Monday, September 12, 2016

Overthinking Things

I have always ben chastised for being too serious, not knowing how to laugh at myself or overanalyzing things. Even as a teenager I was picked on for taking myself too seriously. Part of that is the fact that I have and still continue to struggle with that epic amount of self doubt and insecurity of not being good enough. Many creative types fight that battle everyday. We do what we can and with any luck have someone standing by our side that can help wage the war when we are feeling too weak to keep fighting.

I had a small moment yesterday where I saw first hand what can happen when you relax and just let your real personality shine through. It was the simplest thing, a tweet, that proved it to me. I rarely send out tweets other than links to my books or blog posts. My author page on Facebook does automatically link to Twitter or I wouldn't even have half the tweets I do post. When I think about sending out a tweet I go into a panic over what I should say, how it will be received and what if any hashtags I could use to help it be more visible.

More often than not I will choose to not send the tweet instead of reworking it for the fifth or sixth time. It is just 140 characters but it makes me sweat. Last night I was feeling goofy after spending some time working on various writing-related activities and sent out "Working hard on #editing #blogging #promotions you know being a #writer lol #writerslife" It is not like me to send out something like that, especially without thinking too much but within minutes I started getting likes on it. At a mere eight likes it is the highest response I have ever gotten on a tweet.

It made me happy to see that when I am just being myself people will engage with me but at the same time it immediately made me start trying to come up with ways to post more things like that so my followers would like what I post more. That is the problem, I overthink and then lose that whimsical style of just being me. It is like my heart and my brain are arguing and my fingers are caught in the middle trying to write things to please them both. Perhaps part of it is that I have woken up several characters in several projects for the writing side but my internal editor has been working overtime to get the macro edits of a book done for a beta reader so they are battling in my brain as well. oh well, off to the writing studio to see who will win this round!

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