Even when you really, really don’t want to.
I really didn’t want to get out of bed that night.
It was a cold summer evening in San Francisco. I was under the covers at 9 p.m., binging Mad Men on my laptop with a space heater on blast, when a text came through. A new friend was at a bar a couple of blocks away and invited me out for a drink.
I hesitated. I was comfortable. I was warm. I was broke. But I was also single, new in town, and not really in a position to turn down social invitations. So I forced myself to get dressed and venture out onto the dark, foggy streets.
I met my husband that night.
Of course, there were countless other nights I forced myself to go out without such luck—hence my understandable hesitation. But I still wonder sometimes what would have happened if I’d chosen Don Draper over the fog that night.
These coin-flip moments can literally change the entire course of our lives.
I’ve been thinking about that night a lot lately because, the truth is:
Promoting your work in the digital space often feels a lot like being single and going out to bars before the apps.
It can feel awkward and uncomfortable.
You will encounter the occasional jerk.
You will have to face rejection.
You can spend years feeling like you’re shouting into the void, feeling like you’re never going to find your people—and then, boom.
You show up one day, with zero expectations, and your people find you.
It’s scary putting yourself and your work out there. I know because I did it, crashed hard after, and spent weeks couched under a heated blanket barely leaving the house. Essentially, my nervous system sounded the “Danger” alarm.
I’m a professional marketer who still overthinks everything I post.
I know every strategy, have taken every course, and still have moments I freeze when it’s time to promote my own work.
I’ve learned the hard way is that visibility isn’t always a strategy problem. It’s, more often, a safety problem.
Why? Because visibility requires the opposite of everything that felt safe about writing in the first place.
A posting schedule or content strategy isn’t going to make self-promotion feel easy, because it’s not. The execution can be simple. But the psychological piece is layered and complicated. In other words, it’s simple. But it’s not easy.
I don’t have it all figured out. But I’m further along the path than I was, so tune in for more updates on the strategies that actually worked for me (and what didn’t) and the behind-the-scenes of my own author journey—messy parts included.
Here’s to helping each other show up. For the work. For the love of words.
And so the right ones can find us,
Love,
Kristina
