The Rollercoaster of Writing: A Journey of Love and Hate
A personal journey of overcoming my fears of writing online
Hey everyone,
Welcome to the third and last edition of 2022. Today, Iâm sharing my journey of overcoming my fears and evolving as a writer.
Cheers,
Aimen
Back in 2015, during my undergrad, I sought a part-time job to support myself and financially cover my expenses. I was offered a content writing internship at a software company with flexible hours and a reasonable pay rate through the recommendation of one of my lecturers.
However, I regretfully declined the offer as I didnât feel confident in my writing abilities.
A few weeks later, I accepted a part-time web development internship. And I found that coding was more manageable than writing.
After starting my writing journey in 2022, this event comes into my mind often and makes me think, why didnât I choose that opportunity? I wonder why I decided to code over writing back then.
What I remember at the time of that opportunity, I was not confident about my writing abilities. I believed that writers were gifted with an exceptional talent for writing and that I did not possess this talent. I also felt that my English skills were not advanced enough, my vocabulary was limited, and I did not understand how to construct good sentences.
I had always struggled with creative writing throughout my student years. Always! This struggle wasnât in English class only; I faced similar challenges in Urdu (my native language) writing class. So I grew up hating writing.
Fast forward to 2018, I won a global tech internship program and got an opportunity to work with Mozilla, a top open-source technology company. I worked through a competitive and rigorous 2-month-long process to secure this position, and receiving the selection email was a thrilling and winning moment. I was super excited about an excellent start to my career, and I wanted to document my struggle and learnings to look back from the future.
I sat down, wrote more than 2500 words in one sitting, shared âHow I got a remote paid internship with Mozilla.â and sent it to one of my favorite coding journals, FreeCodeCamp. After a few minor fixes, to my surprise, it was accepted and published in the journal.
It is one of the most-read articles about Outreachy internships. Even after four years of publishing it (OMG, time passed so quickly, I just counted), I continue to receive emails and messages on social media thanking me for sharing my journey and using the article as a reference.
I felt confident about writing and sharing my learnings, and I got three more techish articles published in the FreeCodeCamp journal. 2018-2019 was the fastest-growing year for me professionally until we welcomed our baby in June 2019.
Life changed. Priorities changed. Direction changed.
I stopped coding full-time, and I stopped writing too. The last article I published was in Sept 2020 - 15 months after I delivered my baby. It was about one of my findings during a mobile application development project. After that, I almost forgot that I had a blog and could write.
2019 - 2021 were my most exhausting, emotionally tiring, and life-changing years. With a very colicky baby and sleepless nights, I spent most of my free (very little, lol) time reading about respectful parenting and childhood education. I also kept working on my programming skills by contributing to open-source projects because I always wanted to return to work when my baby grew up. But I was never ready to leave my son for work. I wanted to spend time with him, too; I wanted to see him grow.
So there was a continuous fight between choosing a full-time job and parenting. But deep inside, I knew that I wanted to choose the latter.
Indie Hackers:
One night, I opened the indie hackers website my husband had shared with me long ago, and it blew my mind away. I stayed up until 5 in the morning (remember I have a baby?) and was immediately drawn in by the idea of independently building and growing a side hustle.
So every night, after putting my son to sleep, I would spend hours learning about the build-in-public philosophy and bootstrapping a business. The more time I spent in the indie-hackers community, the more precise the path became for me.
I chose a new short bio: full-time mama and part-time indie-hacker (creator).
By the end of 2021, I had a new direction and goal - to build a side hustle while raising my son full-time. Now it was time to find out how I would achieve it.
Major Realization:
After lurking on Twitter among the creators and hustlers, I realized that no matter what you do, build software or an info product, you must write about it online. Writing online builds credibility and relationships and helps run a bootstrapped business successfully in a build-in-public style. I saw Kevon, Dagobert, Tony, and many others creators growing their businesses right before my eyes by writing online.
But I hated writing.
And I knew nothing about writing.
YES!!! I knew nothing.
By this point, I had completely forgotten that I had already published four articles in a highly respected coding journal online. Just like in 2015, I felt anxious, and my fears of writing had returned, fueled by doubts about my English skills and a fear of being judged and vulnerable in my writing.
Twitter threads, daily tweets, essays, and newsletters were overwhelming and required writing for audience building. But I was afraid that people would judge me and that there were so many experts talking on my niche topic, so why would people read me?
But I wanted to write. I wanted to be seen. I wanted to be heard.
So I decided to overcome all these fears.
Welcome to 2022:
One day, through an Instagram post, I learned about a writing program that changed Ana Lorena Fabregaâs life and turned her into a writer. I immediately opened the link and applied for the program. It was David Perellâs write of passage.
In Feb 2022, I got a WOP scholarship and landed in the most curious, supportive, and kind community of writers (and aspiring writers) on the internet. I found my tribe online and met my writing friends Karena (
), Kelly (), Alexandra (MindSwitch), and more.I wrote only three articles out of five during the program and published none. I was still within my comfort zone and had not yet overcome my fears. I was striving for perfection in my first published essay, even though I had likely already achieved it in 2018 and simply forgotten about it.
Before joining WOP, I wanted to start a newsletter about childhood education and homeschooling. Ana's journey and growth in the past two years inspired me, and I wanted to do something similar.
But you know what? After graduating from the Write of Passage, it took me nine months to send my first newsletter. It was a good nine months of struggle, experimentation, and unpublished drafts as I waited for everything to be perfect before it went online.
Then one day, during the Outreachy internship season, I received a DM from an applicant thanking me for documenting my journey of securing the internship. I had a sudden realization. Damn! I had a blog, and I had been publishing some good essays online. So why am I fearing now? Why do I keep revising the publishing date for my perfect first newsletter issue? The last deadline that I missed was Nov 15.
On Dec 8, Kellyâs simple but powerful message popped into our group chat box.
It hit me hard, and I decided I would not wait for a perfect newsletter issue anymore; I could revisit and improve them later. And right after a week, on Dec 16, 2022, I sent out my first newsletter issue.
So finally, at the end of the year, I accomplished one of the primary goals of 2022: starting my personal newsletter.
Yayyyyy!!!! đ
Major challenges:
As I reflect on my journey and write this essay, I identified two major challenges I faced and had to overcome.
Writing for myself vs. writing for others:
In 2018, I started writing for myself and those young programmers I wanted to inspire to apply for the internship program. It was an intrinsic activity, not driven by extrinsic rewards or the desire to build an audience on Twitter or Medium. It was a way to document my journey, share my learnings, and track my growth over the years.
I never felt burdened because that writing was purely for myself. I was an unknown on the internet.
But in 2022, I started writing purely to build an audience for a platform I intended to make for homeschoolers. I was not writing for myself; I was writing for others. I had pressure to write the perfect content to attract and please the audience. I always looked for topics that could generate impressions.
I realized that I was losing my authentic voice and originality of ideas in an attempt to chase followers and business. I wasn't enjoying the process and was reluctant to share my work online.
I fixed this by making my personal newsletter a space where I write for myself, think out loud, and build connections. And for other extrinsic motivations like audience building and business generation, I might launch another niche-specific newsletter in the coming months.
I am not against writing content purely for audience building and business generation. But this is likely not the best reason to start writing if you are a beginner writer. At least, it wasn't for me.
I will explore and write whatever my heart desires, and those who care about those ideas will automatically become my audience and friends online. Analytics don't matter anymore.
Fear of being judged or not being seen as an expert:
Another reason I was resistant to publishing online was the fear of not being seen as an expert to talk about parenting and childhood education. But I realized that everyone has unique experiences and perspectives, and my voice is valuable too. Even if there are already many experts discussing this topic, my perspective and experiences may still be exciting and helpful to others. I shouldn't let fear of judgment or not being an expert hold me back from sharing my thoughts and ideas. Your ideas get refined once you share them with others and get feedback.
Final thoughts:Â
So finally, the girl who hated writing and then loved writing and then hated writing has started loving writing again. But this time, for more powerful reasons: self-reflection and clarity of the ideas.
Finally, at the end of the first year of my creatorâs journey, I rediscovered my love for writing after a rollercoaster ride of loving and hating it.
So I can safely say that 2022, for me, was a HAPPY new year! :)
Aimen, you spoke to me. I'm currently experiencing the same love-hate relationship with writing. Thank you for being transparent.
"full-time mama and part-time indie-hacker", "I realized that everyone has unique experiences and perspectives, and my voice is valuable too. Even if there are already many experts discussing this topic, my perspective and experiences may still be exciting and helpful to others" - my favourite phrases from this beautifully engaging read, Aimen. Thanks for counting me among your fellow-writers.
But the line that stands out ...
By Aimen Batool · Launched 14 days ago
You are now launched! The tap is turned and you are running!