Honesty Moment.
So here’s the thing. I’ve been wanting to devote time for writing for a while now. I thought I would blog during my maternity leave. Ha! Instead, I spent those 12 weeks obsessing over my son. Why write when I could just hold, cuddle, sniff, hug, and stare at him all day?
I am now making an effort to find a few moments each day to write. Yes, it’s only day 3, but I’ve been consistent, so yay for me! I thought that writing would quell my anxiety but that hasn’t been the case. In addition to all the thoughts in my mind, I’ve recently added, “What if I don’t write today?”, “What if no one reads it?”, and “What if no one likes what I wrote?” to the list.
I’m so nervous about sharing my writing here that I only told two people that I’m doing it. Both of them believe that write decently well so I sent them the link to my first post. A cousin told me that she preferred not to have conversations in an echo chamber so I’m choosing not to share this page widely with friends and acquaintances as I’m sure they would add to the chorus of positivity. Not that I don’t want a positive response, I just want it to be unbiased.
Recently, a blog post that I wrote was featured on my employer’s website and shared via my employer’s social media. I don’t have access to all of the analytics, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that the post was shared to Facebook from my employer’s website 87 times. That’s not a huge number, but people don’t generally come to our site for blog posts and if 87 people were moved to share, imagine how many people actually read it. The Facebook post had over 50 (all positive) reactions. Again, everyone doesn’t react so imagine the number of reads… That post gave me the nerve to start writing here, but without the instant gratifications of like, love, and care emojis, I felt lost. I tapped my imaginary mic and wondered, “is this thing on?” And then I discovered my stats. My staggeringly low Medium stats. Then I reminded myself that the internet is a filled with so much content and people only have so much time for mindless clicking and reading about random strangers. Then I ask myself, do I really want readers to find me or do I want to commit to writing to achieve the goals I set in my initial post. Or is it both? It can be both…
They say you have to do a thing 21 times to create a habit so here’s to lucky post number 3. I’ve got this and I will be better for it.
