I have a hard time posting about myself on the internet. It’s something I’ve struggled with ever since the creation of AIM, when I endlessly changed my screen name in middle school because I worried it wasn’t cool enough. In reality, I probably changed it three times, but that’s where my online anxiety began.
Being afraid of posting about my life online isn’t so much a fear of privacy as it is a fear of being embarrassed by my posts. I have a life that I’m excited about, but something about sharing it online really bothers me. I worry that my posts are boring, or dumb, or don’t matter in the grand scheme of things, which means I’m thinking about it way too much. I’m also thinking way too much about what to post.
To stop overthinking what I post, I started this Substack. I wanted to create a low-stakes way to share my life online without the option of deleting what I share. I tend to delete everything I post online, but if this newsletter is sitting in your inbox, I can’t delete it—which means I have to hit send and move on to the next one each week.
I’ve decided to use the following guidelines to keep this newsletter simple:
I don’t know what I’m going to write about each week until that week.
I do take Monday-Friday to write that week’s newsletter.
I do have fun.
idk if this newsletter will be short or long each week, or if it will be good or bad, but I do know that I will send it every Friday. I want to try doing this for a year—maybe two—and see what happens. I’m excited for this journey and to see where it goes!
For a full guide, FAQ, & tour of idk with kimberly bozeman, check out my post idk & others things: a guide to idk and why i started this newsletter.
Let’s do some exposure therapy- post something that’s actually embarrassing on purpose! I’ll go first- I had athletes foot for like 2 years because I thought I just had “dry skin” and then a random nurse I met at a gym told me to get my shit together.