Why I stopped posting my wins

The first place I kept my wins was a Twitter account.

It was a random account, not connected to my name. Nobody really knew who I was. I was not trying to build an audience — I needed somewhere to put the lines, and somewhere technically public gave me a small amount of accountability.

It worked for a while. Then it did the thing audiences do.

The performance creeps in

Nobody knew whose account it was, and it still happened.

Woke up is a true line and a bad post. Had lunch is a true line and a worse one. Without deciding to, I started reaching for the entries that read well — and reaching for what reads well is a different activity from noticing what happened.

At the time my days were creditors, lawyers, liquidators and court appointments, and my nights were panic attacks and gratitude recordings to interrupt what was going on in my head. I was not turning a terrible year into content. But the pull was there, and the pull only goes one way.

Nobody needed to like that I had lunch. Nobody needed to comment on time with my daughter. Those things counted before anyone reacted to them.

A record kept for an audience is a record of a performance

And the performance is always slightly better than the life.

Which is fine, until the day you need to look back — and what you find is the edited version. The wins that photographed well. Not the twenty quiet minutes between a lawyer and a liquidator, which is the one you actually needed to see.

So this one has no audience at all. Not a small one, not a private circle, not close friends. There is no way to publish a win, no profile, no feed, and nobody to see it.

What that buys you

I can write the real win instead of the impressive one.

Sent the email. Had lunch. Shipped the project. Got through the day.

A win does not become more important because somebody approved of it, and it does not become less important because it looks small next to somebody else's. Nobody can like it, reply to it, or decide whether having lunch was significant enough.

Nobody is waiting, either. There are no followers to disappoint by going quiet and nobody asking where I went.

It is not content. It is not a performance. It is not another place to be measured.

It is a record, and it is mine.

This happened too.