I feel afraid that I’ll overwhelm people. Sometimes this means I feel worried that I’ll be too much. Sometimes it means I feel worried I’ll say too much.
In this case, it’s the fear of saying too much, especially online—that I will speak or write too frequently that people will get fed up with seeing me post all the time or that I will speak or write about something really intense and people will get overwhelmed by the emotion.
I think, at the moment, I fear the former. I don’t want to be the person that floods someone’s feed with so many posts that they don’t want to receive. The challenge, really, is not knowing who wants to receive what. Each platform has a different vibe to it, where people connect for different reasons. On Facebook, it’s often because people are friends. On Twitter, it’s often to follow what the person says, typically about one or a few topics. On WhatsApp, it’s often friends again. On LinkedIn, it’s often business connections. So if I start posting multiple times per day about politics on a platform where people just added me to be their friend, it may push many people away. Likewise, if I start posting multiple times per day about emotions on a platform where people just added me to follow about politics, then they may be annoyed and leave as well.
Unfortunately, many of these platforms don’t provide ways to control how much we’re seeing of the other person’s posts. Email may be the best way. In email, I can forward all of someone’s emails to a specific folder so that I receive all of them and can open them whenever I want, and yet they don’t flood my main inbox. In Facebook, I can mute someone, but that means to read anything they post, I would have to visit their page, which feels farther away than a different folder in my inbox. On Twitter, I can mute, and again, have to visit their page. I imagine it’s similar for the other platforms.
There doesn’t seem to be a semi-mute, or a way to do it sometimes but not all the times—like muting them on Mondays, but not Fridays. In person, we can avoid people on certain days and see them on others. We can walk away from a conversation and walk back when we’re ready. We can do a variety of things to mitigate how much we’re hearing from someone without having to almost completely cutting them off.
Maybe this isn’t as big of a deal as I imagine. Maybe some people are craving for me to post me, hear more from me and more of me. Maybe those who aren’t will find out ways to mitigate how much they receive. Maybe I can give them tips on how to mitigate it if they want. Maybe I’m just making excuses so that I don’t put more of myself out there, the real fear being that people will know who I am on a much deeper level. That could definitely be it.
Well, I’ve written three times per day so far, so people will see a lot of me!
