The Fear of Publication
This isn’t a piece about how scared someone might be to publish a book. Not even the fear of sending a smaller work into a magazine or news paper. This is about the fear of posting anything anywhere, a fear that comes and goes for me due to the people public forums tend to reach.
Specifically I am talking about Facebook status posts. After so many years accumulating friends on Facebook it has become apparent to me that most of the written posts I put out there, posts that I hope reach people and leave an impression, are widely overlooked. I discovered this during a mini social experiment I conducted with my then boyfriend shortly after we started dating. Both of us preferred inspiring or sentimental posts so when we wanted to see what gets bigger reactions we went onto my page where I made three posts. The first was a thought out post about being a strong person and overcoming the different challenges of life, the second was me changing my profile image, and the third was us updating our relationship status.
I don’t have many friends on Facebook but the results of the experiment were respectively: 5 likes on the written post, 15 likes and 7 comments, and the relationship status had over 25 likes and 12 comments. This was roughly a year ago and I have taken to only really posting more meaningful text posts on my page because that’s what I want to put into the world.
No matter what you put into the world it has a way of effecting you even if you don’t notice it at first. Lately I have been afraid to put much of anything on my page though, because every so often you have people that you don’t want to lose contact with but just don’t want to intrude on their life any more than you already have. This isn’t some sad break up post, or tragically torn friendships, just a realization that all of these things can happen and when it boiled down to it there was a feeling of emptiness by continuing to post on Facebook. My audience wasn’t wide and the few people who did really take notice are people I need to not think about for a while.
This doesn’t however mean that I should stop writing. Writing is therapeutic for writers, as essential as air it sometimes seems, and to not write for fear of posting to the wrong people or not enough the best remedy I can think of is to write into the void. Write like you have to and it doesn’t matter who reads it because the world has a way of using something helpful to help someone. There may only be one person that this effects but it could effect that one person more than it effected half a million combined and that is what is important.
