Are We Focusing More On The Mic Than On Our Speech?
Testing. Testing. Is this on?
Lately, I have been focused on growing my Medium presence.
I want to get followers and get curated and more than anything, I want to get paid.
More than anything?
That´s when it hit me, this shouldn´t be about me, the writing thing.
It should be about making a difference in other people´s lives, my goal should be to inspire them, add meaning to their lives, provoke them into thinking differently…or just thinking.
I short, I should be focusing a lot more on what I want to say and not on fighting for the microphone.
What Separates Determination From Obsession?
As Suzane Vega once said in one of her tunes, it is probably that space where friendship ends and passion begins, in between the binding of stockings and skin.
When we focus we usually bring things closer but how clearly can we see the big picture when our noses are practically touching our target.
How badly can our drive to make something happen can makes us forget about why we wanted it to happen in the first place?
I never meant to be a blogger, I never had the habit of writing every day and I thought I could only write stories based on my imagination, not my on my experiences and most certainly not on my feelings!
The sheer idea of writing something personal was enough to trigger an anxiety attack but I realized there was no point in writing books that no one would read and if I wanted to have an audience, I would have to attract one first.
That´s how I got into blogging and that´s what got me into Medium.
What Do People Want?
A few months ago, when I started blogging, I thought I could do this (growing and audience) by releasing a post every other week and keeping the conversation bounded to the outskirts of my personal space.
I started reading a lot of articles on Medium, trying to figure out what kind of posts I liked to read.
For a while, I liked the tutorial-like ones, the ones that teach you how to do virtually anything.
They looked attractive, professional and clean.
There were bullet lists, they were neatly punctuated and the text was separated by well-placed headings that made skim-reading that much easier.
It seemed perfect, except for the fact that I couldn´t wait to get done with them, it felt very much like doing dishes.
All of a sudden, reading Medium´s articles became a chore, something I had to do in order to try to interact with other writes and grow my followers' list so soon enough I could be the one standing on that stage, microphone in hand and receiving a 10K ovation after I was done.
Bow.
Thanks, guys!
Kaching!
This probably won´t come as a shocker but I was not able to attract more followers with that kind of thinking and that wasn´t even the worst part.
I was now feeling stressed and anxious as I hadn´t been in a long time, all because I had no idea what I wanted for my writing.
I was trying to emulate what I thought looked professional but no matter how pitch-perfect you sound when singing other´s tunes, people are always more impressed with an original song.
Having a voice as a writer involves more than style, it involves being open and honest enough to be able to let people see your handwriting through the typed words, even when you´re not exactly proud of your calligraphy.
On A Second Thought
I abandoned Medium and tried to focus on other platforms that I head could help grow my blog´s traffic, after all, I was not even going to get paid by Medium even if I had claps, since Stripe hasn´t figured out a way to pay Brazillian writers yet.
That made it all seem just that much more like a lot of wasted energy.
If I could attract people to my own blog, at least I could have a chance of selling them my book.
Kaching!
A few weeks ago I started reading articles on Medium again, this time though it was not about research, but fun.
This radically changed the way I saw things, I noticed I no longer clicked on the kind of article that attracted me at first.
Now, I was more interested in personal stories, the ones who told me who the writers were.
The things they had been through, what they had learned from it.
I realized I preferred to read the articles that weren´t necessarily as tidy and properly sanitized but carried a message that nurtured my spirit instead of my brain.
I stopped having the feeling I was studying for a test and started enjoying reading again.
Some stories made me laugh, some made me cry and the best ones got me thinking:
“Yeah, me too!”
I´ll Wait For My Turn
I don´t know when, or if it is going to happen but I decided I will wait for my turn, patiently.
Meanwhile, something wonderful is happening to me.
I´m becoming more open and more flexible with my goals.
I don´t know where my writing is supposed to take me and I´m tired of squinting my eyes, looking into the future and trying to see what it has in store for me.
For now, I decided to settle for no longer allowing fear to determine my choices.
Fear of not being liked, fear of being not good enough, of being criticized or ridiculed, or even worse, fear of being so deeply ignored that I might start questioning my own existence (found that gem on Pinterest and it suited me so well I thought I´d use it, because I´m not afraid to admit my own voice is also an echo sometimes but it still unique because it is a patchwork of everything that I love and believe in.).
I´m ready to shift my focus back to polishing my speech not so it can come out perfect but so that it can show my reflection clearly.
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