraph from a draft I abandoned in March and rework it. The newsletter still goes out, but it goes out with the kind of permission I wish someone had given me years ago: imperfect is fine, shipping is the work, your readers would rather hear from you than wait for the polished version.
I also stopped pretending that the writing had to be done in one sitting. My most-read issue from last year was assembled in three separate bursts across a Sunday: one paragraph after brekkie, another after a trip to the shops, and a final edit while the kettle boiled. The newsletter became a series of small acts rather than one heroic performance.
Building a Schedule Around an Anxious Brain
I send my newsletter on Sunday mornings, AEST. That choice was deliberate. Sunday is the day I am least likely to be hit by a sudden work deadline, and morning is when my medication has kicked in and my nervous system is closest to baseline. I keep a shared calendar with colour-coded blocks that look a bit like a primary school art project, and I tell my partner when I am in "newsletter mode" so he knows not to ask me to make decisions about dinner.
I batch tasks. Monday is for collecting links and notes. Wednesday is for outlining. Friday is for a rough first draft. Saturday is a rest day. Sunday morning is for editing and sending. If I miss a step, I do not push the deadline. I either compress the next day's tasks or I send a shorter issue. The schedule is a friend, not a taskmaster. Borrow the principle and change the days to fit your own energy. What matters is the rhythm, not the specific hours.
Subscribers, Spam Laws and Growing Slowly
Growing an audience felt uncomfortable for a long time. There is something about anxiety that hates being visible. I worried I would be annoying, or that people would unsubscribe and it would mean I had failed as a person. I had to remind myself repeatedly that an unsubscribe is just someone tidying their inbox.
Practically, I also had to learn about Australia's Spam Act 2003, which governs commercial electronic messages. Even though my newsletter is mostly personal essays, once I started offering paid tiers I had to make sure every signup was confirmed, every sender identity was accurate, and every email included a working unsubscribe link. The rules are stricter than I expected, and rightly so. I keep my consent records in a simple spreadsheet because the penalties for getting this wrong are not theoretical.
I grow the list slowly and ethically. I mention the newsletter at the end of relevant blog posts, including pieces in my feminism section, and I occasionally cross-post in places where readers are already expecting long-form writing. I do not buy lists. I do not run giveaway blasts. The numbers grow in the dozens each month, not the hundreds, and that has been more than enough.
What I Stopped Doing to Keep Going
The most surprising part of building a newsletter while managing anxiety was not what I added to my routine. It was what I removed. I stopped tracking open rates more than once a week. I stopped refreshing subscriber counts during the day. I stopped replying to every single email within an hour, and I started batching my replies for Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.
I also stopped pretending that every issue had to teach the reader something. Some weeks the newsletter is a soft observation about a song I cannot stop replaying, or a recommendation of a show I am halfway through, or a short note about why I cried at the footy. If you are interested in the kind of cultural critique I lean into, I recently wrote this pop culture critique that grew out of one of those Sunday morning newsletters.
The other thing I stopped doing was treating my anxiety as a separate problem to be solved before I started the newsletter. They live together now. Some of my best issues were written on the worst days. The newsletter did not cure anything. It just gave my anxious brain something to tend to, like a small garden that does not mind if you forget to water it once in a while.
Comparing the Tools I Tried
Here is a quick comparison of the three newsletter platforms I tested during my decision-making week. Prices are listed in Australian dollars and reflect what I was paying or quoted at the time of writing.
| Platform |
Free tier |
Paid tier (AUD) |
Custom domain |
Built-in paywall |
| Substack |
Yes, unlimited subscribers |
Takes 10% of paid subs |
Yes |
Yes |
| Ghost (self-hosted) |
No |
From $9/month (basic) |
Yes |
Yes |
| Buttondown |
Yes, up to 100 subscribers |
From $9/month |
Yes |
No |
Substack won for me because the free tier removed every financial barrier to starting. Ghost was tempting for the ownership and the Australian-friendly data hosting. Buttondown had the cleanest writing interface of the three, but no built-in paywall meant I would have needed extra tools the moment I wanted to charge for an issue. The right tool is the one your anxious brain can actually open and use on a bad day.
The platform you start on is rarely the platform you end on. You can almost certainly migrate later, and many writers do. The thing that matters is pressing send on the first issue, not picking the perfect home for it.
The newsletter is still small. It might stay small. That is okay. The thing to hold onto from all of this is that you do not need a clear head, a perfect plan, or a stress-free season of your life to start writing to people who want to hear from you. You need one issue, one honest Sunday morning, and the willingness to lower the bar until the bar is low enough to step over. The rest grows from there, slowly, in your own time, in your own timezone.
