Why writing is so hard

Writing makes you vulnerable. By writing, you’re exposing your thoughts and ideas to people. People that you may or may not know. People that might love or hate your opinion. That’s hard.

I don’t want a person I’ve never met before to criticise my thoughts. I don’t want a stranger to think lesser of me because of something I said. I want to be liked, we all do.

But I know the more I write, the more I start enjoying it. Posts I write somehow manage to capture my ideas, opinions and state of thinking at that instant of time. Opinions change over time, but it can be exciting to come back and read how you’ve grown and changed as a person.

The first time I started writing as a self-documentation process was back in high school when I wrote letters to myself in the future. I wrote them as Facebook messages to myself, counting on the fact that future me would be using the same account. It’s the closest thing I had to time travel.

It can sometimes be hard going back to those letters because they make me cringe and feel. I usually wrote only when I was troubled about something, and the letters were wrought with passion. But when I do go back, the depth blows my mind. It brings up issues and events I’d completely forgotten about. It exposes my ambitions, anxiety, self-doubt, fears and how they’ve changed over time. Experiences and emotions that have shaped me as a person.

Writing today is hard for me because I get caught up in thinking about people’s reactions to it. Writing is easy when you’re writing without expectation. Which is why I post on Twitter rather than Facebook, because it feels like a personal feed of my thoughts and very few people read it anyway. Svbtle over Medium for the same reason. Facebook private messages to myself rather than status updates, etc.

If I were to publicly publish every single thing I wrote, I imagine I’d be too stressed refreshing the stats page, replying to comments, anticipating responses, pruning/promoting on social media networks etc. Which is why it helps to have a healthy mix of public and private posts, share as necessary.

At the same time, writing publicly is an extremely important form of self expression. Writing about your thoughts is a great way to attract people who think similarly, and form meaningful connections with them. For every person you influence positively, there will be people you don’t. Statistically, the more reach and influence a piece of content has, the more haters it will attract. But never stop writing. Writing can sway and persuade, it can influence people’s thoughts and decisions. Writing can have the impact to change the world.

When I say this, I’m not even necessarily talking about writing alone. I’m talking about all forms of creativity. Photos, music, snapchat stories, essays, poems, vines, movies, songs, vlogs, tweets, games – everything. Whether it’s a song by the Beatles that evokes the thought of world peace, a photograph on Humans of New York that exposes the diversity of emotion, a mural by Banksy that makes people look up and take notice, or a status update on berlin-artparasites that resonates with something you didn’t know you had within you. Creating something that tells a story and putting it out there is the only true way I know of changing the world.

So write freely, write frequently.

Write about something, write about anything,

Write to yourself, write to the world.