There is a simple and notable trend that has begun to surface among the things I write here. Without fail, the posts that I feel most vulnerable or uncertain about, the ones that either require me to dig deep inside of myself and express something very personal about my experience of the world around me, or the ones where I stretch myself intellectually and push myself beyond my comfort zone of absolute certainty (really, the ones where I say things I haven’t seen a lot of other people saying, exactly), they are the ones that really seem to reach other people.
The posts that I am afraid to publish, the ones that I put off and fiddle with endlessly, they are the ones that ultimately most encourage other people to engage with me, and to open up. And I mean, this should be somewhat intuitive I guess; a willingness to be vulnerable does make other people more comfortable with being vulnerable around you. It gives them confidence that you will respect and honour their vulnerability, and that is so important, and such a powerful experience.
I’m talking here about things like coming out as demisexual, talking about my gender identity self-doubt, writing about things that don’t affect me personally, like cleavage-shaming (which continues to this day to be one of my most-viewed posts, since it was shared on the big boob problems sub-reddit – which some of y’all might be interested in), and even seemingly un-vulnerable things like this week’s post about the importance of labels. These posts, and others, have all induced fear in me, sometimes for inarticulable reasons. And they have all caused really interesting responses from other bloggers, and/or from my friends.
So yeah, I’m going to try to remind myself of this from now on, when I find myself with a scheduled post that’s got me stressed out. Even if I mis-step, there are people who will catch me and re-direct me. And very often I don’t, and I just manage to say things that really have an impact on the people who read them. And that’s really what it’s all about.
So yeah: no pain, no gain. I’m gonna keep putting myself out here for y’all <3
*This unscheduled post is rather randomly brought to you by the WordPress daily prompt, because it happened to relate to and give me a framing for this thing that’s been rolling around in my head. :)
Valprehension 
While there are occasional exceptions, as a general rule I have also found it to be true that the harder a post is for me to write/the more nervous I am about sharing it, the more interesting responses I get. I try to remember this as a way to keep myself posting the harder stuff, but it isn’t easy, definitely.
There are a lot of blogs out there with just information but people really are craving for the personal experience. So I try to write as personal as I can tolerate but it is very hard.