This is, statistically, one of the tiny few blog posts I have ever finished, and I think that says everything you need to know about the actual subject of this post.
Here is the loop. I’ve decided I want to be more present online, more communicative, less of a mysterious author-shaped void who occasionally emerges to post a cover reveal and vanish again. That’s great, Sofia; what a healthy goal to set!
But then I sit down to write something, and within minutes, I’m deep in a formatting decision, or rewriting the same opening line so many times I may as well be writing it on the wall with lipstick. Then I get the bare bones down and spend hours wondering if this sentence is too casual, or not casual enough; is it easy to read?
Does it make sense?
Am I over sharing? Who even wants to hear about my Tuesday struggles?
Yoast is telling me I need subheadings to be SEO smart. Do I want to be SEO smart?
Does that even matter?
Goddamn, I’m going to have to make a featured image for this word vomit, aren’t I?
Fuuuuck.
I repeat this every time. I end up with a folder on my computer full of half-finished possible blog posts, each one abandoned at a different stage of the same spiral. They’re little monuments to my perfectionism, and they mock me with my inability to follow through.
I want to be quick about this. I want to be the type of person capable of firing off a post the way I fire off a GIF in a group chat message (seriously, I can communicate purely through GIFs, which I guess is a sign of being a millennial). That means not overthinking, doing just one draft, letting the typos slip and not thinking that my trivial little blog post needs to survive a peer review.
Which is another thing! University writing. My god! Even with my creative-based degree, I’ve gotten myself to this point where I have two forms of writing:
- Creative, filthy and fun.
- Everything else. That’s essays and work emails, text messages, product reviews, social media engagement, notes to myself…
Blog writing falls into category 2, which is a jumbled mess of neurotic bullshit.
(And that is another, another thing; my brain works in wild tangents, and so then I question if I should include that unrelated story or cut it out, because does it SEO? Does it bring anything to the rest of the blog, or does it show people just how crazy I am????)
So anyway. I’m trying to convince myself that the posts people actually enjoy aren’t the polished ones. I’m not trying to audition for the New York Times or anything here, and I’m not trying to go viral—I doubt anyone is even going to read these. But I want to make the effort, and I want to have a documentation of this side of my life.
So this post is basically an experiment in stopping while it is still a little rough around the edges and chaotic and posting it anyway.
So if you see this, be sure to drop an emoji or something.
(Oh shit, I just ended that with three paragraphs starting with ‘so’, but I will not stress about it or go back and change it! This is a new me, after all!)
P.S. If this unhinged little experiment worked and you want more of it, more chaos, more half-baked confessions, more me actually showing up, the newsletter is the place that gets it first. Consider this your one polished sentence for the whole post.