if i didn't want people to read my work, i'd just write in my journal
can we all just be honest for minute?
Earlier this year at a book fair in Marseille, a woman gifted me a postcard, matte black with a light streak, that said vue on one end and être vue on the other. I don’t speak French, so I missed the bulk of her explanation behind it, but later googled the translation: seeing (vue) versus being seen (être vue).
The postcard has been tacked to my living room wall for a number of months. I’ve felt called to write about it since I stuck it up there, but the thesis of the would-be piece has eluded me.
This week, I scrolled irately through my Substack timeline and huffed at the influx of Notes proudly stating that the writer doesn’t care if anyone ever reads their work. I’m here to proclaim that I, Andy, do in fact care whether or not people read my work.
Life is about experiences (vue). It’s easy to feel like your experiences are unique to you, but chances are that they aren’t. Chances are that someone else has, too, eaten that meal or fought that fight or swallowed that same lump in their throat. What is unique? The lens through which you experienced said event. What is unique? The story that you tell as a result; the words that you choose to shape that retelling. What is unique? The Substack post that you painstakingly crafted and published (maybe even before you felt ready to) to tell the world about it. Bonding over shared experiences is a beautifully human thing. Sharing a story and having someone empathize (être vue) is something that everyone deserves to feel. I’d venture as far as saying that it’s critical to living a fulfilling life.
Somewhere along the (digital) way, we decided that we didn’t care about that. Or, more realistically, decided to lie and say that we don’t. I get that the digital world sucks the soul out of everything it touches, but if we’re not careful, we’ll let it suck the soul out of us, too.
I am officially jaded with the How I Gained 100000 Subscribers in My First Month on Substack pieces. They are annoying at best and mini MLMs at worst. Keyword stuffing is dead and long gone are my pre-pubescent dreams of writing shiny Buzzfeed listicles for a living. And though it may be dramatic, I find it genuinely insulting that a bunch of adults are still putting out this content in 2024 and calling it art.
On the flipside of this, there are the contrarians, the “write like no one’s watching” crowd who insist through tight teeth and gnarled knuckles that THEY JUST HAVE THINGS TO SAY AND THEY ACTUALLY DON’T CARE IF YOU READ IT OR NOT, OKAY?! (Surely we’re all self-aware enough to recognize the irony in sharing these statements on an online platform, yes?) If we wanted to write like no one was watching, if we wanted to write as a form of therapy, if we wanted to write to process trauma, we could just…write? And choose not launch our words into cyberspace? No one is vilifying you for wanting to share. Except, apparently, you.
Speaking for myself: I don’t write any ol’ bullshit for the sake of an exponential follower account. I write my own personal bullshit in the hopes that people will identify and engage with it. I don’t spend hours per week battling imposter syndrome to type out an essay that no one reads; I want everyone to read my essay and then I want the people that enjoyed it to stick around for more of my work! I want people to say, “I love this,” or “You read my mind” or, my favorite, “THIS.” When I publish something risky, the wait time between hitting share and getting that first notification is excruciating. But when it finally comes, it says, ding! you’re not alone. Ding! I see you. Ding! Être vue!
And I’ll say the embarrassing, cringy part out loud so you don’t have to: it fucking sucks if that little orange circle never comes. It’s kinda heartbreaking when no one engages with something that I’m really proud of having written. (Am I alone? Was this a weird thing to say?) “I don’t care if anyone reads this” is a gauzy defense mechanism; if that were a true statement, the writing would’ve stayed in my Notes app or the barely-touched journal in my bedside drawer.
Nonchalance is a virus that will kill us all if we let it.
Surely we’re all familiar with the loneliness epidemic ravaging cities and hearts across the globe. We write for ourselves, yes, but we write for connection and in an (albeit, fucked up) way, connection in 2024 often looks like comments, looks like likes, looks like restacks, looks like subscriptions, looks like tiny orange orbs in the upper right hand corner of your large or small backlit screen. It’s a lesser than form of a hug, a verbal “good job,” or a high five, but it’s what we have in this timeline.
I am decidedly chalant about my work and maybe that’s cringe, but not as cringe as the seemingly inescapable “cool guy” rhetoric. Being seen feels incredible. Être vue!
Somehow Substack has tricked the masses into believing that it is a cozy little library of a place, layered with Moroccan rugs and twinkle lights and free hot cocoa hot for the sipping. It isn’t. Substack is a B2C SaaS tool that is worth $650M (and growing!). It’s a social media platform for people who prefer longform writing to the bite-sized tidbits that other platforms encourage. But like Instagram, like X, like Meta — people want to be thumbs upped and hearted and shared just the same. And. That’s. Okay.
I often ponder on the classic, if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? proverb. The older I get, the slower I am to answer this question. The obvious answer is yes, of course — there’s something very human — and I mean this disparagingly — about needing to witness a thing to validate its existence. But the less obvious, more true answer is that I don’t know. If Substack is a forest, we are the pines, the oaks, the firs, chopping away at our own barks in hopes that someone is around to hear us collapse.
I write because I have things to say. I share my writing because I want other people to hear them.
Thump. Être vue! (Or whatever sound a tree makes when it falls.)
THIS. Part of what Substack is helping me wrest myself away from is the connection between engagement and my value: "No likes means my work is shit" or "No shares means I should shut up". I do hope people engage with my heartwork, that they feel themselves and their experiences in my own, or, at the very least, they think, "How curious!" What I will no longer do is degrade or denigrate my creative practice because "not enough people engage with it". I write publicly to satisfy a creative impulse, a desire to be intimate with others, and I will not measure my worth against the algorithm. I will not let algorithmic silence deter me! Asé.
We all care - you can tell this by how cute the community is in the notes. But I think it’s also part of the process to say that we don’t care because of that horrible sick feeling you articulate so well “The wait time between hitting share and getting that first notification is excruciating.” A lot of us are probably introverts who are slightly traumatised every time we hit ‘post’ and yet compelled to do so because of the overriding human need for recognition and acceptance.