on the fear (Patreon)

audio for this post is available here.

hello all. I’ve read your responses to the google form and not only was I proposed to and encouraged to start a cult but was asked overwhelmingly not just about the process of creation but of sharing the things you create, this inevitable river-mouth of judgment our work empties out into, or for some of us, the insistent siren’s call, to be known, understood and experienced......how do you take the plunge? how do you best the anxiety, not just of being perceived, but rejected, or ignored?

I would like to open with a purposely obtuse bit of thought candy: don’t do it!!! don’t post it publicly. if ‘putting your work out there’ to you means putting it onto the internet – you simply don’t have to. this compulsion may be the false prophet of a delirious crack-addled attention economy, powered by the existential horror of being forgotten by the zeitgeist unless you participate in this constant output – meanwhile, you’re wasting time daydreaming about the pitfalls of a career you don’t have yet, putting off learning how to be the best you can be at your craft by nursing self-important little fantasies that someone, someday, might be rude to you. share only with very trusted friends, a writer’s group, the people on your course. you can simply become a very good writer in private and burst onto the scene with your cushy six-figure urgent debut and then fade into obscurity, respectable, perfect and deeply uninteresting.

but I know you still want to, and anyway, those audiences are also scary, if not scarier. of course you’re not afraid of sharing your work; you’re afraid of something like rejection or humiliation or regret....there are external and social forces at play – people will be cruel; people will know you; people won’t care – and internal, introspective forces – you don’t have anything worth saying; you will grow to hate what you’ve made; you will regret your vulnerability – and all of these less-than-desirable outcomes are in response to the body’s primal aesthetic cry, the blanket your ego is swathed in, for many the most tender and sensitive fruit bore from their time on planet earth. not great......in reality what you’re really feeling is probably a puttyish combination of all of these things and some others that I haven’t identified.

because I’m answering the question, let me talk about me: I was never afraid to share work in the way some people have described to me, or, at least, was never immobilized by this fear. a maladjusted wee tyke, I shared writing with anyone who expressed even the slightest interest in me and also some that didn’t – online, in-person, from childhood. this is not to assert myself as being born with guts. on reflection I think I may have had some natural aptitude for writing, which was noticed by teachers early on, who gave me attention and praise and led me to believe I was better at this than my peers. but look at the results of this socialization! the places false confidence propels you!

I understand and feel the fears, of course; the self-lambasting doubt of whether or not I actually had anything of value to say was ultimately what kept me from making videos for a time. everyone’s perspective is unique and everyone’s voice, when developed, is valuable...…but this is a platitude and didn’t encourage me much at the time. in reality I got over this feeling of attention-theft by getting smarter, developing confidence backed by work and critical, active reading, a familiarity with the process, an assurance rooted in myself that even if someone were to insist on my inconsequentiality I would know it wasn’t true – or, even it were true in the moment, I would know I was ultimately working towards something greater. it’s helpful to develop a keen awareness of your current limits alongside a confidence that borders on temporal delusion. you are a good writer, just one who’s not good yet. the inherent narcissism of the creator has been waxed to death: that to make and tout anything you must believe yourself to be worth listening to, in this moment, over anyone else. it’s true. you must. it’s an ugly little appetite. feed it anyway. (there’s also something to be said for gendered socialization here, wherein generally girls must be thoughtful and precious with their voice and generally boys are free to charge ahead, unencumbered by this etiquette of thought or, indeed, whether or not what they’re saying is valuable, or even correct.)

I relate also to the fear of a poor response, or even disgust towards someone’s compulsion to give a response. when I got back the edits for my first novel – which, mind, is a standard, deeply unemotive part of the publishing process – I couldn’t open the document for two weeks. just that the notes existed humiliated me. even a noticed minor error in word choice was a lashing. I wanted to be perfect or nothing. I got through the notes in short bursts, a chasm of embarrassment opening wider in my belly with every page. it felt awful. did it anyway, because I had to. and then another time, and another time, and another, and now it’s less awful, and I’ve seen what critique can look like in its varying degrees, and I’ve edited other people, and through exposure I take it much less personally. this is ‘the work’.

but there’s more! when the truth about keeping secrets released its first advance copies for review, I was, without exaggeration, checking goodreads twenty times a day. I even figured out a workaround that would let me see reviews that were posted but hadn’t updated onto the book’s page yet......looney toons behavior.....this, if not clear, was an unproductive way to spend my time, and was not indicative of a zealous thirst for public feedback, but instead a mechanism of the brutal thought loop coiled around my brain that I’d been given this opportunity for any reason besides my ability to write a good book. one of these reviews will point out that I’m a sham, and that will be the one that’s true. as we all know people who enjoy your work are lying idiots and people who hate your work are telling the truth and are also very clever.

in actuality people liked the book. also, I got awful reviews! reviews questioning my intelligence! reviews articulating exactly the supposition I so feared, that I wasn’t a good enough writer to have what I did! I’ve seen everything: people disappointed in me, people who expected more from me, unfavorable responses from people I respect. I’m very sorry but you will too. this was goodreads so at the same time literally none of this matters at all, but you are sensitive, so yes it does.

your fears are real. people will be cruel. people will have their perception of you altered after being given your flesh. that's what this is. there’s a toughness you need here. unfortunately it’s not a toughness that can be forged theoretically. it will come, like all callouses, from a repeated stress to one spot, or in this case many, namely the heart, the mind, and the soul. in hindsight I’m grateful this choice – to share or not – never presented itself to me, because I don’t know I would have been brave enough to choose correctly.

all this to say the belief you’ve developed out of politeness and social grace that you’re not extraordinary, your willingness to let the anecdote trail off because you knew it wasn’t any good anyway – it does nothing for you, this meek fear, at home in the same filthy hovel as shame. they are parasites. they slow your creative heart to a crawl, moving towards the actualization of nothing.

you simply must keep experiencing the pain associated with this vulnerability. school is useful for honing this muscle (Iike creative writing degrees, which exist mostly to allow you to be embarrassing in private). I did it publicly. it doesn’t matter how you do it but you will have to. eventually you fill the cool pond of knowledge inside you that this work can be bad, or offensive, or ignored, but this doesn’t make you bad, or unpalatable, or pointless. (but like, also, you might be a bad writer at the moment, which is fine. you have to be first! you have to be.)

failure is inevitable, but to experience it is, of course, unpleasant. it stains the record. I’ve felt perfectionism to the degree of not posting a video because I slightly mispronounced a word. one misstep, I felt, was enough to shake away the facade and reveal underneath the true face of my incompetence. of course this isn’t true. your life is no showcase.

as a kid I’d get a new journal every so often and decide this journal to be the one. perfect! pristine! it would contain only beautiful thoughts in my tidiest handwriting and every page would be full. naturally this never happened. if I spelled a word wrong in pen, whatever, I’d get frustrated and ditch the whole notebook. wasteful little wench. obviously here the notebook is your body of work and, in a real way, your one, unditachable life. you don’t get another and you will mess up and still you must go again. you simply cannot let yourself be so paralyzed by fear that you don’t even interact with the blankness. now when I get a new notebook – this is completely true – I intentionally fuck it up, write something sloppy, spill coffee on it, tear pages out unprecisely. and too will your work live like this.

ultimately – and this is the conclusion to any less-than-optimistic treatise about writing – you must love the activity. the puzzle of words, the arrangement of them, the synergies, the logic of ideas, the game of a phrase that’s a little wrong, the absolute euphoria of getting it right. that’s all. that is the sense that gets you through these lashings, that there is nothing else.

sav xo