Writers, Don't Let Social Media's Whims Determine Your Worth

Here are my musings about my journey (thus far) as a writer in this digital age.

Photo by Nik on Unsplash

The world is beginning to wake up again.

I see it every day as we struggle our way out to return to some kind of normal. People don’t wear masks anymore in stores, remote days are disappearing from workplaces, and people try to avoid using the dreaded p-word as if it’s just a long-lost memory best buried by moonlight at a crossroads.

I notice it too when I look at the stats on my writing platform of choice. People aren’t stuck at home reading—or, better put, doomscrolling—on their phones or tablets anymore. They long to strike out and go enjoy the world and leave all thoughts of isolation and introspection behind.

I get it. I understand the appeal of living moment by moment in the hope of making good memories and trying to soak up as much out of life as you can. We all have a limited time, after all, so you’d best enjoy it while you’ve got it.

But what does that mean for someone like me who sits behind a computer to try and shoot some meaning out into the world? What if no one’s there to listen? What if it’s all just empty noise going out into the digital void?

I’m a writer in the age of social media.

And sometimes I feel like I’m falling behind.

Move on with the times.

It’s difficult to keep up with all the innovations our world concocts. To be a good writer today, it’s almost as if you need a minor in marketing to put your work out there to get the best response. And, even if you do everything right, there’s still this sense that you may get drowned out in the vast amount of information out there.

I’m a person who likes to keep to myself. Even in the circles of social media, I don’t hop out there and wave hello. It’s as if I need to be drawn out of my little cave every time. Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr—those are all I can seem to manage at the moment. I dread the day I have to try and master the art of TikTok. It’s no easy feat to try and build an audience on each platform either. You have to come up with the perfect persona for each place and their specific algorithms, and then you just hope for the best.

You can get lost in the chase of finding some kind of validation. The goal feels like you one day want to say, “You like me, you really like me,” to all the followers you have. And it feels exhausting that you have to go through all these hoops.

You just want to write, dammit.

I’ve had my time in the limelight, and I didn’t like it.

This is old news by now, but for a while back in 2022 I held a pretty prominent place among fiction writers on the writing platform Medium. My stories blew up with views, my notifications were insane, and I got a mixture of positive comments and negative ones on the work I was sharing.

It was nice—for a little while. It made me feel as if I had stories within me that people actually wanted to read.

But I eventually had to stop checking the comments at some point. The attention was too much. The pressure to deliver on story after story also made the writing feel like less of an escape and more of a slog.

I liked the recognition from readers, but it was so much easier to write back when I was invisible.

And, in a way, I’ve come full circle.

I’m slowly fading back into a kind of obscurity, and a part of me doesn’t mind.

What’s waiting for you beyond the bend?

I wish I could say I’m fine with my writing life at the moment, but every day I feel like there’s so much I want to do but so little time to accomplish all the things. Isn’t there some kind of workaround? A time machine or a cloning device or something?

I love that I live in a time where my words can be shared with people in only moments if I wish through social media and blogging platforms. I don’t have to wait for publishing schedules, I don’t have to determine everything by deadline dates, and I can write pretty freely (if I’m not adhering to a specific niche or audience).

But I know this kind of creative life isn’t sustainable. Someday I will need to “be serious” with these endeavors. Someday writing may just feel like a job. That’s the kind of world we live in. We’re not meant to rest easy. Society isn’t structured that way.

I mourn for the life of a carefree creative. Alas, she lives in an alternate universe somewhere. I hope she makes her dreams into a reality.

For me, though, I think I’m just one of those people who will do the day job grind while leaving writing as a hobby to be picked up at leisure. Surely that’s not a bad life. Plenty of people manage it just fine. Only the 1% ever make it past the sky and straight to the stars.

I just wish I hadn’t had that gleam of something more before it faded away.

Determining your creative worth is internal work, not external.

I struggle with the above thought. As I’ve been watching statistics and metrics go by the wayside, it has become more and more desirable to go back into my hovel where I didn’t share my writing with the world. It feels like the safer, smarter thing sometimes.

But there has to be risk involved if you hope to achieve anything, right?

I try to tell myself that on the bad days. Today happens to be one of those bad days where the storm clouds are peeking ahead on the horizon.

Yes, you may be shouting out into a void. Yes, you may go days or weeks without hearing one person say they’ve liked something you wrote. Yes, you may feel like writing is just a thankless task at times.

But you have to ignore the voices. You have to knock them down and bury them alive. Anything that tries to murder your creative spirit needs that kind of quick smackdown.

The bad days may come, and you will just have to write through them. You have to. If you don’t want to give up, then you have to play the game smarter. This isn’t a chess game of muses, inspiration, and wayward writers. It’s just you and a screen/notebook and a battle with your own internal critic. Everything else? Just noise. Ignore it.

I know. I have to keep telling myself too.

But we’ll get there. Even this piece I’ve shared was just noise—something to shrug off and discard.

I’ll do better tomorrow. And so will you.

Photo by Tamara Gore on Unsplash

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