I spend an embarrassing amount of time trying to control how people hear me. Most of us do. We want to be understood, neatly categorized, and told we make sense. But sitting down to actually write and sharing publicly requires dropping all of that. You just have to surrender.
Richard Rhodes nailed the feeling:
“To write is always to seal notes into bottles and cast them adrift at sea; you never know where your notes will drift and who will read them.”
You’re basically bottling up whatever is rattling around in your head on a Tuesday afternoon, tossing it into the digital ocean, and walking away. It’s vulnerable. Honestly, it’s a little reckless.
Once the bottle leaves your hand, you lose your voice. You can’t tap the reader on the shoulder to explain what a sentence really meant. The person who finds it brings their own weather to the shore. They might read a lifeline into a paragraph you barely thought about, or miss your main point entirely because they were distracted by the tide.
Forget about engagement metrics. The connections that actually matter rarely show up on a dashboard anyway. You write something, and it drifts. Maybe for years. Then someone stumbles over it exactly when they need it. You aren’t writing for a demographic; you’re writing for some random person walking the beach. True serendipity.
In the end, you just have to trust the water. Even if the bottle sinks, the act of throwing it is usually satisfying enough.
“Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?” (Annie Dillard, The Writing Life)
