first is the worst

the mantra of an aspiring writer making her Substack debut

Hi, Substack. It’s me, Libby.

After many years (and many rounds of revisions), I’m finally leaning into the social media app that likens itself to the warm, cozy, creative feeling of a writer’s room.

Like so many of us, I penned a series of 2025 aspirations at the beginning of the month, and now here I am, finally in pursuit of a long-delayed dream: publishing my writing.

When I was in college, the notion of this practice felt inherent to me. I religiously contributed to fashion and style blogs (and even founded my own as evidenced below) in between J-school classes, sunrise hikes, and sorority-organized community service, and yet that younger version of me was poised with a staggering ability to publish her point of view without a second thought.

Fast forward years later: I’m a seasoned copywriter who spends her 9-5 crafting stories and devising ownable campaigns for some of the best brands in beauty, and here I am constantly trying to create within the realm of perfection. It’s an understandable (read: inevitable) reality of working in the corporate world, but while in the thick of a recent creative rut, it occurred to me: if I’m not making the time to create for the sake of creating, am I really bringing my most creative self to the career I love day in and day out?

As I’ve slowly become more acquainted with the nuances of Substack, I’ve found that what I most admire about this platform is its ability to let both creativity and humanity thrive—and its most alluring instinct: to celebrate ideas over aesthetic. With every minute spent scrolling on this app, I find myself being drawn to the art, poetry, photography, color theory, and thought-provoking pieces that fill my newly-curated homepage. It’s been the burst of inspiration I’ve needed to lean in, so when thinking about the first piece I might pen, it only seemed appropriate to lean into a mantra that’s motivated so many former beginnings.

There’s a phrase I cling to, one that always fuels courage and conviction, when I immerse myself in something new (more on that later)—and it’s penned in the very title of this post:

first is the worst.

It’s been my experience that the digital era has ushered in an expectation of polished perfection that inhibits creativity at its core. I’ve subscribed (literally) to this idea that everything I post should be both buttoned-up and primed to amass a note-worthy number of likes, but it seems that very mindset merely constrains my ability to create to begin with. When I sat down to write out my goals for the year, I flipped through the hopeful pages of years past, and found that this desire to create and share was threaded through too many entries to let another year go by without trying it.

I’ve had to remind myself that the purpose of trying something new isn’t to be the best at it in your first go. It’s to learn, to experiment, to discover new ways of creating and of being. To try something and love it, to later decide that you hate it, to try something completely different, and to fall into a poetic rhythm with that very process again and again and again. We uncover each of those stepping stones and deepen the lifeline of our creativity by being okay with being our worst. And that is where the magic lives. To be clear: it’s not a mindset that endorses the absence of ambition, but one that embraces the truth that our earliest efforts rarely reflect the scope of what we might be capable of. And because shaping, finding, and defining those building blocks is fundamental to creating a fulfilling foundation we can build from.

Maybe this Substack will only reach my best friend’s inbox, maybe it will be a quiet, isolated corner of the Internet where the inner workings of my brain will find a virtual space to live and be, or maybe it will prevail as a source of inspiration or comfort to a far-away stranger. Who’s to say?

I’ve come to realize that the outcome of what I create and the reach of what I publish aren’t up to me, but it is my responsibility to breathe life into my ideas and be brave enough to put it out there.

So, as I try (and fearlessly fail) to express musings and learnings that span from poetry to fashion, music to mood boarding, beauty to branding, I hope you, too, will consider what you magic you may uncover when you get comfortable with the notion of doing your worst.