If Only I Started Earlier: How Fear Steals More Than Just Time

I’ve always loved writing and reading more than any other media.

In a world that is so overwhelming to all the senses— taking your attention without your consent— I find writing to be a quieter, but more substantial, more honest way to share. It’s a medium of peace.

You can’t shove it into people’s faces.

It’s intentional.

People choose to continue reading.

See, you need to understand that choice is power— especially when it can so easy feel like we are don’t have it. Be it by the government making it so, by our past traumas mentally caging us in compulsive patterns, or by the Gods themselves punishing us.

It’s easy to complain about how we feel wronged by others, the system, or by the Universe, but as one of my mentors would always say:

“There are people with power, and there are people who talk about people with power.”

Those who are constantly complaining, criticizing, or in confusion over what, “the people in power” are doing, are rarely ever aware of their own power.

They choose to fan the flame of doom and gloom. They choose to highlight everything wrong and bad without asking themselves to find a solution or a pathway to different direction. They choose to default to complacency because they believe the issue to be too complex, the solution to be too out of reach, and the effort needed to change to be too much.

And I’m not just talking about politics here.

In your own personal life, there is always the darkness that you can get lost in, the hardships you can get stuck in, and the dreams you let just be dreams.

For years, I’ve put off writing on Substack because I had spent so much time on cultivating an audience on Instagram and TikTok.

Even with the resurgence of blogging and the financial opportunity created through Substack , I felt shackled by the wrists to my phone that would habitually open Instagram to create a post that would be lost to oblivion after a day.

I wasn’t happy with it, but I figured if I just kept going with it, eventually I’d be rewarded.

But the years piled up, thousands of posts, reels, and stories shared, and only a shadow-ban to show for it.

Just like how I learned in love, you can’t try hard enough to make something work when it’s not meant to work.

Which brings me to why I’m writing this post—

I’m choosing to reclaim my power in how I distribute my energy online.

I’m choosing to honor my natural pace, my authentic voice, and my creative process.

I’m choosing to see myself as resourceful enough to not be on social media.

No one I know actually wants to be on social media as much as they are, not even the influencers.

It’s not to say that no one can see the good in it— I love discovering events, being inspired by new recipes, and exposing myself to vastly different lifestyles than mine.

However, there has been a constant tension in my life over the past 6 years between knowing all of life happens in real life, and believing the narrative that it is imperative to be on social media if you’re a business owner (and want to succeed).

But succeed in what metric?

The other day, I was in a fit of rage over how loud the world is and found myself scribbling down how, “the internet needs to stfu.”

I had seen yet another Instagram reel giving relationship advice and I immediately was filled with hot anger. After all, I had just spent the last week brooding over my decision to close an intimate relationship I’ve been navigating for months.1

I was frustrated with the crippling amount of personal opinions, expert guidance, and spiritual disconnect constantly overstimulating my already wildly active mind.

I was angry that content has become so easy to consume, but so hard to digest.

I was afraid because I saw how easy it was for my own thoughts, feelings, and process be hijacked, muddled, and disrupted by a stranger’s.

If being on social media means to constantly subject myself to involuntary feelings of frustration, anger, and fear, then that doesn’t sound like success. If I’m going to feel all those emotions, I want to be choosing the trigger. I choose the frustration of missed opportunities in real life, over the frustration of comparing my timeline to someone else’s online. I choose the anger that comes up when I hit a writer’s block, over the anger that comes up when I read unthoughtful comments. I choose the fear of being misunderstood by people in person, over the fear of being judged online.

Not only do I want to stop consume bite size, microwave, AI generated content en mass, but I also want to stop feeling pressure to create it.

I need the space to go in depth, to deliver imperfect sometimes half-baked thoughts and theories, as well as to be witnessed in my process.2

You can’t replace your own life’s journey with a polished AI-generated one.

You must live it.

So whatever you’ve been waiting to start, for whatever reason, just start today and live in the journey.

Because fear steals more than your time— it steals your power to choose.

1 Sidebar— the hopeful romantic in me wanted so badly for our friends-to-lovers arc to play out, for love to conquer incompatibility, and for the terrible timing of everything to right itself. But alas, reality hits no one harder than the romantics of this world whose very existence is dependent on the amount of distance they can put in between logical fact and pathological optimism.

2 Sidebar— I naturally am a deep thinker and feeler. It’s my 1-line in human design that drives the conscious part of me to investigate, research, and educate in depth. While my 3-line creates a subconscious undercurrent of experimentation where I need to validate, stress-test, and experience what I’ve learned for myself. Together, my 1/3 profile works together to be, “the establisher of knowledge of truth” for others’ benefit.