Why I moved from Ghost to Substack in 2025?

Ghost is great, but Substack is a community that gives you so much more.

Photo by Tandem X Visuals on Unsplash

I've tried to build a writing habit for 20 years.

Twenty. Years.

That's roughly 7,300 attempts to become "someone who writes regularly." And 7,299 failures.

What happens when you've spent two decades trying to do something that seemingly everyone else can do easily?

You feel broken. You wonder what's wrong with your wiring.

Then, at 35, I got an answer: ADHD.

Suddenly, the pattern made sense:

• The graveyard of started projects

• The addiction to beginnings but allergy to middles

• The constant battle with my own attention

It wasn't laziness. It was neurodivergence.

The Ghost in the Machine

Three years ago, I launched a Ghost blog on a $5 Digital Ocean droplet. Classic ADHD move:

1. Get excited

2. Set everything up perfectly

3. Write furiously for a week

4. Completely forget it exists

5. Remember months later

6. Feel crushing guilt

7. Repeat

The cycle felt permanent. Unchangeable. Like weather patterns you can predict but never control.

The Medicine Change

October 2024: diagnosis official. Medication prescribed.

For the first time, I started working with my brain instead of against it.

On February 20th, 2025, I made a tiny commitment: I would write. No requirements on length. No rules about topic. Just words on the page, sent into the void.

Now it's been a month. For someone who measures consistency attempts in days, not weeks, this feels like climbing Everest.

Why Substack?

Ghost was perfect for the void. For shouting into empty space. For practicing without witnesses.

But after a month of consistency (a personal miracle), I want something else: resonance.

I want to know if the words landing in someone else's mind create a tiny spark. I want connection, not just expression.

Substack isn't just a platform. It's a community. It's a place where readers become correspondents. Where the void talks back.

The Migration Mess

Of course, nothing is ever simple. The official Substack importer choked on my self-hosted Ghost blog, and images broke. Manual fixes were required.

For someone with ADHD who thrives on immediate results, this was the perfect trap—the kind of tedious process specifically designed to make me abandon the project.

But something had changed. I persisted, fixed, and adjusted. Thankfully, I only have 90~ posts to fix, so I'm doing it one by one, and it should be done in a couple of days.

Because this habit—the one I've failed at 7,299 times—finally feels possible.

The Real Question

What habit have you tried to build for years? What thing makes you feel fundamentally broken when you fail at it again?

What if that failure isn't about willpower but wiring?

What if you need to stop fighting your brain and start working with how it's built?

Maybe your void is waiting for an echo, too.

~ aq