I have a fear I haven’t talked about publicly yet.
It’s layered within a subject I’m wary to breach because the last thing I want to appear is ungrateful or whiny. I’m not. I’m simply ready to pull things out in the open that have been ruminating in my brain for quite some time in regards to the work of my writing.
Nine years ago, I began posting my work publicly on Instagram. I wrote as honestly and clearly as I knew how about walking through the refining fire of being a mother for the first time–and then about being a mother to two for the first time. I had a few posts go viral and a tiny dedicated community formed on my page. I took over the Coffee & Crumbs Instagram for 24hrs. I was a contributor to the Sakura Bloom Sling Diaries for 6 months. There were multiple times when I got over 100 followers in a day. I would post something and conversations would erupt around it. I was reading comments and DM and emails from women thanking me for my work and saying they felt seen when they read my words. And so I kept at it.
I don’t regret those years in my writing, they served an important purpose of teaching me to be disciplined and consistent with my work and to do it in such a way that invited others into the gospel through grace and truth working in tandem.
But over time, I began to feel like who I was as Breanne was being stuffed behind the things she was writing about. It was like my writings on being a mom were the storefront but no one wanted to know who owned the store and why she opened it, they just wanted what was sold here. It didn’t help that, as I gradually shifted my writing away from being mother-specific, I stopped getting the comments, the DMs, the emails. I’d work hard on something I’d written and—if it didn’t somehow relate back to being a mom—it would fall flat and I’d watch people unfollow me one by one. Not that I blame them, if you started following someone’s work because it was an encouragement to your motherhood, and then they stopped writing about being a mom, it makes sense you’d move on.
*deep exhale* Let’s talk about it.