Write Like No One is Watching

And post like you'll never be hurt.

At the beginning of the year I set a goal for myself to write at least twice a month on Substack. I’d had an even more ambitious goal last year when I started — once a week! every single week! — but that goal had to be walked back more or less immediately. I knew when I started writing again that it would tough to write through life’s rougher stretches — part of the impetus for making the commitment to write publicly again was to write through things in a way that held me accountable to myself — but I over-estimated my ability to write consistently through the rough stuff.

I’m being hard on myself. All writers are hard on themselves, at least the ones for whom writing isn’t just a mode of production, but a practice.¹ It’s difficult to not interrogate one’s own practices; by definition we seek some kind of improvement or progress through our practices, material or spiritual, and so the quality of the practice matters. And if the practice is, for any reason, a deeply personal one, then the impulse to self-criticism becomes more acute: the things that we do to serve the deepest parts of ourselves are the things that often provoke our deepest anxieties and fears. We don’t just want to do these things well; at some level we need to do them well. How terrible to let ourselves down.

And then there’s the ego, and pride, and all that messy human stuff connected to worrying about what other people think. It’s a terrible thing to let ourselves down; it’s even worse to do it in front of other people. This is why personal writing is such a radical and brave act, as I said some weeks ago: it is one of the most vulnerable things that we can do. It’s a kind of baring of the soul; it’s taking the precious tendrils of ideas and dreams and speculations and explorations and longings that live in here (*gestures vaguely to chest*) and putting them out there and saying, look, these deserve to be out here in the wide open world. It’s an assertion of the right of our inner worlds to find expression in the outer world. It’s an assertion of our right — and by extension our desire, our longing — to be heard.

So, yeah, it’s hard. It’s hard to do it once or twice; it’s super-duper hard to do it again and again and again, to make a practice of it, to try to make it part of your ongoing lived experience of being in the world. And to do it on a schedule. And to not worry about how it’s received.

That last part is impossible. To make a practice of writing you have to get comfortable with anxiety and fear about what people might think about your writing. This is true even if you never publish or share your writing: once words are on a page in the world, actual or virtual, they are discoverable, and because of that they are alive and available for witnessing. Writing is spelling is spellcasting: you bring something into the world that was not there before. It’s magic, and it’s more than a little unnerving to use it, because it’s a magic that you draw from your heart and mind and spirit and it exposes you. There’s no way for that not to be vulnerable, not if you genuinely care if your magic is good.

Anyway. I started this Substack because I wanted to a) force my own practice of personal writing, b) push against my own perfectionism relative to writing, and c) rediscover my courage. I wanted to confront and overcome my tendency to overthink the words that I put out into the world, to find the flow of my own deepest storytelling instincts, and become, if not fearless, more brave.

And that’s been hard, as I knew it would be, but this week it was super hard, to the point of almost derailing me entirely. The irony is that I’ve probably written more for myself this week than I have in any given week for years; the writing itself has not been the problem (for this I am wildly grateful). The problem has been my inner critic, or at least one in particular (I have a whole chorus). One of my loudest inner critics when it comes to my writing is my inner recovering editor-in-chief, the chief content officer and creative strategist who knows way too much about how to get words out into the world in ways that click. She has been very loud of late, and insistent that I should worry about which words I share and when, about whether they’re the right words for the right moment and the right audience and, you know, the times and all that. How are your words going to find an audience, she has been whispering, if you’re not thinking strategically about them? You do want an audience, right? You should think more about that. Why aren’t you thinking more about that?

I argue with her. I tell her that finding an audience wasn’t the point of the Substack. It’s always the point, she says. You know that.

She’s not wrong, which is the core of the problem. I do want people to read the words that I put out into the world; that is, after all, why I put them out there. So I never have a good answer for her when she pushes me on that point, and last week was no different, and that is why you are currently reading a post that I wrote about not writing, because I didn’t want to not write just to spite her and I didn’t have any better ideas about how to shut her up.

I wrote three and a half draft posts last week, which is a lot even though none of it made it here.² One was about Lent and spiritual hunger; another was a reworking of a memoir piece about an early confrontation with my own cynicism (featuring ghost cats and a conversation with a squirrel.) There was also a revisitation of a talk I gave last year about the book of Genesis and the myth of the Garden of Eden and its relevance to the stories that we tell about taking care of the earth. And then there was the half post, which was related to International Women’s Day and that I never finished—that’s the one where I finally realized that my inner critic / content strategist had fully taken over and that I was chasing a goal that I didn’t want to be chasing.

It didn’t start out that way. I didn’t set out to write about Lent because it was timely; I wanted to write about it because thinking about Lent catalyzed some reflections about spiritual hunger and the power of giving things up and what it even means to ‘give things up’ in a time of deep loss. So I wrote it, and enjoyed writing it and was pretty happy with it, but then Ash Wednesday slipped by and I thought (or rather, my inner content strategist leaned in and whispered) damn, the moment has passed. No one will be thinking about Lent anymore; no one will read this. So I paused, and turned my attention to the two other pieces of writing, which felt more evergreen, but then the memoir piece all of sudden felt too personal³ and it seemed that the Garden of Eden post should wait until closer to Earth Day, which reminded me that International Women’s Day was coming up, at which point (I now recognize) my inner content strategist had almost entirely taken over.

But I fought her.

I have feelings about International Women’s Day, specifically about activism fatigue and the exhaustion that comes from having fought to change a story for a very long time, and under certain circumstances that would be a meaningful thing for me to write about, but I wasn’t in that moment writing about it for meaningful reasons. I was writing about it because that annoying voice was telling me that I should write about it for timeliness and audience reasons. I was shelving other writing in service to a content calendar that didn’t even exist and that I certainly didn’t want. So I paused and asked myself: did I even want to write about International Women’s Day? No, I did not.

And also: fuck content calendars. Fuck content.

I did not return to my writing practice to create content. There are many good purposes for content but content in and of itself is not storytelling; content is just narrative or informative material (from the Latin continēre: to contain). At the most basic level, a lot of content is exactly what its names implies — filler — and the world already has more than enough of it. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; under other circumstances, I happily create content. I have been an editor and purveyor and manager and distributor and strategist of content, which is why I have that inner critical voice yelling so loudly for my attention. But I don’t want to be that anymore, at least not in relation to my own creative work. I don’t want to make content. I want to make stories.

So. I resisted the voice. Which in the moment felt like it might become a stubborn (and self-defeating) refusal to write, but I reminded myself that I wasn’t really arguing with my inner critic about writing, I was arguing with her about posting. I had, after all, written a whole bunch and was just waffling about what writing I was willing to share with the world right in this particular moment. It was that critic-induced self-conscious waffling that was giving me trouble. And I so decided to push past the waffling by writing into the waffling, which is why you are reading the unapologetically self-indulgent navel-gazing mess of words that you see here.

If this is what resistance looks like—this oddball exercise in writing about not writing—then so be it. At least it’s honest (I think). If nothing else, it is an assertion — to myself and to the world — that I am writing for the experience of it, for the joy and pain and terror and satisfaction of running headlong onto the landscape of my own storymaking and not caring (mostly) if anyone follows me. It’s writing for the purpose of experiencing the magic of writing, which is its own reward. And that kind of writing is most powerful when it allows itself to forget that anyone is watching.

So.

Write like no one is watching.

Write like no one is watching.

If in doubt, write about writing like no one is watching.

Whatever you do, just write. Post if you feel brave. Remember that your words are magic.

1. Duncan Trussell did an interview with Neal Allen (who is really great on the subject of inner critics) and Anne Lamott (who is really great) on his podcast last year and at one point Anne Lamott says, about the experience of writing, that you sit down at the keyboard every day and think “I am so fucked.” In case you ever felt alone in your fear. Anne Lamott.

2. Yet. We’ll see.

3. I was actually *this* close to posting it, but then I went in search of a photo to post with it and in the process of going through photos emotionally triggered myself and it all of sudden all felt way too vulnerable and all the intrusive thoughts about what stories are worth sharing came flooding in and I just couldn’t do it. For now, anyway.