When Sharing a Creative Hobby Feels Scary

When I turned 38 last month, my biggest goal was to get back to creative writing. Writing as a hobby. For me, for joy, and for fun. 

I want to share more on this little blog, too. I’ve pretty much let this space go over the past year or so between freelancing full-time and changing jobs.

But I’ll be honest, I feel deep resistance when it comes to sharing my writing. “Resistance with a capital R” as author Stephen Pressfield would say. My birthday was a month ago and I think this is only the second thing I’ve shared since then.

To write is one thing. I have a plethora of journal entries and random snippets of thoughts on both a yellow legal pad and in my Google Drive.

But every time I think about sharing something I’ve written, I freeze. 

As a writer, I can confidently confirm that sharing a piece of written work feels vulnerable. It’s equivalent to putting your heart on your sleeve. There’s no more guessing or disguising – what I said is out there. For everyone to see. And judge. And to put their own spin on it. 

Ya know, no pressure. 

But I read a quote from Jen Shoop this week that’s slowly changing my perspective: “Your job is to shape something and send it out into the world; the reader’s job is to determine whether it is successful. Frankly, the latter is none of your business.” 

So I guess my job as a writer and a creative is to shape something and send it out into the world. Full stop. 

Of course, this is easier said than done. I wish I could tra-la-la my way through life giving zero F’s on what others thought of me or what I write. But even as I’ve gained more confidence with my age, I’ll still openly admit that other people’s perception of me is my greatest fear.

I care less, but I still care. I’m convinced this is simply a part of being human. There will likely just always be a part of me that cares, even if that amount continues to decrease as it has in my 30s. 

So, with all of this being said, and as I wrapped my head around a blog post I actually wanted to share this week, I decided to just write about where I’m at and what I’m feeling. 

As I’m working my way through this, here are a couple of mindset shifts that are helping: 

I am more than my job. 

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. I can be amazing at my day job, and still hold a hobby in my off hours. A work title does not define who I am at my core. Yes, it’s a part of me, but it’s not the whole of me. Creative writing is also a part of me. It’s one of the many (many) facets that make me who I am. 

I used to put so much pressure on myself in correlation to a career title. It was my whole identity. But as I’m growing older, I realize that I can hold this one thing a lot more loosely than I used to. Our purpose on this planet will always stretch further than our work environment. We are not the one thing we do, but the sum of many little things.

I am allowed to live in and embrace the “and.” 

To piggyback off of the last point, I often, in my younger years, reduced myself to singular titles or singular focuses. The more I’ve learned and read and stretched myself, however, the more I realize that we can feel and be two things at once. I can be both great at my day job and have this really whole, really beautiful life outside of those 4 walls, too.

I can be a great mom and have a bomb hobby. I can be there for my kids and tuck away small chunks of time for myself. I can be both a professional and a creative. Not everything has to be either/or, and not everything can happen at the same time. But we have a lot more options than we think. (We also have a lot more options than we may have grown up to believe, but that’s a subject for another day.😉)

Not every piece of written work will be a “success.” 

Success is in the eye of the beholder anyway, right? Not every piece of written work will be extraordinary and I’m sure I’ve already shared some words that didn’t hit the way I had hoped they would. But circling back to the quote from above: the reader’s job is to determine the success, and those results aren’t up to me OR the reason why I write.

Every piece of content is perceived through our own individual life experiences anyway. My job isn’t to write “successful” pieces but to just. keep. writing. To get up, every day, and get a few words on paper (or Google doc, or WordPress post…) My job is to lean into my love of creative writing, despite how it’s perceived.

Wrapping Up. 

Sharing my writing is hard. But so is writing forever in the dark, wondering if what I’ve written could be helpful to someone. Every time I read a piece of written work by someone else that I can relate to, it makes me feel less alone. I hope to be that space for someone else, but it won’t happen unless my words move from the shadows into the light.

Over to You:

I would be really interested to know – Do you have a creative endeavor that you love and think about sharing? I would love to hear about it in the comments below!