Creating Authentically or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Create Like Nobody’s Watching

Photo by Thomas Franke on Unsplash

My early exploration of personal blogging took me down several clickbait-, buzzword-, and listicle-filled rabbit holes: “Ten ways to get more followers”, “How to find your niche”, “Five habits of insanely successful writers”, etc. The more I read, the more it seemed that the measure of a successful creator is their ability to amass followers, exploit trends, strategically time content, and create non-stop.

From a business-marketing perspective, these metrics make a lot of sense: Higher visibility equals higher follower engagement equals higher clicks equals higher revenue. I’m even willing to admit that a bit of self-marketing is necessary to foster a community around one’s personal content.

But when the pursuit of numbers becomes a means to an end, you lose a bit of yourself.

Sincerity in a sieve

In the years leading up to the pandemic I started getting an itch to write. Write what? I didn’t know. I just knew it was the medium through which I wanted to express myself and connect with other people.

When the pandemic finally hit, I started getting into meditation and mindfulness, finding them to be wonderful tools to deal with the new stressors of life. Wanting to share my newfound interests with the world and flex my writing bone, I decided to take the plunge and start a blog.

It was easy at first—the novelty certainly played a role in that—but I also enjoyed sharing with others what I was learning. As my follower count started to climb, so did my desire to please my budding audience (dopamine is one hell of a drug, kids). I began to delve into social media strategies and best practices, focusing my efforts on pumping out content at regular intervals and trying to anticipate what topics would perform best.

As impulsively as I had started my side project, I stopped. Keeping up on social media had become a chore. I was bored of writing about the same topic. I didn’t want to write based on some arbitrary schedule.

All of the curiosity, excitement, and optimism I had started my project with had run its course. I wasn’t writing for me anymore.