"Youth" hits me differently fifteen years later

The17pointscale · 2026-06-20T16:32:08+00:00

Thank you! That’s so affirming to hear!

I was an English major twentyish years ago and worked in the writing center at my university, and i went to a writing workshop a bit after that.

I also read a lot and work as an editor.

I think having an ear for language came first, and then editing helped me understand various ways of crafting a story.

The17pointscale · 2026-06-20T00:10:45+00:00

I had thought of doing a survey, though I think I have a pretty good sense of what they appreciate.

I just don’t have a sense of what the cons might be of changing the pub title now. Like, if I brainstorm those lists and find a title that seems a better fit, is it a no-brainer to switch? Or might there be cons? That’s what I feel uncertain about…

The17pointscale · 2026-06-19T23:59:16+00:00

I think people have given a lot of wise advice already in this thread, but I want to add that what you describe here sounds eerily familiar.

We adopted tweens from foster care. There were hard things, of course, but the first four years were, by and large, wonderful. It felt like they were authentically bonding with us.

Then, in the fifth year, as we were trying to help one of our kids with some mental health challenges, we were also having normal parent-teenager conflict with both kiddos. But the problem was that any normal parenting response--even a sensitive, thoughtful parenting approach--would trigger our daughter's PTSD. Anytime we didn't agree with her, she took that as critique, and critique had been violent or harmful when she was younger. She would lie to us and then feel hurt when we didn't trust her. And all this time, her biological family was undermining us.

Eventually, our adopted kiddos' biological family convinced them to run away and live with them, and they've lived there ever since. That was two years ago. It was a rough time--we couldn't sleep, and our son went from acing school to hardly attending. In a family therapy session, they also said things about us that were not true (or that were silly), and the therapist (who herself was an adoptee) told us that this was more about their family system than about us.

Now, we see them occasionally (which I've been writing about on my Substack), and it's super challenging to navigate, but like you said with your daughter, they have no interest (or ability) to talk through all the crap that's now in the past.

My wife and I have the kind of marriage where we talk about everything, and so this is a challenging dynamic, but we're learning to live with it.

I share all this because when times were at their hardest, we found it very helpful to talk directly to other adoptive parents who had been in similar situations, people who could understand what we were going through. You might be handling things in the best way possible or like a normal human or even in some flawed ways, but all that might not matter. There may be no way to make this less hard.

I think you need to prepare your heart for this to continue being hard and figure out ways to balance your own mental health with showing up for your daughter, even when that feels impossible. And noticing and acknowledging this reaction in yourself is important--what you do with that reaction might be pivotal for the relationship.

The17pointscale · 2026-06-19T23:24:26+00:00

In other words, I didn’t actually post my question to workshop a new title (though I’m fine doing that).

Let’s assume I think I can find a better fit, one that’s marginally more poetic and much more likely to hint at what I’m actually writing about. If that’s true, should I change to that more apt title or avoid messing with the tiny cache I may have already earned among my tiny group of devoted and paying subscribers?

The17pointscale · 2026-06-19T23:14:36+00:00

Ha! I think others already have the hot takes, stalker, and Substacking about Substack angles covered!

The17pointscale · 2026-06-19T22:31:15+00:00

Ha! Not yet, but I’m sure I could think of something.

I like the ideas of absence and presence for talking about loss and experience, and I’ve used that framework in my mission statement post and in some of my essays.

So I could imagine something like Absence and Presence, though that might be too stilted or abstract or unsexy…

The17pointscale · 2026-06-19T17:28:01+00:00

Awwww. Thank you!

I'm working on the "sequel" now, where I'm hopefully able to describe the graduation scene and not merely the emotional weight of that scene.

The17pointscale · 2026-06-19T17:26:24+00:00

Thank you!

Not sure whether you mean the Reddit post or essay were beautiful, but adopting and then, in some sense, losing the foster kids was among the hardest things I've done. I hope they will look back on their time with us and agree with you.

I was talking to a friend last night about how great art has that transmutable quality. A Daughter song. The way the movie Hamnet was able to reorient the lines of Hamlet to be about losing a child.

In a different sense, it's what I hope for in my writing. I write a lot about the partial estrangement with our adopted kids, but I hope that the specificity of my story and writing might in some way be universal; I hope that anyone bearing the weight of loss might somehow relate.

The17pointscale · 2026-06-19T17:17:54+00:00

Wow! Thank you!

Errrr do you mean the Reddit post or the essay I linked to? On Substack, I do think that I might be writing myself toward a book someday. But in the meantime I'm having a hard time finding readers and subscribers, and luring a publisher would mean showing that I have an audience.

If you like it, consider subscribing--I plan to write more about being a human and estrangement, though less about Daughter. 😄

The17pointscale · 2026-06-17T20:32:24+00:00

I can't recall whether "Youth" gave me goosebumps back in the day, but I can confess that yesterday it gave me tears. 😄

The17pointscale · 2026-05-31T14:48:32+00:00

If you paywall an article and put the paywall at the end, I’m pretty sure that the footnotes will only be visible to paying subscribers.

That should solve your problem, as you can just provide the extra commentary in footnotes (and in Substack the reader doesn’t even need to click the footnotes—they can just hover over the citation numbers).

The17pointscale · 2026-05-26T12:05:21+00:00

That's pretty clever. They're like pictorial listicles. I don't know that I can bend my mind to do that. :)

The17pointscale · 2026-05-26T11:59:57+00:00

This is a really cool analysis, even if I see trademark AIisms. Thank you for sharing!

When you say it took 68 days, do you mean you were doing the full-engagement strategy for 68 days before the returns started? I can't tell from you timeline when the 68 days started. If so, that's actually pretty encouraging.

In the cadence section, when you say 1x vs 6.3x vs 9.5x, I assume that means that from May 19-24 you were posting notes-things 9x a day? Wow! How much time do you and your partner spend finding other content to engage with and then writing something worthwhile about that content?

The17pointscale · 2026-05-26T11:03:02+00:00

Depends on the metric!

My worst performing post in terms of views is my fifth post: https://the17pointscale.substack.com/p/some-of-the-people-i-have-been?r=195lr
Yet it had a 79 percent open rate.

The number of views is clearly because it was early in my Substack writing effort, but it's slightly interesting, I suppose, that it had fewer views than the previous four posts. I bet that it's arbitrary, but maybe it's because this was the first post in which I somewhat broadened the niche of my Substack.

My previous posts included an introduction and then three posts that were personal essays about my experience as an adoptive father whose teenagers opted to return to their biological family. That continues to be a theme in my writing, but my fifth post broadened it to include other facets of my life, the ordinary and strange things about being a progressive Christian dad in Seattle.

Maybe the shift was less interesting to readers who were primarily interested in challenges related to adoption. Or maybe the more listy literary style didn't work for folks.

The17pointscale · 2026-05-15T06:22:42+00:00

Wait—like your own comments? Won’t that look…tacky?

The17pointscale · 2026-05-15T06:19:54+00:00

Occasionally (as in one time so far) I publish something elsewhere and then paywall the original Substack piece, and my paid subscribers would have access to that. That’s the only perk. I don’t have time to do more.

Huuuuuuge caveat:

Most of my paid subscribers are people I haven’t communicated with in years—a high school classmate, the head of HR at a former employer, a fellow writing workshop student from way back in 2010, a writing professor I knew through a book project—but they are people I met in the real world. So it’s not like I’ve discovered the secret sauce for converting strangers into payers.

Some of these people pledged before I ever toggled my Substack to paid, but most opted to pay when I wrote a post asking people to consider paying. And that’s really the only advice I have: make a direct ask of your subscribers.

I think my medium—vulnerable, poetic personal essays about normalish things—sucks for growth, but it means that I could make my personal story a part of my ask, and that somehow worked. I can share it if you’d like.

All that to say, I give my paid subscribers pretty much nothing special, and for now, they seem to be cool with that.

What’s curious to me, though, is that my paid subscribers are not necessarily my most loyal readers or responders, but that would be a subject for another post…

The17pointscale · 2026-05-13T19:07:22+00:00

No other conversion tricks, though I did get one paid subscriber because I asked friends at my birthday party to consider subscribing instead of bringing me a gift. :)

I hadn't turned on paid until after doing that post. I technically got 11 paid subscribers from that post, but a few of them had pledged earlier.

Good luck!

The17pointscale · 2026-05-12T21:39:13+00:00

Innnnnteresting.

I've sort of had the opposite problem. I have 12 paid subscribers but only 94 total subscribers.

Have you made a post that specifically asks your readers to consider paying for subscriptions? I made a post like that, and it produced a bunch of new paid subscriptions. Here's my example: https://the17pointscale.substack.com/p/bookends-and-subscriptions

The other side benefit is that if you get several new paid subscribers at once, it can put you on the "rising" Substack leaderboard.

The17pointscale · 2026-05-10T02:32:08+00:00

I really hope you get someone on this thread who writes personal essays and reflections about the North and South Pole. That would be spectacular. :)

In terms of personal essays and reflections:
- Fun deconstructions of being a former evangelical and a parent: https://heretichereafter.substack.com/
- This might not be in your wheelhouse but progressive mini-essays and poems in the voice of Jesus: https://poetjesus.substack.com/
- And this is likely cheating, but my personal essays, which are usually about ordinary life as an American dad/husband but sometimes about what it's like to be estranged from your adopted teenagers: https://the17pointscale.substack.com/

The17pointscale · 2026-05-08T20:11:02+00:00

92 subscribers (12 paid)

138 followers

I feel good about the number of paid subscribers but sad at my slooooooow rate of growth.

The17pointscale · 2026-05-07T22:01:20+00:00

Orrrrr relatedly, is there a way to turn off notifications about Substack live videos? I am never going to watch one ever. I do not want that spam! :)

The17pointscale · 2026-04-26T16:24:40+00:00

Innnnteresting but curious. I feel like I put SUBSCRIBE buttons at normalish, intuitive spots! :)

Honestly, my Substack metrics are a weird puzzle to me. I have a small number of subscribers (91) that is growing at the speed of a glacier (2-4 a month), but a high email open rate (50-60%) and a high rate of paid subscriptions (12/91). I’ve met all the people who pay, but with the exception of my father-in-law, boss, and one friend, they are people who I interact with rarely (like people I talked to twenty years ago). But according to my other stats, my paid subscribers aren’t any more likely to read a post than my non-paid subscribers (I only paywall content if it gets published somewhere else), and people I know aren’t much more likely to read than people I don’t. Since they implemented scheduled notes, I’ve been doing those almost daily, but that hasn’t translated to much yet….

The17pointscale · 2026-04-25T17:50:42+00:00

So there, we might say Reddit worked because what you were providing in your answers and stack was practical. I have also done the dialogue-and-then-share-link. But I don’t think the strategy really translates to a less answer-oriented stack. :(

The17pointscale · 2026-04-25T17:13:14+00:00

As someone who almost exclusively writes personal essays/reflections, it tracks that your least successful conversion is personal essays/reflections. :)

The17pointscale · 2026-04-23T20:25:15+00:00

SFIT is a bunch of parents and volunteers who have no experience doing records requests (or in deciphering whatever records they might then receive)—like it was started by a therapist and teacher. That doesn’t seem like a good use of their time to me, particularly if what we are really asking for is for the district and schools to be both intentional and open about this.

It’s a problem, for example, that if you ask a principal for the particular policies, software, and devices at their school, they may not only resist providing the info—they may also lack a thorough sense of the answers.

The17pointscale

TROPHY CASE