What It’s Like Baring Your Soul to The Public

Or at least, on Medium.

I love, love, love getting emails from readers. It’s like an emotional hand job.

My writing on Medium is an online diary. I have a day job and I’m not here to make bank. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t have a journal in one format or another. My writing is for me; I share with others in case anyone else feels alone with the same problems.

Most of my emails from readers are of the thank-you-for-being-so-open-and-honest-I’m-going-through-the-same-thing variety. There is no greater compliment than hearing that my writing is unusually genuine because of my willingness to bare it all out here, both bad and good.

There are the odd trolls. Only one troll is blocked; she was one step from throwing a brick through my window. While I usually can troll the trolls with ease, eventually my defenses rise and the feeling of crumminess takes over. I’m cool with blocking someone for being a dick; I won’t go broke without their four cents worth of reading income.

After years of writing on this open platform, it’s clear that not everyone understands that there are different writing processes.

The mature, articulate, skilled writer takes the time to create a framework. There are endless drafts and edits. These revisions can take hours and days to make sure an article is of the best quality.

Yeah…that’s not my style.

When I write, it’s a complete brain dump. As someone with generalized anxiety disorder, my mind is constantly swirling with thoughts and worries. Writing them is the only way to get a reprieve (briefly; another series of thoughts take over quickly).

I’m not thinking about the layout. I’m not thinking about content. Sometimes I don’t write a title until the article is ready for publishing because I don’t know going in what my thoughts are conveying.

When it’s a true brain dump, I post to my personal publication with the disclaimer that it’s probably garbage.

Writing is my way of processing a given situation or thought. Because I don’t have an idea going into my writing about the conclusion, readers see my brain processing as I type. Sometimes, I make a significant mental breakthrough after gobs of paragraphs.

This means that when the peanut gallery writes things like, “why haven’t you broken up with him, you stone-cold bitch”, they don’t understand that they’re reading a distilled, processed version of something that has taken me time to form into words and then think about. While the outcome may be obvious after reading an article, it’s because Medium readers get the final episode after the mental gnomes in my brain have thrown pallets of incoherent thoughts into a basin in hope of figuring out a script.

I write to filter out the noise.

I write to process a situation.

I write to get the jumbled thoughts out of my head.

I write so I can see my next steps in life.

I write because the answer isn’t clear.

I write because my emotions overtake my logic, blinding me from reality.

I write because I need to silence the words scrambling in my head over a given topic.

“Sooooo…” you, Dear Reader, are thinking. “What the fuck is your point?”

Good question. Up until writing this sentence, I didn’t have one. I only want to convey that for those giving ruthless commentary, you’re seeing the final version of what my brain has been able to form into a coherent thought. If I dumped everything in my noggin into an article, my next steps or beliefs wouldn’t be clear to you either.

For the most part, I let comments get to me (if I even bother reading them) for a short moment then I focus on some other mental saga. It’s easy for anyone to form an opinion, myself included, about a given situation when you’re not the one in the moment relying on the behaviors of another person or other external factors.

On an unrelated note, I fucking hate writing the final paragraph. My ideal is “You get the gist of what I’m writing to say. Peace out.” I also loathe writing the 150 character SEO blurb, there are articles not published because I’m too lazy to condense my endless rambling into a Google-friendly search string.

Ahhhhh. My brain feels relief after writing this, much like peeing after holding one’s bladder for an eight-hour car ride. In forty-five seconds, the next wave of anxiety-ridden thoughts will crash in my head.