Why I Don't Click Publish

There are so many blog posts that never make it on to the site, and often it’s from fear. Whether I feel that my writing isn’t good enough, I can’t take the right photographs for the post, or just a general sense of gloom that keeps me from clicking that little orange button.

Then there are the personal posts. The posts so gut wrenchingly honest that I feel like I have ripped my heart out and laid it for people to dissect. You probably know the ones, you may have written them yourself. Some of them make it on to this site, but most of them don’t.

And that’s okay.

As I wrote in my How To Healthily Handle Anger post, the act of writing our feelings is incredibly cathartic. We seem to have known this for centuries, given how many historical figures kept diaries. When we write our feelings down we validate them for ourselves, and no one else needs to know.

Sometimes when I am finding life hard to deal with, I cannot blog; it’s almost impossible to fight past the dark feelings eating me up to write posts that people want to read, or more specifically that I would want people to read. A lovely blogger commented on my How To Handle A Break Up post asking how she could get back into blogging after her relationship ended, and this is all I could offer her: to write. But to write from the heart, from the soul, from all the emotions that are occupying key creative space. When I start to write from the heart I can exercise out a lot of the pain that is blocking me from blogging, and it feels good to externalise it. 

Even when I’m scared, writing is a good way to get past this. Procrastination often comes from a fear of inferiority, meaning that we don’t try because we think it won’t be good enough. But until you put pen to paper, or finger to keyboard, you can’t start making something good. Great posts rarely come from nowhere, they need to be crafted. Some never reach the standard I want, but just the act of writing them has caused me to grow as a writer, and so were worth the effort. Some have sat in my drafts for months before I found a renewed inspiration to develop them into a post, this one included. 

As bloggers we have to make choices every week, sometimes every day, about what makes it on to our site. But I have come to believe that it’s what doesn’t get published that also contributes to a richness in the site and the blogger's life, and I hope that this post will help you write whatever you need to write, not just want you want people to read. 

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