✶ iteration #59 of this monthly letter full of feelings. ✶
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If you follow me on instagram, you’ve probably seen a story rant or two about my recent frustrations with

Here’s what happened,

and also why I’m embarrassed to talk about it. Shame is almost always an indicator of something I want to write about and share and release, so here I am!

Take a stroll back in time with me to November 12, 2024; I am in the car and I receive a text from Discover alerts asking if I had made a $4,600 charge to COME HOME NEWSLETTER. Obviously I fucking did not! I laughed! How silly! How obvious! I responded “No” immediately and got the text confirmation that it was marked as fraudulent. I went about my day because it’s the fucking holidays and I have other shit to worry about and assumed it had been handled. It’s thousands of dollars, there’s no way the credit card company would let that go through, right? (the hypervigilant part of me that I try not to listen to laughs, condescendingly) – it’s annoying when the anxiety is right.

I recognized Come Home as a newsletter that I had subscribed to a while back, when I was still typing this from my mom’s basement. The writer is a cool girlie whose perspective I really trust and I liked the idea of supporting her work and writing through subscribing to her substack. My inner shame monster scoffs at me: “why would you give $ to a random influencer you barely know in the first place? Stupid millennial.” This does not align with my beliefs, but of course the shame monster isn’t interested in my values. Part of me doesn’t even want to give details about this because I’m afraid of people thinking that this is the writer’s fault. The instinct to post blame on an individual and not the system isn’t really my jam and forcing individuals to be hypervigilant about scams all of the time is kinda probably just another way to keep poor people busy and mad at each other. Anyway, I really like her and I don’t want to throw her under the bus but I said the name of the publication already and you can figure out who she is. I will continue to give her money! And I will continue to encourage other people to support her work! She doesn’t post on substack anymore as far as I know (and I wouldn’t suggest substack as a way to support artists anymore anyway) but you can buy a tangible IRL project of her’s here.

I have a vague memory of cancelling the $50/year subscription within the last year because I couldn’t pay rent and I needed to tidy up my spending. The shame monster butts in: “you couldn’t pay rent and you’re spend money on little things that bring you joy or make you feel kind of good? you can feel good when you can afford to. you shouldn’t have been spending $50 on this in the first place! you should be on top of things like this! you should have made sure your subscription was cancelled. you should have looked for a receipt. Where is the receipt? You barely check your emails let alone your subscriptions. If you actually stayed on top of your emails maybe you would have noticed something. This is why you don’t have any money! This and your desire to buy a little treat every other day. Be more responsible with your money and then you’ll have a right to complain when things go wrong!” ugh. Again, I must interject here to say that this voice in my brain refuses to align it’s negative self talk with my actual value system. The voice in the back of my head’s beliefs are not my own.

Anyway, at the time, I didn’t know if this charge was actually her newsletter or something else with a similar name and I didn’t f*cking look into it because I didn’t have time!! and I don’t fancy myself a detective! It’s obviously fraud and it’ll be dealt with by the credit card company because… OBVIOUSLY.

I went to pay my discover bill in January and noticed that my balance was exceptionally high. At first I was like “oh shit, I must have spent too much money again” and started to shame spiral about my relationship to money, scarcity, etc. I went through my statement, expecting to see a few handfuls of $100 – $250 gift purchases that added up when I wasn’t paying close enough attention. I noticed the familiar $4,600 charge now posted on December 12, 2024. I dealt with this already! 😤 Being the millennial with phone anxiety that I am, I went to the Discover website to press a button and maybe chat with their helpbot and complain that there had been a mistake. I marked the transaction as fraud again and hoped it would solve it. The voice in my head rolls it’s eyes at me.

February comes along and I get a letter in the mail from Discover saying that they couldn’t verify this charge as fraud and I would be responsible for paying it. At first I was like “you’ve got to be f*cking kidding me” and then I started to spiral into an “I deserve this” story in my head. I pulled myself out of it and put on my ~big gurl pants~ and called Discover. They said said that the fraud claim had been denied because I had used apple pay for this subscription originally, and apple pay is inherently a safer form of payment (???) so it’s harder for a credit card to deny (????) I was like “MAY I REMIND YOU that I consented to a $50 charge via apple pay and this is not that?! Why in the world would a $4,600 charge go through because I had once agreed to pay $50 to this merchant via apple pay?!

I found myself explaining what substack is to a handful of different customer service representatives. Nobody seemed to understand why I was mad. They kept telling me there was nothing they could do and that I needed to get in touch with the merchant to issue a refund. Have you spoken to the merchant? I was like… who is the merchant in this scenario?! Is it the writer of the newsletter?! Or is it substack, the platform through which I originally paid? Or is it stripe, the payment processing platform?!! 😭 What is a chronically online girlie to do in the real world where these things make very little sense?

Discover customer service tells me that our records state you were in contact with the merchant via email and approved this charge. HOW?! I ask them to read the email address back to me. bridgetbadore6@gmail.com is not my f*cking email. Isn’t this enough proof of fraud?! Whatever whatever whatever.

Emails with substack support told me to reach out to the writer directly, using the email on their substack page. A substack domain. It bounced back. Every time I get a response from substack support, it’s a different customer service person (robot? I don’t know) who reiterates the same canned reply: Substack does not handle the money and I would need to be in contact with Stripe to issue a refund. When I contact Stripe they state that they need the owner of the compromised account to contact them directly.

To be clear, at this point I am still trying to get the money back from discover because this is very very obviously a fraud issue, and I’m looking for an explanation from substack or stipe to help with the fraud case. I reiterate: i’m not looking for a refund from substack, im looking for them to remedy this incredible breach of trust. as a writer on substack, i really want an explanation of how something like this can happen. can someone really hack into an account and charge current paid subscribers (consenting to a $50/year subscription) $4,600 out of nowhere and get away with it? Nobody responds to that.

I finally reached out to the writer via instagram. I don’t know her personally; she’s a friend of a friend at best, and the only way I knew how to contact her was through this silly app, which felt like a futile form of communication. I felt embarrassed and didn’t want to waste her time, and she probably wouldn’t even see this message. She doesn’t know who I am, and after all she’s just another individual trying to navigate the unending horrors of capitalism! A company or a person who is getting *paid* to fix this problem should be spending time on this. Discover or substack or Stripe–all companies with a LOT of money (and insurance!)–could have spared this chunk of change and it wouldn’t put a dent in their business.

In spite of my spiralling, she ended up responding right away, immediately concerned and hoping to do what she could to help. In an instagram message exchange, she told me that she got an alert that her account had been compromised a few months ago and a couple other girlies had reached out about a similar problem. She had been trying to contact stripe to regain access to her account ever since, with zero luck getting any help from customer service for months. The others ended up getting their money refunded through their bank, so hopefully I could do the same. I felt stupid again, thinking that I should have just reached out to her when this first happened. That the right thing to do would have been to let her know as soon as it happened and contact my bank and get it all sorted out immediately but I was busy and lazy and in a weird money shame spiral and I trusted that it was handled and whatever this is all so silly.

At this point, the whole millennial with phone anxiety thing is out the window; I am on my knees begging to talk to a person at one of these f*cking companies. Filling out complaint forms and waiting for callbacks and circling back on emails. Am I really going to be stuck with this charge because I wasn’t vigilant enough with tracking my credit card usage for a month? Is my fault?! My brain starts circling… “I probably deserve it, I should be better about these things, I shouldn’t have even been spending $50 on this newsletter to begin with, I don’t have this kind of money, who do I think I am, how is this legal, wait is it legal, did I do something wrong to somehow make this legal?”

I don’t know how many hours I spent on the phone with Discover in February. After trying to escalate the situation and reiterating that Substack and Stripe were incredibly difficult to get on the phone, I finally started sobbing and asked if there was anything they could do. Someone at Discover finally gave me a more in-depth explanation and told me that I had one chance to re-open this fraud investigation a third time before it was permanently closed. I had 30 days or less (???) to prove that I didn’t make this charge. How do I prove that exactly? They needed me to mail in a physical affidavit with receipts of communications with the “merchant” stating that their account had been hacked. (ugh, I have to go get more ink for the printer or go to the library or something). The instagram exchange *might* be enough but it would be great to get a receipt of the transaction from substack or stripe (the companies with virtually no customer service and no user-accessible records of payment besides that screenshot above???). AND that I had to file a police report???? AGAINST WHO??? Wait what even is a police report anyway and WHY DON’T I KNOW THIS ALREADY I AM AN ADULT. I remembered trying to file a police report at the Kingston station after my car accident because someone at the insurance company said they needed it to file my insurance claim, and the police were like “idk what you’re talking about, we can’t file a report after the incident and most people don’t need that for their insurance claim” (i’m paraphrasing). WHAT. So I wasn’t super eager to enter that station again with another request for a police report that I didn’t fully understand.

I have this shame story in my head that I’m a whiny brat who always makes themselves the victim and that I am always complaining about stupid things for attention. This was really digging its claws into that story, especially after it had already been going on for 3 months and I had been quietly trying to handle it. I finally posted about it on instagram.

A friend told me to reach out to

A handful of folks suggested I file better business bureau complaints for stripe and substack. The latter has an “F” rating and doesn’t abide by BBB standards so good luck with that lol. The former finally started responding to my complaints, just a tiiiiiiny bit. They responded to the substack support person that finally took over the email thread about the “ongoing issue” and requested the writer call them but didn’t give a phone number. She responded on the email thread that she would LOVE to get on the phone with the and has been trying to for months and has given them her phone number multiple times but hasn’t received any calls. She expressed frustration about substack using her influence to make a bunch of money through her subscribers and literally paying her to use their platform, but denying accountability when those subscribers get scammed via their platform. They ignored that part.

Another friend suggested I cold email

$4,600 is a big deal! my credit score went down 50 points and I had *just* brought it back up after taking a dent with holding space. It takes way longer for your credit score to pop back up than it does for it to dip down. 😡 One of my goals going in to 2025 was to maybe finally go to a local bank and see what it looks like to get pre-approved to buy a house but instead I was wasting a bunch of time on this. 🥲 I spiral at least once a day about how precious our time is and how frivolously I seem to spend mine. Most days, the only discipline I can harness is used to hyper fixate on things that ultimately don’t matter, like a hex code for the perfectly light muted purple background, or the way each of the books on one shelf line up perfectly. Instead I could be editing those photos that are due or emailing photo editors or figuring out how to make enough money to buy a house in this lifetime. The Mary Oliver quote I hand-lettered across multiple journals in my youth haunts me: “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Cue a tik tok ADHD diagnosis.

The $4,600 was refunded by Stripe on 3/10. I got an email from the writer saying “good news!” After all of our back and forth, the people from stripe had finally helped her gain access to her stripe account and they were able to refund via my original form of payment. I don’t really know the logistics of where the money actually came from; I’m assuming stripe’s insurance. I’m annoyed that it took so long and it ended up being solved by getting two people on the phone that had nothing to do with me. I’m annoyed that I spent so much time in the waiting room at the station of an institution I don’t believe in for the police report to not even matter. I spent so much stupid time on this and I’m tired of talking about it. I got the money refunded but I am still mad about the lack of accountability. I still don’t really know what happened! Shouldn’t substack be concerned about this? Or am I crazy? If I had to make sense of it, I would say that I think the writer’s stripe account was hacked and they were able to create a new charge for me as her current customer with the card I had on file. Whyyyy is that possible?

Nobody on the

Substack and Stripe customer service (like most contemporary internet companies) is the fucking wild west. Trendy cute little companies like this get to make their own rules, and the CEOs can do whatever they want and get away with it because people are desperate for a fun social media platform that connects them with their online communities. I am people.

negotiating values on the internet / under capitalism

I complain about ~the internet~ and remember that this has been a problem forever. Oil companies, governments, banks, monopolies, there are always bunches of people in power and insidious things we have no control over and it just feels like we can kind of touch these things now because of the internet.

This shit makes me feel crazy. It feels like literally everything under capitalism is designed to make regular people hate each other and fight each other and keep the powerful people in power. ultimately what I believe in – and always come back to when I start spiraling about whether my “radical” “far left” beliefs are correct – is working class solidarity against billionaires and corporations. Crazy that we live in a world where one billionaire could like solve world hunger or whatever, you know? Like… literally what the fc*k? I don’t want to participate in this bullshit culture of rich people and corporations and CEOs bypassing responsibility.

People have been flocking to substack as a social media alternative after leaving meta products like facebook & instagram because of Mark Zuckerberg’s whole ~would do anything for Tr*mp~ vibe. People are all “wow substack is so cool because it’s like the old days of the internet where you can find real people writing about things!” but also (especially now, post flocking from meta) your whole feed is probably inundated with the same boring influencers that have made you feel unpretty and uninteresting for the last decade on every other social media platform. Because substack is probably paying them to be there to make this platform seem worth investing in. They throw their resources at ~cool people~ to make their product seem cooler and harder to part from.

I know that this $4,600 thing isn’t even the best reason not to use substack. It’s been well known that their CEOs kinda suck for a while now. My partner Tommy works as a graphic designer for a tech-focused company & he usually knows a lot about “internet news.” So I asked him to send me an article that encapsulates “that moment a while back when people were leaving substack because of hate speech and values and stuff” and he said this one should cover it (if you want to read a more legitimate critique of the company and why a lead tech journalist doesn’t trust the platform).

But you know what? I’m not leaving substack. How embarrassing. I want to, but it won’t make a difference, and it’ll only cut me off from a few people on this platform I’ve found connection with. That feels stupid as hell to admit!

I don’t have clout. I don’t have enough followers on any platform to warrant any real sense of importance. I don’t really have much power to wield in this space. At the end of the day, nobody is going to leave substack because of me or this weird loophole that puts your subscribers at risk if your stripe account becomes compromised. Maybe 50 people will read this, and a few people might take their credit card information off this site because of it, but it won’t make a difference to the company in the grand scheme of things. It will make a difference to the writer who stops getting an extra $10 in their account each month from the 2 paid subscribers who stopped trusting substack and pulled their credit card info from the site. We rely on these websites and apps that enable us to have some kind of reach and connection, but at the end of the day they can do whatever they want and we’re just along for the ride. How embarrassing.

You know what else? I love my stupid substack! I love this stupid product run by shitty people. I love reposting quotes from other people’s substacks to the notes section! It’s like tumblr for earnest adults who can reblog each other’s work again. I’m a little bitch for this website. My landing page is SO CUTE. Look at it! UGH.

I started moving these letters to beehiiv and eventually felt defeated because I was putting all of this time into this thing that ultimately doesn’t pay my bills and probably doesn’t help me land photography gigs or further my career or make it possible for me to buy a house. Embarrassingly, I still preferred the way my substack looked and felt after putting a stupid amount of hours into the beehiv thing. Is this something I should really be spending my time on? I’m going to keep the beehiiv account going as a backup for this for now. At the end of the day, the 3 dudes in charge of substack are not people I’m excited to support, but it seems like there’s not a great alternative to what substack is offering right now as a free service that facilitates paid subscribers. I’d love to be proven wrong! (Preferably via the comment section of this post though – it’ll stress me out to get individual messages about this).

Is this whole project even still working for me? Do I even like it here? Is this practice serving me or is it a waste of my god damn precious time? To borrow the overused Marie Kondo phrase: “Does this spark joy?”

In the short term, with the tools I have available to me, I think it does. The best version of myself would be doing this offline in zine form or something very cool and punk and not reliant on the internet... in person, in community, and all that. In the long term, the goal will be to find a way to connect that isn’t connected to a tech bro making money. But for now, it’s a practice that allows me to reflect and alchemize my thoughts and feelings as I cycle through them. When asked if the “monthly” aspect of the newsletter is important to me (since I rarely actually send these newsletters on a monthly basis), the answer is more about listening and tapping into my own rhythmic cycles rather than adhering to a deadline. I notice myself metabolizing different themes each month and taking notes and it feels GOOD to write through them and make them make sense to me and whoever reads this.

For some folks, a private journaling practice does the trick just fine and they might roll their eyes at my desire to write public essays about my feelings. I don’t owe anyone an explanation, but I’ve found time and time again that journaling doesn’t work for me. Something about the private element demands less of me and I don’t show up the same way, and just willing myself to be better doesn’t work. my disconnect from journaling could have something to do with the fact that my diary was read as a child, so I didn’t get used to a place for private processing.

As a young person, spending time on the internet was exciting to me. I copied my older sister and got a myspace before everyone else in my grade. I was was an early adopter of AOL instant messenger in my age group (lol). I made little websites with selfies I took in the bathroom. ~WeLCOme 2 my pAgE~ here is who I am! I wanted to be witnessed outside of the confines of my family and my church and my small country town. I didn’t know how to reach people who liked the things I liked and eventually I made friends on myspace with people from neighboring towns. They were the kind of friends I dreamed about having. We become pen pals and sent each other books and polaroids and I always fell behind on keeping up with them. I still have boxes of postcards I meant to send people when I was sixteen. Anyway, the point is: this practice currently helps me get through the day to day of having the brain that I have. I’m working toward something more value aligned and tangible in the meantime like a book of these essays or photo zine that I can mail out but tbd for now! Those are big projects that require an extra does of executive function. For now, I’m here, and I’m going to stay here at least a little longer.

lastly, I’ll leave you with some tangible takeaways & to-dos to make sure this *specific* thing doesn’t happen to you:

1. Take your credit card information off substack if you can (especially if it’s a discover credit card – you might be okay with other companies, idk). Pleeeease continue supporting authors of your favorite small publications! You can ask to send them the amount for a subscription and have them hook you up as a “comped” paid subscriber on their end. Giving money directly to the artists also cuts substack out of the equation and gives their shitty CEOs less money. 🙃
   
   I’m offering comped yearly subscriptions to anyone that venmo’s me *any amount* of money. You can send it to @bridgetbadore on venmo & put “newsletter” in the payment description. I’ll find you on here and upgrade your free subscription to paid. As a paid subscriber you get the privilege of commenting on these essays but you also get that warm feeling of supporting an artist that you like!!! (you like me, right?!)
   

2. If you see a fraudulent charge on your credit account, call your bank or credit issuer immediately. It’s not enough to just respond “no” to the text that asks “did you charge this amount?” Apparently you literally have to talk to someone and tell them officially that you didn’t make this charge to ensure the charge doesn’t go through. Have them cancel that card and reissue you a new one, because the scammer is gonna keep charging the card & giving you headaches until they get away with it.

3. Apparently Discover sucks with fraud claims in general so maybe avoid opening a credit card account with Discover. If you already have a discover credit card, don’t link it to apple pay. 🙄 Pick one big company that you use often like netflix or your internet bill or something and have that be the one thing you charge on that card monthly. Don’t cancel your card if you already have one (that fucks up your credit). Just keep the account open and don’t carry a balance (so they can’t make any money off your interest).

4. Be hypervigilant about online payment platforms like stripe and paypal. Change your passwords often, blah blah blah.

5. SPEND CASH MONEY IRL AT YOUR FRIENDS BUSINESSES INSTEAD 💘

6. Don’t use apple pay for any recurring transactions online??? I think??
   All of this garbage makes zero sense but whatever.

   

A few things that I did with my one wild and precious life in february that didn’t suck:

Had so much fun plotting and dressing up for Alentine’s Day in Kingston with cutie local musician Al Olender and did a sweet little portrait booth. Went into the city once to jury the national scholastic art awards and again for Abigail’s bday and got married to linden and jordan at Luna Luna. Tommy and I had valentine’s dinner at Brunette. ♥︎ The rest of my time was spent on the the phone with Discover!!! lol

✶ In sticking with the “things you love on the internet are almost always evil in the year 2025” theme, here are six times I swear these pokemon guys were flirting with me (and I liked it, to be clear). ✶

I love to play this stupid little game. I love collecting my stupid little eeveelutions. Pokémon Go is already like selling data and AI-mapping the world and the gaming company was recently sold so it’s getting even spookier on here but gosh the game is so cute and I don’t want to give it up yet! I’m a f*cking idiot, I know!!! Anyway I need to make 3 new friends to finish this challenge if you want to add me. 🙃 my trainer code is “47BCF86R4” lol

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