I just want to write without thinking about who's reading
I've been wanting to start a little corner of the internet where I can actually write – not for an audience, just to think out loud, messily and honestly, the way you do in a diary that happened to live online.
Then it hit me: my name would be on it, and immediately the questions started. What if a future employer finds it? Do I keep it anonymous somehow? Do I share it with friends and family, or keep it hidden from them too? Each question narrowed down what I was willing to put out there. The imaginary version of me writing freely about something embarrassing or genuinely difficult had evaporated. I'd be thinking about who might read it before I'd thought about what I actually wanted to say.
This isn't a new thing for me. I used to have a personal Instagram, just normal photos of normal life. Then it quietly became more of a photography page. People were responding positively, and suddenly there was an audience with expectations. So I stopped posting the blurry ones, the mundane ones, the ones that were just for me. I started a food blog too. Different account, same trap: followers, expectations, unspoken rules about what it should be. And then I more or less stopped posting to Instagram altogether.
I don't think I'm alone in that. I've watched people I know go quiet on there, not dramatically, not with a big announcement, just gradually less. I think most of us know exactly why, even if we don't say it. The photo wasn't quite right. The caption wasn't landing. It didn't fit the feed. So you don't post it. And then you don't post the next thing either. And eventually you're just scrolling, a consumer rather than a creator – because we got too good at imagining the audience. We learned to see ourselves through their eyes before we'd even pressed share, and most of the time that imagined gaze was unkind, or just indifferent. Either way, it was enough to stop us.
That's what I don't want this to be. I want to write when I've had a strange thought on a train, or when I'm working something out and writing it down is the only way to do it. Without it needing to be content.
The problem is that putting something somewhere public, even just a URL that nobody knows about yet, turns it into content whether you mean it to or not. You just have to know it's possible, and it becomes curated.
I don't have a tidy answer to this. Maybe it's just accepting that the fear of being read is part of writing, and you have to do it anyway. But what I'm really after is a version of the internet that had room for the unfinished and the unpolished. Where the point was never the audience.
I want that back. I haven't figured it out yet. But I'm starting here, I suppose.