Reader, I was scared of you (and so I hid)

It's time to own my true self and my spirituality in my writing

Jan 31, 2024

On the nature of who I am as a person, my fear that my audience will not accept me as I am, and how it has interfered with my writing for so, so long. On the nature of art and the relationship between art and audience; the difference between artists and content creators. And on my secret identity—my spiritual path, and what it means to me—and how I can’t not write about it anymore.

Dear Reader,

Time for the realest of talks. Cause I’ve had an on-off relationship with my writing my whole life, and I am so ready to be done with this. I want to be free from this fear, free to write what I feel called to, and free to be myself.

The last few months, besides resting and emotional processing, I’ve been leaning into my intuition and spirituality. I’ve been immersing myself in it, and trying to figure out what it wants from me now, and what is next on my path. But I haven’t written about it.

I want to talk about why I hide the things that matter most to me. Because I want to stop doing that.

I’m scared of you, my audience.

I’m scared that you won’t like me, you won’t understand me, you will criticize me, you will think I’m delusional or crazy or stupid or naive, or any other variety of an unacceptable kind of person. And you’ll be mean to me, or silently back away and I’ll be alone and I’ll never know why.

In other words, I’m afraid you will bully or ostracize me for being who I am. (Yes, this is my bullied-at-school-for-a-decade trauma, along with a heavy dose of childhood emotional neglect.)

This fear has kept me from writing consistently for so, so, so many years.

There are two main patterns to how I stop my own full free expression, but they are interconnected:

I am afraid to move my writing in a new direction. My recent newsletters were about discovering my neurodivergence. Any time I focus on a topic, I feel fear about no longer focusing on it.
I am always afraid to explicitly share spiritual, woo-woo experiences and ideas, because I’m afraid I’ll alienate parts of my audience who are just here for personal growth and nothing else.

I’m scared to go in new directions.

The cycle goes like this:

I get excited about a topic. I want to write about it, so I do.
I eventually exhaust my interest or immediate need to discuss that topic.
I’m done, so I don’t want to write about it anymore.
I feel wrong for that, and feel I simply must stay on topic for anyone to want to read my writing. How dare I change? How dare I be different than you expect me to be?
But I just can’t write about things I’m not feeling anymore.
So I don’t write at all.

Look, I know it’s irrational. But even the slight amount of expectation I imagine is created in my audience by writing about the same topic several times in a row starts to feel like a straightjacket I can’t escape.

But what if that topic is why they subscribed? my mind whispers.

And while I know, rationally, that the worst possible outcome is that someone unsubscribes, which is fine, my body seems to be anticipating people taking offense and lashing out at me.

But I’ve always been someone who runs all over the place with what I explore. ADHD, ENFP, multi-potentialite—whatever you call it, it’s a core aspect of my personality and life path. I’m an explorer. I’m a seeker. But somewhere along the line, someone must have reacted badly to that. I can’t pinpoint a memory for this feeling that grips me, but it’s a binding sort of dread.

I’m scared of sharing my spiritual truth.

I've always kept my spiritual path relatively private. However, my personal growth and healing journey is deeply intertwined with my spiritual path. I can't authentically tell my story or fully explain how I have healed certain things without discussing the spiritual framework I work within.

I deeply value Western psychology, but it only explains how we suffer, not why we suffer. Without having some way to make meaning of my experiences, I don’t know how to fully come to terms with them.

But beyond the meaning any spiritual system can provide, I use spiritual healing methods because they work. They work in ways I can’t explain with chemistry or physics, but they have an internal logic and methodology that produces results. The lack of scientific explanation doesn’t bother me, but I have a deep fear that I’ll be viciously belittled for discussing them out loud.

So I mostly don’t, even though my house is littered with crystals, Tarot cards, and astrology books. I love my relationship with the unseen world, but it’s just that—unseen. Unprovable. Unscientific. But it’s part of me, and it’s not going anywhere. And I’m tired of hiding it, because it keeps me from fully committing to where I know I want to go.

I’m tired of this pattern, y’all.

I’m tired of living in fear, I’m tired of giving up my needs, I’m tired of inhibiting my impulses to share because somebody might not get it or might not like it. I’m tired of holding myself back from what my soul came here to do. It’s exhausting because it divides and siphons my energy into self-protection rather than fully committing to using my energy to pursue what is meaningful and purposeful for me.

I’ve been working on unmasking, on breaking the pattern of giving up my needs in exchange for safety, on refusing to sacrifice what I need and what really matters to me in order to make someone else happy. And it’s finally trickling through to my relationship with my writing such that I just can’t keep doing this the way I did in the past.

I trust you can take care of yourself. You can decide what is right for you, and it’s really OK. I’m not going to die if someone unsubscribes. It doesn’t mean my safety is at risk. There is no threat here. I’m not being bullied. None of that is what is happening when I write something that just doesn’t interest someone else. That’s a completely normal fucking thing. I unsubscribe from things all the time. I move through interests like a freight train, so why on Earth would it be a problem if you do the same thing? It’s not.

And honestly, at this point, I’m not afraid of haters either. I am often energized by conflict. And after being a prison wife for 7 years, I have pretty thick skin. I do not actually care what people think of me, in so many ways. But there have been these particular ways in which I still did, because they were so close to my heart, so close to my identity and core sense of self.

But if I’m not writing my actual truth, what am I even doing here? My writing starts to feel pointless to me if it’s just another form of masking.

Let’s talk about my spiritual path. 🫣

Let’s talk about this tender, deeply meaningful, deeply personal thing that forms the core of my understanding of the world and my place in it—my spiritual path, and the wandering, wild, I-guess-I’m-doing-this-now way that I walk it.

This is what moves me, what drives me, what gives my life meaning. This is what gives me a reason to keep going when my path has led me into the deepest, darkest parts of the human experience. “I guess I wanted to learn something here, OK, where is it, where is this fucking lesson?!” has got me through so much that I could not have survived without turning bitter if I didn’t know in my bones that this is happening for me, not to me.

This is who I am, and there is no authentic path of writing that does not include it. If writers should write what they know, this is what I know. I know how to swim through oceans of pain because I can see the light in the far-off distance, and I know I will get there if I just keep swimming. I know how to dive straight into the hard parts so I can get through them and on to the clarity and bliss that is waiting patiently on the other side. I know how to see the purpose of pain. I know how to remember that I am bigger than this, that I am a vast and uncharted cosmic something when I’m not squished into this fragile, confused, fearful human body.

Nothing in my life makes sense if you don’t understand this about me. I’ve done the craziest things because they felt like the right thing to do at the time. And I find my way back from the darkest places and soar to the highest heights because I’m following a light that only I can see (but that shines for us all). I forget sometimes, but I always remember again. And every time I forget, and remember, I get stronger. That is what I’m doing here. That is why I am me, why I came to this planet, why I chose this incarnation.

I don’t know what sense that will make to you, dear reader. I don’t know what you believe, what you experience, or what meaning you make of it.

But you can do what you want to with my writing. Because…

Art belongs to the audience, not the artist. — Rosie Danan.

I’ve heard this phrase before, but I never understood it until I realized the inverse of this is: artists need to not care about how their audience perceives their work, to maintain their freedom to create.

Being an artist means detaching from your audience.

And this is the difference between artists and “content creators”. (And no, I’m not saying either is superior. I’m just saying they are different. I love both, but I can only be one.)

Let me explain how this realization unfolded.

It hit me last night that I don't actually need people to like me. Like, I'm supremely OK just living my own existence. My life has shaped me into a person who is extremely self-sufficient. So, on the deepest level, do I actually care if people read my newsletter or not? I'm writing it to express something that wants to be expressed, and whoever finds it interesting or useful, that's wonderful, but it's a bonus.

I don't write as an act of service, I write as an act of art.

I just keep forgetting that.

But let me write more words, so we can both remember.

I always wondered why, when people praise my writing or say they got something from it, I felt an odd sense of detachment. I wondered if I had a problem receiving compliments, or didn't believe in myself in some way.

But that couldn’t be true—I love receiving compliments. You can tell me I'm great all day, that's not a problem at all for me. I have a level of self-esteem that borders on arrogance: I think I’m fucking awesome. That doesn’t mean I think I’m the most skilled writer on the planet, obviously not. It just means I’m very connected to my inherent Divinity, which means that my true nature is wondrous beyond measure, and I refuse to pretend otherwise just because disliking yourself seems to be so popular on this planet.

So, if it’s not a self-esteem thing, why do compliments specifically about my writing feel odd to me? It’s like I don’t know what to do with them.

What I finally realized is that it doesn’t feel like what people get from my writing is about me at all.

Once my writing is published, it has a separate existence.

It feels like this: what I wrote came through me, it had its way with me, and now it’s moved on to its own life where it can have its way with other people. And I don’t really have anything to do with that. Whatever you get out of this piece is your experience, and it belongs entirely to you.

You can of course tell me about your experience, and I do enjoy that as a conversation topic, but it feels like we are discussing a third party that just happened to emerge from me. Like, I’m as surprised as you are. I just wrote that? OK. 🤷🏼‍♀️

I often start writing to convey an idea, but as I write, the ideas start to convey themselves. There is some energetic integrity that my writing has that I’m just showing up to midwife. Much like the rest of my life, I have no idea where it’s going until I get there. The way I write is that I tune into a certain frequency of energy and translate it into words. Or sometimes the words just come to me. But once it is done, it’s out there, doing its own thing.

My audience and my art have their own relationship which is really none of my business.

When I am in the act of writing, I am in relationship to the energy I am bringing through. But that energy has its own purpose to fulfill, and I am not privy to most of it. I don’t know who all reads what I write. I have no idea how it lands in them most of the time. I don’t know what impact it has, or how those impacts ripple out into the world. I have no knowledge of or control of that—it’s all just out there, happening.

What does this have to do with my fear of my being bullied? It’s about establishing the right relationship between me, my writing, and my audience. I’m responsible for showing up and writing—I’m not responsible for how people take it. So if someone has a negative reaction to my writing, that is theirs. It belongs to them, and they get to keep it.

Being a writer involves a set of relationships—the relationship between me and my writing, between me and my audience, and between my writing and my audience. Therefore it is subject to the same dysfunctional patterns that show up in all relationship types—codependency and enmeshment.

Codependency involves limiting yourself in an attempt to control other people’s responses to you. The goal is to prevent your own pain, but you do it in an indirect way, because clear boundaries don’t feel safe or possible.

I was in a toxic relationship dynamic with my audience.

I was trying to limit my writing, to control my audience’s perception of me as a person, to keep myself safe. But that is not what my writing is for.

My writing has its own work to do in the world. It’s not here to keep me safe. I need to have whatever boundaries I need for safety, but it’s simply not my writing’s job to do that for me. And inhibiting my writing for that purpose was limiting its potential to be what it needs to be.

So ideally when I am writing, I am:

listening for what wants to be written
writing it, editing it for clarity, and publishing it

What I am not doing is:

trying to get you to like me
trying to validate myself
trying to keep myself safe

This doesn’t mean that I have to publish everything that comes into my head. I get to have boundaries with my muse, and say, “Hey, I’m not the right channel for that, go find someone else”. I can toss it back to the collective unconscious, and someone else can volunteer their body and life to steward it into existence. That’s fine. I’ve done that before, and I’ll do it again. There are things I’m meant to write and things I’m not meant to write.

What I mean by “not trying to keep myself safe” is more about not trying to control how the audience perceives what I write, and what their relationship is with it. It means separating my writing from my person-hood. It means letting it be what it is, and not taking its reception personally, whether it’s positive, negative, or confusing. Whatever its purpose is, that is its business.

My writing, once it is out there, has its own life. And my own life keeps going. I keep changing, and growing, and my writing will always reflect where I’m at in any given moment. Which means that what I wrote 2 years ago (or 2 weeks ago) may not feel relevant to me anymore, but it could still be relevant to someone else.

The fact that I keep changing is not actually a problem, I was just making it into one.

I had a very rigid idea of what it means to write on the internet—one that comes from the world of content creation, where success rests on niche, branding, and consistency. I understand that world, but that’s not what I’m doing here. I just need to accept that and own it and stop worrying about it.

It’s true that audiences often want a repeat performance. But what I’m performing here is “Emma’s journey out loud”, not “X healing topic”. The topics will change. The ideas will evolve. But it will always be me.

And that’s what this boils down to—can I be brave enough to bring my real self to my writing? Can I set aside the past, the bullying, all the little kids who were mean to me, everyone in my life who didn’t understand me or support me—can I let those things go, and show up at the page without demanding that it make all those past things better?

Just like I had to accept that my partner cannot heal me or give me what was missing in my childhood, and it’s my responsibility to heal myself so I can show up as a good partner—my writing also cannot heal me or make up for my missing childhood experiences. To give my writing what it needs from me, I have to choose to let go of my past myself. I have to decide that the present is new and different and it’s safe to express myself, and if people are mean, I can handle it. I’m a grown-up now, not a child on a playground.

I know some people will follow me regardless of my meandering path, and I know others will come and go based on the topics I’m into, and none of that is anything like being bullied or ostracized. It’s just normal audience dynamics, and it’s fine. And I know some people are turned off by the woo-woo. That’s OK too. I can’t be everyone’s cup of tea.

There is no threat here. There is no problem here. My brain was just very, very, very scared after what I went through as a child, and it latched onto the idea of writing on a consistent topic, and avoiding spirituality, as the safe way to mask and be “normal”. But that’s just not who I am. I’m a constantly evolving, growing person who is walking the path of a mystic. And I definitely am not and have never been “normal”.

I’m ready to be who I came here to be.

I’ve always felt I had some kind of mission or purpose, but I also always felt very vague on what that was. I spent a lot of energy lamenting about my confusion, and searching for answers.

The answer is me. I came here to be me.

I never know what the future holds—that’s how my path works. I only ever see a few steps ahead, and I walk in faith that it will unfold before me in Divine right order.

So of course my writing has to work the same way. That means I don’t know what this newsletter will be about a year from now, or if I will feel called to do something else. I can’t know, and I surrender the need to know. It is this way of life that I’m committed to, not any particular aspect within it.

So I’m officially not going to worry about it anymore. I will write what I write when I write it. And you’re welcome to read it, or not, as you please. 💚