At yesterday’s Galactic Bonus Homebrew Website Club, I appreciated hearing others’ perspectives and approaches to managing some emotional aspects of blogging.
Perfectionism
We discussed overcoming perfectionism on our websites and in our blogging — a pernicious, perpetual challenge for creative expression. I’ve had some success tricking my mind to be less precious about writing shorter, less formal content: this entire mind garden is meant to be a ‘first stop’ for thinking; I created a category called “ponderings” to encourage myself to post little thoughts and curiosities; and in the course of composing a post, if I’m having trouble harnessing my thoughts, I’ll start with a framework of bullet points.
Deciding what to share
Assessing the risk of publishing
Several of us wavered on how much personal material to post on our blogs and websites. Jeremy reminded us that we needn’t publish everything we write; indeed I’ve been doing this frequently of late. Yet we can also remember that in our reverse chronological dominated world, anything we post will also get pushed down the feed and off the ‘front page’ relatively quickly. I suspect I’ve carried over the fear of saying the wrong thing or being taken out of context from social media and projected it to all online publishing, including my own blog. (This is another facet of my perfectionism: being afraid of making mistakes or looking stupid. Working on it.)
Posting with less exposure
We discussed approaches that might enable posting without broadcasting, like requiring login to access, leaving the post unlisted / omitting from your RSS feed, or posting it only to the RSS feed (I’ve seen someone call this “RSS club”).
Being part of the cultural and political conversation
Lately I’ve erred on the side of keeping things to myself because in the past I’ve regretted oversharing, but I feel I might be holding back too much, particularly opinions about politics. Scrolling through my TBR list after the meeting, an Audre Lorde title I’d saved called “Your Silence Will Not Protect You” jumped out at me. Not engaging in controversial conversations won’t save me from the impacts of their outcomes; writing can be one way I participate in building the future I want. This is why I’ve been writing about abortion and birth control more recently, although it sometimes feels uncomfortable (after all, our culture is squeamish about sex).
Practicing openness
Following the meeting, James published a personal blog post that reminded me of the value of vulnerability in relationships. There is some relationship between writer and reader in blogging, even if it’s chiefly one-directional besides the occasional comment. The trick is finding the sweet spot of vulnerability for a general, unknown audience. I enjoy reading about other bloggers’ and writers’ personal lives and have benefited from others sharing about their challenges, like mental health; I also want to be able to be known as a person from my writing and pay it forward if sharing my experiences can help others. At the meeting, we discussed what we look for when exploring a new personal website: personality and signs of humanity and connection arose.
I have a few hard rules of things I won’t post online, but I generally want to maintain a sense of freedom that I can be myself in this space, and write about whatever I want. It’s an ongoing practice to choose how much to disclose about myself, how strong of a stance I feel comfortable taking, and what I think is worth responding to. My politics are impossible to conceal, but I can choose which other aspects of my identity and personal life to share online.
14 replies on “Blogging’s emotional obstacles”
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Tracy nails pretty much all of the emotional obstacles that I encounter when thinking about what I post here, but ones that weight heaviest on me are around risk, especially concerning cultural and political topics. I build and maintain this site as a hobby, and having to deal with any kind of fallout (spam, DDOS, etc, etc) from being too vocal about those kinds of fraught topics would not be fun, so I tend to self-censor a bit around those areas. I’ll admit to that being not the most courageous of approaches, but adding another source of stress to my life isn’t something I’m keen on doing.
Published to campegg.com/notes/20230417112507 by Cam Pegg.
Good, thoughtful piece from Tracy Durnell about some of the choices she makes to blog. The comment about bits of personal life being interesting, while to much can be, er, too much, is encouraging
It’s been pretty quiet around here lately.
The main reason is that almost all my creative energies have been spent on making music. This (hyper) focus has meant there is nothing left for anything else. Especially writing.
I’ve found it hard to concentrate on music for the past couple of days 1 so have found myself writing again — both on paper and screen. It’s a perfect example of my obsessive nature and not being able to task switch.
Multiple passions cannot coexist. It’s one or another, never both or all.
Even when I’ve sat with my phone in hand, almost desperate to post something, the words have eluded me. It’s like a wall rises up between different areas of thought and I can’t climb over it. I have to be done on this side before I can cross to the other.
Even when feeling like I might post I battle with myself over the worthiness of doing so and what I might consign to the blog.
Tracy had a lot to say about blogging’s emotional obstacles following a Homebrew Website Club meeting which resonated very strongly with me. The usual suspects of topics were covered:
perfectionism,
deciding what to share,
how personal to be, and
the risk of publishing
That last one goes back to the underlying fear pervading the web.
When I’m not in a blogging headspace I can’t escape each of those points. Nothing seems worthwhile of being added to the noise; no commentary or opinions worth sharing.
To quote Tracy:
The only reason I am able to write this now is the problems I’m having with music. Again, the spectre of perfection reigns supreme. What I thought was pretty decent starts to dull, loses its sharp edge, as imposter syndrome starts to kick in.
A bit of me wonders if it’s down to not having yet processed last week’s CBT session — at least in part. I say CBT but it’s really still the ‘getting to know you’ phase I wrote about a couple of weeks ago.
The therapist is learning what makes me tick, trying to open me up to get to the juicy meat inside so she can do her job. She has been giving me a few things to think about, different approaches to thinking about them. Less of the negative and more of the appreciative — finding the good bits so that I can offset them against the bad.
I need to work on acceptance: this is how things are and, even if there are bad bits, how they allow me to do what I want to do. Work is unfulfilling? At least it’s well paid and supports living where I do. That kind of thing.
I had to draw a pie chart of triggers and work out the relative percentages of their impact on my mood. I drew three segments of external triggers but forgot probably the most important one: the internal triggers. I still really struggle with self-compassion so the thoughts about perfectionism, and subsequent self-beratement, felt like a blow to the head.
I’m not sure why I would forget that in a therapy session. It may not necessarily be my biggest trigger by volume but it most definitely is by impact.
I may now have Y but X remains beyond my grasp, not because of what I do or don’t have but because of skill, or lack of practice, or childish impatience. I know this but it can be so hard to act accordingly, to not try to run before I can walk.
I need to give myself permission to go slowly, to fail, to accept and grow with each failure. I guess that’s why I’m going to therapy.
partly due to back pain but also a loss of confidence in what I am doing ↩
Tracy nails pretty much all of the emotional obstacles that I encounter when thinking about what I post here, but ones that weight heaviest on me are around risk, especially concerning cultural and political topics. I build and maintain this site as a hobby, and having to deal with any kind of fallout (spam, DDOS, etc, etc) from being too vocal about those kinds of fraught topics would not be fun, so I tend to self-censor a bit around those areas. I’ll admit to that being not the most courageous of approaches, but adding another source of stress to my life isn’t something I’m keen on doing.
Published to campegg.com/notes/20230419131238 by Cam Pegg.
Stuff I did:
6 hours consulting
4.5 hours writing
Went to Galactic Homebrew Website Club — as a followup, I wrote about the emotional challenges of blogging
Gave editorial review for a couple blog posts
Paid my business taxes for the first time! Only had to call the IRS for guidance twice 😂 Hope I did ok 🤷♀️ Added to to-do list: engage CPA 😳
Researched hotels for an upcoming trip
Baked ‘powdered donut cake’
One walk with a friend — took today as a chill skip day
One appointment
Reading:
Read The Sad Ghost Club
Started reading Heart, Haunt, Havoc by Freydís Moon
Continued reading The Expanded Mind — totally digging it
DNF’d Hanging Out by Sheila Liming and Something Wilder by Christina Lauren
Added 3 books to my TBR — most intrigued by The Worst Journey in the World, a graphic retelling of a memoir by a member of Scott’s tragic Antarctic expedition, but it appears to have a limited US release
Words I looked up / concepts I learned:
ekphrasis
tumbrel
Pretty stuff I saw:
The “Eye of the Sahara” (Daily Overview)
Website changes:
Created a Website Wishlist of changes I’d like to make to my site
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