Please don't read this

Meet me.

I wrote this post originally as part of a re-introduction on Instagram, but it nicely captures my overall ambivalence of writing in public - which is different from my hesitation about writing, period, and different again from my embarrassment at telling anyone I am writing. 

Because then of course, what do I have to show for it? Just minuscule outcroppings in the swamp of the internet. I think it's a good primer on all these doubts for this, my blog.

I started being on social media back in 2018 because I wanted to be a writer. Indeed I do want to be a writer and have wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember, which is among the most unoriginal things to want.

Getting on social media - building your platform - was recommended to me at a conference I attended for physicians about writing in 2018. I didn’t know that trying to build my platform through the writing itself, the very raw materials I wanted to promote, would eventually short circuit all my creativity. I didn’t know that social media would unravel any of the creative cloth I was busy weaving for myself. I thought I’d write captions that could attract readers and teach me what is interesting to others, but writing done on Instagram or one’s blog can’t be then reprinted elsewhere; literary magazines want original work. 

And frankly there’s something about me that doesn’t capture the Instagram audience - and perhaps no other public audience. I’m too private, too aware when I cross a boundary that makes me feel uncomfortable. I flinch when I look at myself in mirrors; I don’t want to juggle parasocial relationships with an audience that thinks they know me. I struggle to take myself seriously enough to really give it my all; I am always judging myself and finding myself lacking.

Can I recreate something good inside a platform that made me feel increasingly uncomfortable? I don’t know. Good writing requires self-revelation. To write means some implication of myself in a connection with others, and I don’t want to do that with selfies. Sharing my writing, my opinions, my hot takes - who cares? It's all too terrifying in the context of this platform. Which is, in reality, a complete context collapse ("the flattening of multiple audiences into a single context"). The prospect of that flattening has a way of stealing inspiration before it strikes. 

Plus my writing didn’t get better by pounding out 300 word captions, and neither did I benefit from all the time I invested ‘on the app’ with loops and comments on other doctors' social media’s posts, and other bizarre ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ demands. 

I took a break from Instagram because I felt the inversion of private/public as a pain running right through my skull, somewhere between my eyes and Broca’s area. In the limited time I have available to myself - after work, between family obligations - I’d drained my creative juices dry. I was, in the words of Martin Gurri, presenting an increasingly mutilated version of myself online, and weary of seeing other mutilated people reflected back at me.

Here’s the truth: I honestly don’t know the right way to communicate about science online and I’m not going to get another degree to learn that. I don’t think establishing trust in experts (or even expertise) can necessarily be accomplished in the social media setting where you’re one square among many. Do slogans and exhortations really improve medical understanding? What’s the best way to hear from experts in the age of information equality and saturation?

I have no answers, only questions. All I know is for myself, I can’t be a scientist online. I don’t want to write a how-to book or be a micro Op-Ed columnist.  

“A writer ought not to be an opinion-machine… The job of the writer is to make us see the world as it is, full of many different claims and parts and experiences.” - Susan Sontag

I can be a writer whose perceptions are shaped by my life, my family, my internal dreams and yes to some extent by my work in pathology. I listened to Cheryl Strayed talk about being asked why she wrote about hiking the Pacific Coast Trail - the interviewer assumed she had written her memoir because it was such an interesting topic. No, Cheryl told them, I wrote about my hike on the PCT because I’m a writer.

I’ve got a lot more work to put in before I can compare myself to Cheryl Strayed, but that stuck - I write about my life, my observations and pathology because I’m a writer.

How do I write about pathology? I write essays about what I observe and how I have been trained to notice the visual world. I write poetry that incorporates some of my pathology-trained observations. I write fiction, a thriller about female friendships, memory, manipulation and the flimsiness of our own perception. (This post is an elaborate distraction from working on said novel!)

I have not been able to write about pathology on social media.

Once I open the lid to share any of my work, it brings in a desperation and cynicism that can alter what I create. Sharing my writing means rejection and I am surprisingly unsuited for this. It hurts, so much, especially for someone removed from formal education. Fear of that rejection then alters the insights I experience, the pleasure that comes from producing something I personally enjoy. How willing am I to juggle the tension between creating things and sharing them? This tension is not new nor unique to me and it’s not even new in the era of social media. The change is the intense recreation of writers as salespeople on this site and others, turning ourselves (and the endless definition of self) into products.

But how else does one become a writer in 2023? Should I not blog, and instead sit on ideas like eggs that do not hatch?  Should I neglect all public platforms until my book/project/poetry collection is completed? It's 2023 and this is a version of reality.  Here I am, writing these words in hopes (and fear) that someone else will read it.