What a day! Today is the day the first installment of my newsletter goes out. As I sit down to write this, I can’t help but feel overwhelmed with gratitude, joy, and trepidation.
Gratitude, for all the support and encouragement I’ve had so far; from everyone who has subscribed to the newsletter, followed my socials, streamed, or downloaded my music on all the platforms, or just reached out to say a kind word. If you are reading this, then thank you for following me on this journey. I appreciate you, and I’m thankful.
Joy, and happiness, because I marvel at how this journey is unfolding. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started my creative ventures. In a sense I still don’t know what to expect, but I know I’m still going in the face of adversity, rejection, and uncertainty, and that makes me happy. You probably can’t see me right now, but feel free to imagine that I’m giving myself a pat on the back, figurative or literal.
And then there’s the trepidation, the fear of the unknown, and the fear of rejection. As I write this, there’s one question on the tip of my tongue. Several questions actually, but one of them is particularly salient: how will this be received?
It’s a scary thing to put yourself out there, writing words, sharing songs, and disseminating content that you know will live on forever in some form, given the digital age we live in. A part of me wonders whether I’ll write something here that’ll come back to bite me in the future, something that’ll get me canceled perhaps. But then there’s another voice in my head that whispers “nobody cares.”
When I pay attention to this second voice, I hear it get louder and louder. In time, the voice starts to bellow words that at first sound harsh and discouraging, but on second thought, are actually words of encouragement. It’s this second voice that I choose to pay attention to, and this is the reason you’re reading this.
“Nobody cares!” Nobody cares. You could interpret it in the cruel sense, that you’re alone, insignificant, irrelevant. There’s another lens through which these two words can be viewed; you can and should do the very thing you want to do. Write that story and share it with the world, sing that song from the rooftops, take up drawing or painting again. Express yourself in the ways that matter to you, because everyone’s so busy living their own life and worrying about their own problems that nobody has the time or the bandwidth to care about what’s going on in your corner of the world.
This idea isn’t new; you’ve probably come across it in some form. I wish I could attribute it to someone smarter than me, but I’ve come up short on sources. When the voice in my head starts asking “what will people say?” or “how will it be received?”, I can seek solace in the voice that whispers “nobody cares” and it spurs me on to do the thing.
I’d like to suggest that the potential benefit of doing the thing – whatever that means for you – outweighs the potential pitfalls of not doing it. Research findings suggest that you’re far more likely to regret not doing something than you are likely to regret doing something that didn’t go as planned, at least in the future, when it matters most. In other words, there’ll most likely be some sort of regret in life, and that’s okay. You get to choose whether you’d rather have a regret of omission or a regret of commission.
Do the thing!