Why I choose to not share everything about me
And the joy of happy surprises
🎧 You can catch me presenting a recent episode of BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme called: Sourfaux — should the ingredients of sourdough be set out in law? Listen via BBC Sounds or wherever you usually get your podcasts from.
Hi! This is Leyla from A Day Well Spent, a newsletter about purposeful living.
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One of the comments I heard a few times after announcing I had written my debut book in secret – along with hardly telling anyone about the big life news it was about – was, ‘how did you manage to sit on this for so long?’
My answer to that is, very easily. And the process of writing Pathways made me realise just how much I enjoy a happy surprise, whether I’m on the receiving or giving end.
One of the reasons I told very few people about the fact I was 1) writing a book or 2) moving to Portugal to live off the land, was to avoid the inevitable ‘how is it going?’ questions, at every interaction.
The only updates we had over the course of two and a half years for the immediate family members who did know about our big move was: we’re still waiting. Any updates about writing a book would have been in a similar vein, ‘I’m still writing it.’
The other reason was, I don’t need to know the minutiae of what everyone is up to
And I believe this to be the case for everyone else, too.
I totally appreciate that freelancers / creatives / artists are responsible for promoting their own work, because ain’t no one else going to do it for us. But I’m also acutely aware that we — as in, everyone on the planet — are already bombarded with so much information and stimuli, every moment of every day.
I have no desire to unnecessarily add to this noise. And I also don’t want the message I’m delivering to get drowned out by everything else.
The same applies the other way around; I don’t need to know every passing thought or action of those in my social and online spheres.
Which is partly why I don’t watch Instagram stories, I’m not interested in what celebrities are up to and generally do not have my finger on the pulse of whatever the current discourse is.
I guess there’s also an element about just wanting to keep some things private from the general internet / world at large.
Which is why there is a paywall in every piece I publish on Substack (which protects the community comments and big portions of my essays from being visible to — just anyone) and why I’ve never shared a picture of my husband on Instagram, for example.