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