posting online as an exercise in discomfort

This will be my 15th day in a row writing a microblog. It’s past 1am where I am, and I feel so tired, but I cannot go to bed without publishing. Such is the commitment I made to myself (and in public!).

I actually spent the past +30min writing a different post that I’m not sure I will ever post, because I cannot fully gauge the reputational consequences. That hesitation inspired this post.

Let me tell you that writing (and PUBLISHING) everyday with little editing or filtering has made me feel quite embarrassed. I tend to write before going to bed, and I frequently have to deal with a cascade of regret or worried thoughts after hitting “publish” and closing my laptop.

More than once I have had to fight a strong urge to delete a post. “I can clean it up and repost tomorrow”, “this is so poorly written, so clunky, it makes me sound extremely dumb”, “I don’t want people to read this and assume that I think this is OK”.*

(I have to tell myself “NO! the point of the challenge is to get something quick out daily! you must NOT give in to the voices telling you to delete. Don’t be a coward, learn to sit with the discomfort, owe your mistakes! Dare to be cringe. Dare to look dumb. Discomfort breeds growth.")

Earlier today I was mortified when I realized that a very cringy intro from yesterday’s post I had asked my agent to remove was, in fact, still visible in production (apparently I had checked a local version, and prod hadn’t been rebuilt).

I massively cringed the other day rereading one of my posts, noticing all the typos and awkward grammar. I cringed at the thought of expressing such personal experiences and thoughts, and snap judgements with no epistemological basis.

“F***, what if someone read this and they didn’t get that this was supposed to be a rough draft, a microblog? What if they think that I think that this is a proper, serious post?”

(I’m often tempted to slap “THIS IS A RAW FIRST DRAFT, WARNING: TYPOS AND BAD GRAMMAR, I HAVEN’T GIVEN THIS MUCH THOUGHT, IT’S BEDTIME AND I’M TRYING TO GET IT OVER WITH” in huge letters at the top of every post.)*

I can imagine someone reading two paragraphs, feeling outraged at the utter lack of quality in my writing, then proceeding to immediately close the tab, swearing to never again open an article written under my name.

As I write and consider publishing, there’s always a critic, a voice that analyzes how everything I write might get twisted by others, how it might damage my reputation and close opportunities.

It yells at me: “Do you really want everyone to know this about you? Writing about this is so déclassé. Can you imagine any of the founders or intellectuals you admire writing about any of this? That would be inappropriate, embarrassing. Nobody will ever take you seriously after. They’ll assume that (you wrote this because) you’re desperate for attention.”

I feel confused, because a big motivator behind my urge to write is to splatter bits of my “soul” and my experience out in the real world.

I write because putting my story and thoughts into a slightly less ephemeral form makes me feel more alive. Like they won’t just vanish when I die, or when my brain decides to prune them. They almost get to live an independent life, carrying on the “snapshot” of the current form I inhabit, outliving it.

I write because the magnitude of the existential dread I feel when I imagine myself dying tomorrow, carrying all these thoughts and experiences with me into oblivion, feels unbearable.

And it is this feeling that pushes me forward daily, screaming at me every time I reach for my laptop to delete or clean up a post,

reminding me that before I allowed myself to post raw “dirty” drafts I would never have published anything, because the bar was too high.

Reminding me that at least those ideas now get to live out there in the wild, instead of being part of a private museum only I have the keys to, gathering dust as time ticks by.

(Well, f***, I rambled too much and this is now +700 words and it’s past 2am… Wtf. Worth it, though!)