Writing Hereafter: Instagram, Substack, AI, and Authenticity

I grew up in the golden era of Catholic mom blogs. As a teenager, I nourished my heart and imagination with Sarah Mackenzie's Amongst Lovely Things and Haley Stewart's Carrots for Michaelmas and Mary Haseltine's Better Than Eden and many others. These are the spaces I learned about liturgical living, family read-alouds, cloth nappies, natural birth, and how to wrangle kids through Mass... a solid ten years before having any children of my own to wrangle. 

These little pockets of the internet gave me a window into the otherwise hidden lives of mothers trying to live out their faith in the sacred spaces of home and sometimes work. Although I was by no means convinced that my own vocation was to marriage, I gravitated towards these women and their domestic churches because they seemed to show me it was possible to love God in the middle of the world. 

They didn't idealise it: there was mess, spiritual struggle, always a tight budget and an unexpected baby and a little more chaos than they thought they could handle. But Christ was at the centre, and their creative, Spirit-led souls seemed to make a way through. As a young woman growing up in regional New Zealand, on the far side of the world from the women whose work I was reading, I cherished the wisdom and inspiration I found in these blogs as my link to a lineage of grace. 

When I began writing on Ardent Devotion in 2011 as a fifteen-year-old just beginning to discover her personal faith, I never dreamed of making this blog public. That call came a few years later, towards the end of my first year volunteering with NET Ministries in Australia. Even then, my hope wasn't really to reach more than a handful of people whom I knew personally and whose prayer lives I cared about. I simply wanted to record the workings of God in my heart, and to write for writing's sake. 

In the intervening years, confessional writing has becoming pop culture's bread and butter. Every Instagram influencer and Substack paywell-monetised author seems capable of sharing the very depths of their soul (with varying degrees of authenticity or advertising). I think there are ways this is to our benefit: hearing others' genuine experiences in different seasons can give us the grace to weather our own transitions, and provide the energy to commit to our vocations with more vitality than we might otherwise have. 

But there's also a sense, for me at least, of total saturation. We are exposed to so many lives, such detail about those lives, and such vulnerability in others' sharing that I think we all become a bit numb. It's no secret that when we are overstimulated we are desensitised to new stimuli. We have felt anguish over a stranger's sorrow, joy over a stranger's good news, again and again, ad nauseum, until we've kind of ceased to care about any of it. 

Social media has radically changed how I think about writing. When I first started sharing blog posts to my Facebook page in the mid-2010s, I hated how much I cared about the number of likes or comments. Now, having ditched Facebook but been as yet unable to rid myself of Instagram, I feel so limited by a format that values images and short captions, when my heart and calling have always been to long-form writing. There's Substack, but something about that feels impersonal - premised on paywalls and think pieces and building a following - rather than reaching out to the hearts of those I have a pre-existing relationship with. 

I know I'm part of a generation that doesn't give fixed attention to digital writing. We read the first sentence of a paragraph and skim thereafter (she says, in the second line of a paragraph). We distill the essence of an article rapidly and don't expect anything to have a huge amount of nuance. We scroll and swipe and read the AI-generated summaries. 

And honestly? All of this leaves me a bit baffled about where I belong as a writer. I don't think I'm ready to write books (and nor would the publishing industry think so, given that I have precisely zero existing following). I don't want to climb the popularity ladders of Instagram and Substack. I don't want to self-promote or play the game or make a living from my writing. 

I'm also terrified about AI and the vulnerability of digitised intellectual property in this era. I recently looked at the page stats for my blog and in the last year it's jumped from dozens to thousands. I have no doubt whatsoever that those thousands are almost entirely artificial intelligences (gosh, it makes me feel sick). 

But in spite of all these things, I do want to keep sharing those little windows into faith, motherhood, and life that I myself sought refuge in as a young, isolated teenager trying to live my faith. I want to keep a record of the Holy Spirit's whispers in my life and to share those in such a way that they might spark someone else's prayer. 

The golden-era Catholic mom blogs were a lifeline for me, and have become a lifelong inspiration. Even in an oversaturated influencer age, such women remain beacons for me, guiding the way through the mess of early motherhood and faith. They still matter to me; and a quiet voice in my heart promises that there are one or two people to whom my writing matters, too. And if it's only one or two, so much the better.

As I close the PhD chapter of my life and for the first time become fully a stay-at-home mother, I yearn to write more, to write more vulnerably, and to allow God to use my writing to transform me and others. I've just got no clue what this looks like. I've got no clue whether my writing at all is just feeding machine learning - or worse still, just feeding my ego. 

But I pray that somewhere in the midst of these uncertainties, grace will prevail. 

Foremost, I just want to witness to what God continues to do in my heart and life. I simply want to stand as a woman fiercely in love with Christ, trying to make sense of life in this strange age, one prayerful and imperfect day at a time. 

So I'm returning to my roots: blogging with no intention of reaching anyone other than maybe the one precious soul who needed those words that day. And maybe it's just me - so often I've written my way through, penning words I didn't know I needed to hear, but that the Holy Spirit put on my heart.

That is sufficient. That is grace beyond measure.

With love,

Kate

AMDG