feeling of being important, of being at the center of whatever small weather system you had been mistaking for the world, was a kind of adolescent equipment you could set down on the porch and walk away from. That it was, to my own surprise, a relief. That without it the goats still needed water and the snow still needed shoveling and the dead were still dead, but the arithmetic came out more honest. I ended with a line about mattering being mostly a thing you do to other people without their consent, and then I pressed publish and I went to bed.
I was alerted to the situation by my niece, whose first text read simply mags, and whose second text, six minutes later, read MAGS, and whose third text, seventeen minutes later, was a screenshot of TikTok. A young woman I had never heard of, with a face made for close-ups and a tone I recognized from certain librarians who had been very hard to work with, had filmed herself reading the last paragraph of my essay aloud in her car. She had cried. She had re-uploaded it with a filter on. She had added the caption this is the thing i needed this week, and below it, seven hundred thousand people had agreed.
By Tuesday morning I had forty-one thousand new subscribers. By Wednesday night I had a hundred and four thousand, and the little blue Substack dashboard had begun to behave the way dashboards behave when they are about to throw up in their own lap. By Thursday someone had created a Discord server, which is a thing on the internet that I had until that week believed was primarily used by teenage boys to be cruel to one another about video games. By Friday the Discord had four thousand members, and a moderation team, and a rule about not being cruel to Margery. By Saturday the PayPal account I had set up three years ago so my
🤖 The author declared this story as written with the help of AI.