Being any kind of creator is mentally taxing at times. Publicly posting a story, a song, or a video you recorded is a double edged sword. It can be the biggest reward or the biggest source of anxiety. Sometimes it’s a little of both. It’s nerve racking putting yourself out there.

As a blogger, I go into more detail here than I would if I used mainstream social media, or honestly more than I do in real life for the most part. I have a small circle of friends I see every once in a while, and then I have my family. I never shut up around my partner and the kids but I don’t go into detailed commentary on what’s going on with different tech and social media companies, the blogging world or even most of the other news stories I like to dig around for every day.

I mentioned something about the Wordpress drama to my partner yesterday and her response was, “wait… people still blog?!” She knows I use Micro.blog, but I think she’s picturing it more like Twitter; she just has no interest in it.

When I’m writing something, I find a lot of joy in the process. Letting words spill out on the page and sculpting them into something that makes sense, and hopefully something interesting. Coming up with a title and formatting everything the way you want it before you release it into the wild. Or into the zoo, I guess. A digital zoo of your own design; your choice of fonts, color schemes and other little doodads where it will live forever with all of your other posts.

Sometimes I’ll spend an entire day, sometimes a few, writing something I was really passionate about. Then I’ll publish it, read it, and realize it’s cringe city. So I delete it and probably never think about it again. Or sometimes I’ll come across an old draft weeks or months later and revisit it. Sometimes it works, sometimes I delete it again.

Other times I’ll spend 15 minutes on something and it’ll be perfect.

I remember watching a video from this big YouTuber - literally pick any one of your favorite creators over there and I’m sure their story is almost identical. One day they decide they’re going to start producing videos DIY and publish them to YouTube. Everyone knows you can make a killing if you get good enough at it. So they pour their heart into it for months. It becomes a passion project that begins eating into all of their free time. They’re too far to give up, but they’re also only getting a handful of views every month. Every time they get a notification saying someone left a comment, they go check and it’s just a bot account. Other channels are mass producing garbage and getting 10 million views a month. It feels hopeless. It’s easy to feel like a loser who just wasted the last year and a half on a pipe dream, but consistency is key.

Ask any successful YouTuber and they’re likely to tell you a couple different things. First, that they started on this uber specific niche, like gaming for example, and now that it’s five years later you would never think of them as gaming content creator; they just vlog now. Maybe cover offbeat stories from around the web or drama with other YouTubers. Kinda like a personal blog. Second, they’ll tell you they went through months (or years) of almost no engagement or even views before they started catching on. Shouting into the void is a part of life, and definitely a major part of being a success at something. Unless you win the birth lottery and you’ve just always had access to a bottomless vault of money, or if you were born into a prominent family in politics or Hollywood, you have your work cut out for you.

You have to be good with failure; you’ve heard this a million times. There are no shortcuts. Unless someone catches you saying something dumb and you turn into a TikTok celebrity overnight but mayyybe don’t count on that.

It’s easy to gaslight yourself into thinking you’re a failure who brings nothing to the table. You must be, right? No one is reading this shit, no matter how much time you spend on it and how perfectly crafted every little joke and anecdote is. Maybe you’ve tried everything from SEO-driven listicles to 5,000 word essays that you spent days researching and polishing into what feels like your life’s work and no one is reading it. Until they are.

Whether you’re running a website to try and escape being a wage slave, or an indie web hub where you talk about the things you want to talk about and make a cozy little circle of friends, keep at it. If you genuinely enjoy doing it, whatever it is, keep at it. If you do it long enough, it’s nearly impossible to fail. There’s no right or wrong way; things just take time and dedication. Victory usually comes after you go just a little farther than you think you can make it.