I gave up on self-promotion. I still want to write.

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I've always liked making things. But putting them out into the world — what people now call "self-promotion" — I've always been bad at it. I drop social accounts after a few weeks. Whenever I get busy, my feeds go silent. I genuinely envy people who can do this naturally.

Lately I've been half-resigned about it.

X in particular — well, Twitter — used to feel like a place where you could mutter something into the air and that was fine. These days it feels like there's a quiet pressure to be in conversation with everyone. I'm the kind of person who ends up in the corner at parties, so it's a slightly uneasy place for me. Still, I flip into some kind of social mode and post a few things, here and there.

Writing on my own site, by contrast, feels much easier. Same internet, completely different feeling.

I've also never been great at putting my actual work out into the world — which is fine, except then nothing gets known by anyone. And these days, making things and getting them known are tightly bound together. If I want to make a living from this, I have to do it whether I'm good at it or not. It's basically marketing my own work.

What I've learned, from trying various things, is that nothing sticks unless it comes naturally.

The one thing I've long wanted to be able to do is sit down and write. Compared to "promotion," this feels less like a conversation with others and more like something I do alone. That's probably why long-form is easier for me.

Lately I've been writing longer pieces.

One night, while half-resigned about all of this, I was re-reading old blog posts by makers I love, and noticed something. Maybe what I'd been drawn to wasn't really the things they'd made — more than anything, it was their writing.

I love the products, of course. But re-reading the posts, I think I'd been falling for them through the writing more than anything else.

When you see what someone made, you can think "that's impressive." But whether you actually want to keep following what they do next? That seems to depend a lot on whether you've read what they've written.

Why have I followed the makers I follow, for years? Looking back, the starting point wasn't a product. It was how the person thinks.

I don't want to read a tidy conclusion. I want to read "ah, this is how this person would think in this situation." When a piece doesn't feel like someone neatly tidying up things you've already heard — when the words feel like they've actually been through that person's head — that's when I want to keep following what they do.

Put this way, "self-promotion" and writing might be two different things.

The former faces the reader and tries to persuade. The latter faces yourself and just leaves the thinking there, as is. The thing the world calls marketing is the former. What I've always thought I was bad at was, probably, the former.

The writers I love seem to be doing the latter. They don't feel like they're chasing topics.

Which is probably the side I want to be on, too.

The "self-promotion" side can stay where it is. The writing side — that, I think, I can keep at, in my own way.

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