Write like no one’s reading

I wrote the first draft of this by hand in one sitting earlier today. It’s down at the bottom for anyone who wants to see my weird handwriting.

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I’ve been writing professionally for 15 years, but for some reason publishing on the internet feels incredibly fucking scary to me right now. More than it ever has. For the better part of the last two years I’ve been paralyzed, and I’m kinda worried I’ll never get my mojo back.

On new year’s day, in one of my annual spurts of “new year, new Rob” energy, I committed to write and publish something new every day for 40 days. But as the clock ticked down on the evening of January 1st, I felt my body seizing with fear as I squeezed out one bland, tortured, lifeless sentence after another. I was about to give up on the project when I felt that wise voice within say, “why don’t you publish on a private blog, some place you never have to share with anyone?” Immediately I felt my whole body relax. I set up that private blog and published my first piece within the hour.

Over the following two and a half months, I wrote and published daily. I think my final tally was somewhere around 72 days in a row. It felt easeful and fluid in a way that kinda shocked me. The words flowed out each morning, and after I hit publish, there was usually a sense of genuine contentedness, bordering on serenity. Which is wild because usually I’m wracked with anxiety after I hit publish. I’m worried about how the piece will be perceived, whether I’m marketing it enough, and I obsessively read back over it and make stealth edits—because it never feels remotely good enough. But for those blessed few months, I didn’t care at all, and I felt free.

I’m in the process of building a rad personal website for my writing. A place that feels more like home than Substack ever has. As I was populating the site with old work, I went back and re-read a few pieces from January and was startled by how alive they felt. They crackle with a vitality that’s hard to describe. It’s honestly kind of frustrating to hold them up next to the pieces I care about, where I sweat the details to make them “good.” I’ve spent the last two months working on a pair of manifestos, and they have nowhere near the same spark as those quickies I fired off in 45 minutes.

This might seem trite and obvious, but it’s becoming clear that I’m not only a better writer, but I also feel lighter and more whole as a human when I’m certain no one is reading my shit. It’s confusing as someone who’s spent the last decade deep in the marketing and creator worlds, drinking in the dogma that you’re supposed to understand your audience intimately and then write just for them. Pair that mentality with my long-standing perfectionism and imposter syndrome, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for paralysis, for staying hidden in the background, plotting and scheming and planning, but rarely if ever publishing.

In the age of abundant and soulless AI text, I’m more convinced than ever that writing like a human matters. When I went back to read those pieces from January, that’s all I could feel—that they were unabashedly human and unlike anything I write when I’m mired in fear and operating like a machine. So for the next little while, I’ll be writing daily again and experimenting with the notion that no one is reading. Easier said than done given that I’m blasting this out to my entire life, but goshdarnit I’m going to try. Oh, and I’ll be drafting the vast majority of these pieces by hand. The handwriting thing has been pretty revelatory for me, but that’s a post for another day. For now I’ll just say that it helps me slow down and think deeply and feel the weight of each word, rather than trying to get out as many words as I can as quickly as possible.

So yeah, I’m definitely a bit on edge on writing this knowing that I’m going to publish it later today. But also, I’m thinking back to the freedom and lightness I felt seven months ago, and I want to return to that place, that way of being. Writing has felt like pulling teeth for as long as I’ve done it. But I have faith that it doesn’t have to be that way anymore, if I write like no one’s reading.