Today I'm halfway to my interim goal of 50 wordvomits (with the actual goal being a hundred), and as I write more of these I realize that something that kept me back from posting in the past was the fear of spamming people, the fear that writing anything but a "great" post would worsen my "signal/noise" ratio.
I think the first time I heard about this concept was in one of Roy Tang's posts where he talks about wanting to clean up the list of feeds he was subscribed to and leave only those he cares about, the ones that tend to post more "good stuff" than bad. Of course, it isn't Roy's fault that I felt this way; rather, I think it was my natural impostor syndrome that latched onto this concept, as it fit so well with what was already my own internal narrative. He was just doing what every person would do to not drown in all the "unread notifications" he was getting.
Things have improved since starting this experiment, but I have to admit that even when writing wordvomits I often feel this "aversion" to publish what I feel are mediocre posts, for fear of being perceived as spam. The difference is that now I set myself this challenge of writing daily, and on the bottom line that supersedes any feelings of worry I have for what others might think. So I guess this is a way for me to say "sorry for spamming you"!
I've talked about it before, but this whole wordvomit exercise is not about the post I'm writing "today" but the post I will be writing "fifty" or so days from now. It's a pathway that allows looking toward the future at the expense of not paying that much attention to where I'm stepping right now.
And I have to admit that in some ways I feel my posts are flowing better! Not always, but on average they make more sense, are less convoluted, and I also tend to talk about a single topic.
...
I think most of us go through that feeling of "not wanting to spam" at some point or another. We can either face it with "paralysis," like a deer caught in the headlights, or we can face it with defiance and an attitude of "I don't care." Though both of these responses are just sweeping the feeling under the rug. The real way forward is to question why we feel this way. It's a hard thing to answer because it touches many points of our social and cultural programming.
For me the issue was that I grew up in a "marketing world." I even spent some years working as the content writer for a marketing website and taking care of their SEO! The whole goal there was to "maximize readership," to never do anything that your readers might not enjoy. Maximize subscribers, always with an eye on the profits. You know, the usual crap.
But even before that, there was a time when I'd culturally accepted that "the successful person makes money" and "the successful person is lauded by others."
Of course, both of these things eventually caused me to get stuck when I decided I didn't want anything more to do with them, when I eventually tried to explore my true creativity. There was (and in some measure still is) that small voice in the back of my head telling me "readership will go down if you publish this." Well, fuck you, little voice.
I'm trying to change the perspective and truly see every website as its own small world. Blogs are different in that respect from social media, because in the latter you contribute content to a whole, and it's very much integrated with it (or you "lose" in social media terms). For blogs and personal websites it's different; every site is its own individual experience, and they might be linked to each other by happenstance, but that's not the core part of it. The core is that each creator gets a space to just be themselves, put themselves out there.
A while back I got an email1 from another blogger called eve, where she shared a bit of wisdom I often come back to whenever I'm feeling self-conscious. It doesn't always work, but when it does it just seems so obvious that I wonder how I could ever have forgotten it.
Sometimes I have to sit down and remind myself that there are no rules for what I post & I can change the game at any time!
So yeah, sorry for spamming you, but at the same time, not sorry.
Shortly before publishing this, I remembered this gem of a meme.
(Meme with two panels. The first shows a musician saying: "what if nobody wants to listen to it"? The second shows a group of three podcasters saying: "yeah so I'm at the supermarket the other day and the cashier is really taking her time". "oh shit". "I hate that bro". "yeah and I mean I've got ice cream RIGHT on the conveyor belt and she KNOWS IT". "oh shit". "I hate that bro".)
I think we tend to be a bit too judgmental of ourselves, thinking that our content is borderline entertaining or whatnot. But the truth is that it's hundreds of times more entertaining than most of the other stuff out there! Also, it's true that what is "good" for one person is not necessarily good for another.
Footnotes
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As I'm writing this I remembered I actually wrote about this same email in another post! ↩