Don’t Look at Me!

That Awkward Moment When People Actually Start Paying Attention

It’s been about 3 months since I decided to write “seriously” (and by seriously I’m referring to time commitment, not content levity) on Medium. I’ve put hours and hours into writing and editing and promoting what I’ve written. I’ve connected with amazing writers and readers. I’ve obsessively checked my stats and notifications at all hours of the day and night. I’ve worked it, guys.

Earlier this month, I wrote a short piece called “Medium Doesn’t Want Our Love Story”, about being an “ordinary” married person on a platform that seems to want to promote every other kind of love but that. The piece apparently struck a chord, and within a day it had far surpassed anything I had ever written in views, recommends and comments. It hit fifty recommends. It hit one hundred recommends. The story didn’t exactly go viral, but it was huge leap from the visibility I had been getting before.

My daughter turned one a few days ago and had her first encounter with chocolate cake. After eating the top layer off of one piece, she of course went into that delightful state known as a sugar-high: she spent the rest of the evening bolting between one end of the living room and the other while screaming with joy and waving the instruction manual from her new toy over her head.

That was kind of the way I felt. Drunk with my new-found consequence, I went into a happy, adrenaline-fueled writing frenzy. Three of my “married life” stories were featured on the home page. My follower list was growing. I was becoming, if not one of the Medium Cool Kids, at least a kid who had found a fun table with some swell friends. It was great.

And then one morning I woke up and I was paralyzed with a sudden sense of fear and panic.

The realization that people were actually paying attention had just caught up with me.

Every time I saw a notification it made me cringe because that meant that someone had looked at what I wrote. It didn’t matter that I was getting mostly kind, positive feedback. It didn’t matter that people were actually liking what I had to say — it was just terrifying that I was exposing myself to that many eyes. Things I said would be in people’s feeds. They would read them. They would see them. I was getting exactly what I had been working towards, but now all I could think about was “Don’t look at me! Don’t — look — at — me!”

I felt an overwhelming urge to go hide under the bathroom sink and eat Velveeta on stale Wheat Thins forever until I died.

Like my daughter’s sugar high crash (yes, it definitely happened and it was definitely ugly), there had to be a moment of coming down. It would be nice to only feel reasonable, rational emotions, but the fact is that the human psyche is a real piece of work (which is why “follow your heart” is probably one of the most useless maxims ever to leave the mouth of mankind). Our emotions are real, but I’ve learned that sometimes you just can’t take them too seriously. This was one of those times. I decided not to worry about it too much, and sure enough, by the next morning I was feeling cautiously optimistic about my chance of survival outside the cabinet under the bathroom sink. I even wrote some more.

It’s a bit of an emotional roller-coaster, this whole writing thing. But then — what isn’t?