I must’ve gone on for at least half an hour, if not 45-minutes, while we were driving back from PEI, about whether I should post links to my blog posts on my Instagram Stories. It’s been on my mind for about a week. Every time I ran through an argument, I ended up at the same conclusion: I don’t know.
When I was posting more “intentionally,” let’s call it, I would put up a “notification,” say. It didn’t take much thought then, but it seems to now. All of a sudden, over the last little while, maybe a few months, my confidence has been shaken. What changed?
I was on a 114-day posting streak. It was kind of exciting to get the notification on my phone, after I’d published a post, letting me know that my streak had increased by a day. I didn’t share any of those posts on Instagram Stories. The writing was more for me, perhaps, but I put it on the internet so it’s probably for someone else, too. The titles of each post aren’t all that interesting, usually just the date. It made it easier, made it feel like I didn’t have a point to make.
The whole point of that exercise was to get me writing again, to just write something down and put it out. It worked. Every day, I would think about what I was going to write, looking around me for story ideas. I had to pay a little bit more attention to my day. I didn’t worry all that much about editing each post, similar to how I’ll edit this one, so that I could remove one potential obstacle to stop me from writing. It was great to just let it go.
Why I’ve given it so much thought, I don’t know. It’s a feeling like the nerves before public speaking. You know that you shouldn’t be so nervous, but your ego becomes vulnerable, and you worry about embarrassing yourself. What’s the worst that can happen? In most instances, at least in my experience, it’s never all that bad.
I remembered that I bought a book about sharing your work and the advantages of doing so. I forgot all of what it said from when I read it so I needed to go back and read it again. Ali Abdaal suggested it in one of his videos.
Now, he’s a guy who has figured out how to capitalise on sharing the intangible. I admire – envy – the people who are capable of sharing themselves to the world by drawing attention to their own work. Thinking about the whole thing as advertising doesn’t help so I have to reframe it as a more benevolent act.
It does feel like I need to build up my confidence by cheering myself on, getting reassurance from others, and writing a post about it. The only way to do that is through practice. It’d be so much easier, though, if I could just not give a shit and get on with things. I’m not trying to sell anything, it’s not an ad, it’s just me sharing expressions of myself.
This post took me about 45 minutes to put together. It’s a lot of time wasted.
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