The Lines I Didn’t Publish No.6
Behind the scenes of “Ugly Photo,” thoughts on rereleasing an essay, Substack stats 15 months apart (on the same essay), and my audio setup.
The story behind Ugly Photo began after attending one of my best friends’ baby showers. We’re a group of friends who met at university, and are rarely all in the same place. This reunion—and, of course, my friend’s protruding stomach harbouring new life—called for a “group photo.”
Once the camera snapped, and the photos revealed themselves, I knew I had something worth sharing.
I’m not someone who runs away from embarrassment. Instead, perhaps as a way to offset a misgiving by gathering more data points, I want you to know about it. I also want your mom, cousins, and weird imprisoned uncle to weigh in as well.
And so, I told Ugly Photo as it happened, with embellishments and, naturally, a dream-sequence vignette. When I first released the post in April 2025, I had 134 subscribers. It mostly circulated among people I knew in real life, who understood me or had a front-row seat to the scorn.
Quickly, it became my most popular post, igniting a string of DMs from friends and foes from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
Cut to today, when I decided to rerelease the essay with paired audio.
Now, admittedly—and I don’t know whether this is the personality trait I have where, if I’m not suffering in some way, it means I’m not doing meaningful work—I feel cheap rereleasing something. It feels a bit like cheating, and more like content hacking than writing about whatever is presently going on in my life.
At the same time, I think it’s a fun essay, and back when my mailing list was smaller than the number of employees at any Ohio Olive Garden locash, it didn’t get a ton of eyes. And so, I thought, “Fuck it. It’s summer, I’d like to invite myself onto a boat somewhere, so let’s make life easy.”
Plus, a few months ago, I spent more hours than I care to admit recording the damn thing to audio. I created a custom jingle with sound effects (thanks, Pixabay), then used Audacity to record, put the audio through Auphonic to clean it up, and used GarageBand to splice it all together and edit it.
Because it was my first-ever recording or using any of these tools, it probably took me 20 hours (or more).
To date, it has had fewer than 100 listens.
So, to do the essay justice, honour the hours spent listening to my own voice (which to me, sounds unbearably baritone), I decided to re-release it to my current list.
And here are the stats of the same essay landing on Substack 15 months apart.
