the biggest mental wall youāll run into in RPāor any other endeavor reallyāis always gonna be, āWhat am I doing wrong?ā
at some point or another youāll spend a lot of effort on somethingāa post, an edit, an event, a blog, whateverāand it wonāt get recognized no matter how much you push it. when it only happens once maybe youāll get discouraged but carry on. the important thing to know is itāll keep happening.
itās not really anybodyās fault and this is just how social media is. things werenāt always this way but they are now and itās platform invariant. it doesnāt matter if youāre posting fics on AO3 or putting up videos on YouTube or writing tweets on Twitter. the real engagement rate versus views is always less than 10%. usually 1%. sometimes less.
so eventually youāll hit that wall and start to question yourself. thatās just how our brains work. itās your self-awareness kicking in. your Default Mode Network. the thing is that that system can betray you and get you into trouble and itās exactly encapsulated in the question itself.
odds are you arenāt doing anything wrong.
odds are it has nothing to do with you. people get busy with real life. there are time zone differences. interests shift. interests donāt align. people are nervous. people are anxious. people donāt know what to say. people donāt know what to do. people donāt think what they have to say matters.
it almost certainly has nothing to do with you the vast majority of the time but itās hard to keep that in mind when youāre the center of your own universe. weāre not built for that kinda perspective.
what we can do is stop ourselves from asking that question if there are no immediately obvious answers to it. we can learn to be kind to ourselves. and more than that we can reach out to try to make a difference for others. everyone can only do what they can at any given timeāno one can give 100% all the timeāand only you will know what you can do. you only have to answer to yourself for that.
but be kind to yourself and if you can be kind to others too. together we can make things even just a little better.














