What I learned from Publishing Something Every Day for 30 Days
Day 31 of Hilma af Klint and the Imaginary Possible
I am a writer who has written a lot for a long period of time, without publishing or even submitting for publication most of it. For the longest time I believed my writing wasn’t good enough. And there was also the problem that I never seemed to be able to come to a conclusion, so as to call it done.
So I decided this year starting on my birthday I would publish something every day about my on-going spiritual apprenticeship with Hilma af Klint.
It didn’t have to be long: 100–300 words was enough, but I did have to do it everyday in order to practice of finishing and publishing/ shipping/ letting go and letting something out into the world where someone might judge it harshly, or see it and not care, dismiss it.
Between the two, being ignored is far more devastating.
I have not published because I have not wanted to feel rejected, which is how I have felt most of my life. But that has stopped me from connecting to people and so my fear of rejection becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
Yesterday marked d thirty consecutive days of Hilma, finishing and publishing it on Medium, my blog and Instagram.
1) I’ve learned I can come up with something to say everyday.
2) I’ve learned that working in small chunks makes it possible to work with big ideas and questions
Up until now, I have tried to hold all parts of a big idea, all of it at once, so as to understand the whole. But I am learning that the big idea is more like a river Trying to hold a fast moving river, I am swept into it and lost inside of it.
In articulating one small part of it — finding a period in long on going conversation, creates a coherence and flow that makes the next thing possible.
This is a way to avoid aspirational clutter — process often whatever you are learning. By making it usable to someone you process it yourself. This is how it works for me anyway. I teach others what I am learning so that I learn it.
3) I can withstand being ignored and keep going.
This is building a muscle so that rejection doesn’t knock you off your feet, nor do you use it as an excuse to stop at the border of your fears. In this respect, being ignored is teaching me how to be a badass to the extent that I am undeterred and keep moving, creating, experimenting with what excites me and also trying to connect what excites me to what matters to all of us.
4) Lack of reaction is feedback.
The fact that few people are paying attention to something I love and find fascinating is giving me feedback.
All art is ultimately about communication. Few people are listening and little engagement tells me I am failing to communicate.
What I should conclude from my failure to reach a wide audience?
A) Have a failed to communicate because the way I write about the subject?
This is where my feelings and fears about not being good enough come in. The first answer I have is, I am not a “good enough” writer.
Maybe I need to learn how to write catchier headlines or use hash tages more effectively?
Maybe my fascinations are too strange and idiosyncratic, I need to redirect my thoughts and concerns to what other people care about. That is the advice of marketers.
Perhaps I too guarded and don’t share enough of myself so that people can connect with me. In telling the story of my apprenticeship with Hilma, I have not written much about my own life, my grief, the things I am trying to release, my own fears about my future which are in part fueling my desire for higher wisdom and guidance.
B) Have a failed to communicate because I haven’t made my thoughts relevant to people who might gather into an audience.
I haven’t solved a problem, or fulfilled a need, satisfied an emotional longing for things like encouragement, a good laugh, hope.
C)Have I failed to communicate because of the method or channel of communication. (Online:Medium, my blog, Instagram, Facebook)
Does this means of communication reach the people I who might be interested? And related to this: Who is actually seeing what I publish?How many are seeing it? Are they the people whom I want to be conversation with? And if not, where might they be? What if marketing is about learning how to find people and places that most feed your soul, who will also very likely, elicit the greatest expression of the gifts you came to share with the world.
What you learn from feedback depends which questions you focus on.
5) Publishing is a way for me to complete something I could otherwise leave open ended.
It’s a way of putting a temporary, for today, finish line in place. Otherwise I generate the material for a never ending marathon whose finish line remains far in the distance.
Provisional is how a long game sustains itself.
6)Just because something is done doesn’t mean it is set and can’t be changed.
If I have more to say, I can go back. I can make more than one attempt at the same idea.
7) Keeping commitments, especially when its hard to do so, makes me feel like a badass.
And it makes me more of one too, in reality.
