Why It’s So Hard to Post Online When You Have Too Much to Say

I have never had a problem having things to say. I can be walking home, dictating into my Notes app, with an idea about work, another one about moving countries, something I noticed about people, a rant about a completely unrelated thing, and somewhere between all of that I will think: "oh, this could be a post."

Then I get home and do absolutely nothing with it.

Excelente servicio.

For years I called this procrastination, perfectionism, lack of discipline, too many interests. Pick a diagnosis, I have probably accused myself of it. But posting for myself has always felt different from posting for work. Give me a client, a goal, an audience and a deadline and I can figure out what the thing needs to say. Give me my own life and suddenly I am wondering whether anybody understands what the hell I am talking about.

I Have Too Many Tabs Open in My Personality

At one point I had my main Instagram, a cooking account, a teaching account, ideas about travel, ideas about the Dominican Republic, work content, personal writing, and probably three other things I had convinced myself deserved their own little corner of the internet.

I have content, I also have opinions aaaaand I have photos. What I did not have was the nerve to put all of those versions of myself in one place and let people figure out that, yes, they all belonged to the same person.

If you know me a little then you know I love a category.

The marketing girl. The teacher. The food person.

The one who moved abroad. The funny one.

The serious one. And so much more*

And then to pick one? Because apparently, somebody is trying to organize me in their head and I am making their filing system very inconvenient. Sorry to everybody trying to make the navigation menu, I can't even figure it out myself.

The Fear Is Usually That People Will Get the Wrong Version of You

Years ago someone told me they could not listen to my voice notes because I talked about too many things.

“Es que no entiendo todo lo que me dices, andas en muchos temas.”

That sentence stayed with me for much longer than it deserved. Because suddenly every time I had a lot to say, there was a little voice asking whether I was being expressive or just exhausting.

And the internet makes that fear worse because everything gets stripped of tone.

You write one paragraph and somebody reads a personality into it. If you post something sexy, that is now who you are. If you dare to talk about work too much then you have become LinkedIn in human form.

Sometimes I want to write something sad and suddenly people are reporting my posts to Instagram and of course if I dare to have an opinion about anything, somebody who has known me for fourteen minutes will decide that they finally understand your entire character.

So posting to me had turned very weird.

I Do Not Want to Be Digestible All the Time

This has probably been the biggest thing I have had to accept. I have spent years trying to explain myself so well that nobody could misunderstand me. But it turns out people can misunderstand you anyways. Some people are committed to the version they heard first. A lot of people are distracted and some others are projecting according to what they've been through.

I tried but I cannot longer build my life around preventing every possible wrong interpretation. That would mean sanding down every interesting edge until I became extremely clear and completely boring. I would rather risk having to explain myself occasionally and accept that some days I will be misunderstood and that's ok.

Posting for Yourself Feels Different Because You Are the Product and the Person

Client work is easier because there is a little bit of distance between me and the thing I am making. I am solving a problem for a business, so I can look at the website, the offer, the content, the audience, figure out what is not working and make a decision without wondering what that decision says about me as a person.

Posting for myself is messier because the material is me, my opinions, my face, my work, my body, the things I am trying, the things I used to believe, the things I am currently changing my mind about, and because the internet has a very annoying habit of keeping all of those versions of you available at the same time, I am constantly aware that somebody could find an old version of me five minutes after meeting the current one.

Very convenient when you are already worried that people are going to get the wrong idea.

I can write something and immediately picture everybody who might see it, a client, my mother, somebody from high school, a random person I met once, the man I went on two dates with years ago who for some reason still follows me, and suddenly this completely normal Instagram post has a board of directors even though nobody appointed them.

That is probably the strangest part of posting for yourself because you are not only asking if the post is good, you are also wondering what people are going to think this says about you, whether it makes you look too serious, too unserious, too emotional, too much, not enough, and by the time you finish imagining every possible interpretation you can very easily talk yourself out of posting anything at all.

I Also Do Not Want My Personal Life to Become a Content Factory

Another problem with knowing how content works is that eventually everything starts looking usable.

A breakup becomes content, a trip becomes content, a random conversation at a café becomes content, something weird that happened on a Tuesday becomes content, and apparently even a major realization while washing dishes has to report for duty because my brain has no respect for working hours.

I hate the feeling that every experience has to immediately become useful while I am still living it, because sometimes I do not know what the lesson is yet, sometimes there is no lesson, sometimes I want to keep something to myself for a few months before I decide what I even think about it, and sometimes I want to post a photo because I look hot and that is enough information for everybody involved.

There does not need to be a carousel, a takeaway, a strategy behind it or some educational reason why the photo deserves to exist online.

That is also part of why I Used to Be Social exists the way it does. I wanted somewhere I could put all of it, the work stuff, the moving stories, the opinions, the guides, the things I am learning, the things I am still trying to understand, without creating a new account every time another part of my personality decides to show up.

At some point all of those things have to be allowed to belong to the same person.

So Why Is It So Hard to Post Online?

For me, it has almost never been because I have nothing to say, clearly that is not the issue, the harder part is knowing that once I publish something I lose control over what people decide to do with it.

Someone can understand exactly what I meant while somebody else decides I am annoying, someone can think I am doing too much, somebody can like me less, somebody can misunderstand the entire thing because they read it in a bad mood while waiting for their Uber, and for a long time I think I believed that if I explained myself well enough I could somehow prevent all of that from happening.

I cannot.

I can be thoughtful, I can communicate clearly, I can try not to be an asshole, but after that people are allowed to have their own reaction to me and, unfortunately for the part of my brain that would like to manage everybody's opinion, that includes not liking me.

I am still not completely comfortable with that. I still have drafts sitting around for months because I am deciding whether I really want people to know that particular thought came out of my head, I still delete things, I still overthink, and I am definitely not about to end this article pretending I have reached some magical place where I no longer care what anybody thinks because I absolutely do.

I just want to care less.

I want to post the photo, write the thing, talk about whatever strange topic is taking over my brain that week, let somebody decide I am too much or not for them, and not immediately treat that reaction like evidence that I should make myself smaller next time.

Maybe feeling more comfortable online is going to come from accepting that I cannot control which version of me somebody decides to hold on to, I cannot make myself impossible to misunderstand, and I definitely cannot make everybody like me.

I think I would just like to keep posting anyway.