The Empty Room

Letting an empty room be an empty room without making it mean that I have nothing worth saying.

For all the slow, introverted, soft business owners who have never felt good about the hustle and are learning how to market and share in a gentle way…

I’m struggling with my process around all this right now.

Putting yourself out there, only to be left questioning your abilities and feeling like a failure is an experience I know well, but one I no longer want to participate in.

I think I’m realizing, though, that I may not be able to participate in this process without some of those shitty feelings resurfacing.

I grew up in an environment where I was constantly asking, through every implicit channel possible: “Am I safe? Am I loved?”

A child who has to seek out evidence of their value and loveability becomes an exhausted adult who, by default, often believes their efforts will fail and that trying is sometimes simply not worth it. So I’m aware of the lens I tend to look through here.

I’ve been tracking this as I’ve focused on healing. I took time off social media platforms to help me untangle some of this.

In part, I was giving up trying to find my way forward as a creative entrepreneur. And in part, I was learning how to find myself again.

As I’ve stepped back toward being present online, I’ve done it slowly and carefully. I want to honor my courage and my desire to be seen. I want to put myself and my work into the world and hopefully find the people who might genuinely feel seen in it. I believe there is something incredibly valuable in that.

In doing that, it’s been interesting to notice how quickly those familiar feelings of failure and insignificance have come up.

Without these platforms, I was starting to feel quite confident. It’s a wrestle I’m in… is it worth coming back and dealing with the sneaky onslaught of doubt?

I envy anyone who doesn’t have this experience. Some of my questions lately have been around the sense of flow that some content creators speak of. I understand the concept: post, then detach from the outcome. My qualm is that it doesn’t always feel realistic. I wonder if that’s how they started, or if they found flow once they reached a certain level of influence.

Flow makes sense to me in my private life, where I’ve learned to live more intuitively. For the most part, my business has become an extension of that, although it has taken a complicated history with my work to be able to say so.

When it comes to finding my audience and marketing online, though, flow doesn’t seem available. If I don’t play by the rules, I’m invisible. If I don’t appease the algorithm machine, I’m left speaking to an empty room.

Is flow really possible on these platforms for those who don’t want to hustle first to find it?

And then I read this brilliant article, which gives me a new perspective. I know the article speaks to content creators in general, and not necessarily people using social media to build a business outside of content creation, but it still resonates with me.

I get it. I know that by showing up online, I’m contributing to the soup of noise already out there. I think part of the problem is that there is so much noise that listening becomes overwhelming. And when so many people feel as though no one is listening, it drives us to try even harder to make our own voices heard.

For me, a new problem emerges when I imagine simply focusing on listening. I didn’t get to use my voice growing up. It almost feels like a loss of agency to listen without the safety of a reciprocal relationship where I, too, will be listened to. Without that, am I listening as an offering to the karma gods, hoping someone will listen to me in return?

I don’t want to listen with an agenda. I want to listen because something genuinely interests me, speaks to me, or challenges me. I don’t want to burden my soul with mindless content because I’ve been told that listening more will somehow make my own sharing more effective. Will I be listening just to find my flow, or can I listen in this noisy world and actually find connection?

It’s hard to listen when everything is shouting at you.

It’s hard to find spaces where these things can happen organically without this weird social media mechanism in the background.

Again, I ask: Is it worth it?

How do I genuinely seek an audience without tethering my worth to their response or abandoning myself to become visible?

“Do what flows” is much easier to practice when your immediate survival doesn’t depend on the results. Some people are doing whatever it takes to keep things afloat. I’m married to a husband who provides substantially more for our family than I do. There are months when I don’t bring in anything financially, although I contribute many things that aren’t as tangible. I don’t dismiss that part of what I provide. I also know that my ability to pause and question how I want to do this is a privilege.

I don’t have a neat conclusion here. I’m still in process with it all. I know I want to increase my reach, not to go viral, but to find the people who might genuinely feel at home in my work. The desire to do work that feels significant has always been an ache of mine. I want to honor myself as I do it. And I want to remain grateful that I can afford to wrestle with how.

Maybe flow here doesn’t mean finally being able to declare that I no longer care whether anyone is listening. Maybe it includes caring deeply, feeling the disappointment when something meaningful disappears into the void, and staying in connection with myself through all of it… letting an empty room be an empty room without making it mean that I have nothing worth saying.

Maybe I’m not alone in this. Maybe there are more of us trying to find a way to be visible without becoming louder, faster, or detached from ourselves. Maybe we’re still learning what that can look like.