My Notes on Being Misunderstood in Public Creative Spaces
I don’t think I’m afraid of being ignored online. Silence is familiar. It’s something you learn to live with when you put your work out regularly. What unsettles me more is the idea of being misunderstood.
There’s a particular fear that comes with talking about something you genuinely love in a public space. The fear that your sincerity won’t be felt. That the care behind your words will be flattened into something transactional. That someone will assume you’re speaking because you’re paid to, not because it matters to you.
Books are especially vulnerable to this. Reading has always been intimate for me. Personal. A quiet relationship built over time. When I talk about a book, I’m usually trying to share a feeling, a thought that lingered, a sentence that stayed with me longer than expected. But once money enters the picture, that intention becomes easy to doubt, both for others and for myself.
I find myself overthinking how I come across. Whether my enthusiasm sounds rehearsed. Whether my recommendations feel sincere enough. Whether someone scrolling past might reduce it all to strategy. It’s strange how quickly love can start feeling like something you need to defend.
What hurts about being misunderstood is that it rewrites your motives. It turns care into calculation. It makes you question whether your voice still belongs to you once it’s seen through the lens of sponsorships, opportunities, or professional labels. You start wondering if authenticity has an expiry date, or if it survives only when it’s unpaid.
I notice how this fear changes the way I show up. It makes me cautious. Softer. Sometimes quieter than I want to be. I hesitate before sharing things that matter deeply, worried they’ll be misread or dismissed as part of a transaction I didn’t intend.
But I keep coming back to why I started in the first place. I wanted conversation. I wanted someone to read what I wrote and feel a small sense of recognition. I wanted books to be something we could talk about without needing to prove anything. That desire hasn’t disappeared just because my work has become more visible or complicated.
Maybe being misunderstood is a risk you take when you care publicly. Maybe it’s the price of letting something personal exist in a space that prefers clarity over nuance. I don’t have a solution for this yet. I only know that I would rather risk being misread than stop speaking about the things that feel true to me.
For now, I’m choosing to trust that the people who are meant to hear the care will hear it. And that being misunderstood, while uncomfortable, is still closer to honesty than silence ever was.