Confession: I’m Almost Always Scared To Publish
But I do it anyway because I think it might just save the world
In all honesty, I do not want to write this post.
Actually, scratch that. I don’t mind writing it. What I don’t want is for it to be read.
It’s times like this that I would love to be anonymous. I mean, my grandfather is here for Christ’s sake. My mother. Aren’t there some things better left unsaid? Unknown by those whose blood we share? Unheard by those with whom we eat Thanksgiving dinner?
It’s one thing for a stranger to see you bare. That’s hardly vulnerable at all (despite what we think.) But your spouse? Your father? 😵💫
We tend to think the opposite is true: that it’s strangers with whom we fear vulnerability, not our loved ones. But tell me why I feel the nerves of an opening night as I walk into our bedroom with pimple cream dotting my cheeks and my hair all twisted and wrapped à la Princess Leia with hopes of beach waves and blemish-free skin tomorrow morning. #RealVulnerability
Sometimes people will say a post or writing of mine was “brave” or that they could never “be that honest.”
I’m grateful for the recognition of what is, indeed, a true effort on my part to be vulnerable and honest in everything I put out. But I suspect they deem it “brave” for inaccurate reasons.
It seems scary to hit “Publish” on a post about the way I feel about my body or the walls I run into in my marriage to a mass following of people. But what’s actually scary is hitting “Publish” on those same posts to my friends, my family, my partner, my in-laws— the people with whom I live and work and eat and love in the very real world about which I write, the people for whom these words live offline.
It seems scary to write down your insecurities and show them to a room full of faceless strangers, but scarier is showing them to the man whose face I see first and last each day; to the woman who raised me who I text about things like how to whiten my yellowed sheets. (Oh what? that thing about my deep, dark, sadness you read this morning? It was nothing… about those sheets…)
And so the other option is to just not publish scary things.
After all, it is ultimately completely voluntary on my behalf to be here (or not.) It’s literally just my own weird brain that experiences an uncomfy icky feeling and thinks, “I should write publicly about this!” There is no one or thing pressuring me to be here.
So why write the hard stuff? The things that make me sweat to imagine my mother-in-law reading? I mean, in the grand scheme of things, what’s really the point of publishing any of this anyway?
I have thought about that a lot as I’ve contemplated what’s next for this little digital home for my writing. Why press on? Why publish?
And the answer I keep coming back to is this:
Because I believe honesty is the answer to it all.
And because I know that honesty ripples.
I believe that raw, vulnerable, Ego-less conversations could fix our warring countries and repair our wounded relationships.
I believe that real, true, deep, scary honesty can suffocate hate.
I believe no one would die of loneliness if we knitted a web of togetherness through whatever medium we’ve been gifted: writing, for me, maybe baking cookies, for you.
I believe that simply saying what’s true & real for ourselves, and listening to what’s true & real for others, might possibly save the world.
And so though it is hard, though I am scared of what the collective “They” will think, though it would be easier not to share, who am I to shy away from what we were made to do?
Here goes.
Next week: a post I didn’t want to write but did.