when your hinge date finds your substack

on the fear of being seen trying, hiding your creative endeavours and perceived vulnerability.

Being seen trying — and sometimes failing — feels like a trap. Like when my mother caught me watching Mean Girls on a school night. Why did I think I could bend the rules and get away with it, no matter how badly I wanted to, no matter how confident I was hiding my phone? It feels like eyes tracking you, heat smothering you. It feels wrong. If only I could skip ahead to the part where I succeed. To the end of the film.

There are lengths we’re willing to go to avoid this feeling. I’ll admit, when I first started sharing quotes and excerpts from my Substack, I blocked everyone in my house and used a VPN. A feeble attempt to confuse the algorithm and those nosy “people you may know” features. Never mind that writing (more accurately, sharing my writing) was something I knew I’d always do. There was the secret Tumblr, the anonymous TikTok account dedicated to my shaky baby poetry. Long before that, there was the creative writing I used to cram into notebooks as a child. Short but outlandish stories that won me praise from an author whose name I can no longer remember, and a dream I’ve kept alive for over a decade.

A visual representation of what 12 year 12-year-old Onyi thought she’d look like writing her essays, novels and secret letters for the world.

And yet, I’ve only recently begun telling the people in my life about my Substack. It’s about time, too, if the guy from Hinge (J) can find it. (He says it came up on his fyp. I’m inclined to believe a search bar was involved.) J read/skimmed a couple of essays. I don’t blame him. I can be nosy too. He stopped, though, said he felt like he was cheating, getting to know me without my input or even my knowledge. I was nervous at first, quickly scanning my latest posts and laughed when I realised he must have seen titles like ‘I want to unearth you’ and ‘what if you’re not one of the good ones?’. It was only after the initial shock of being searchable and thus discoverable wore off that I realised I didn’t mind him reading my work, a far cry from what I would have felt about this a year ago.

I kept it a non-secret secret, for the very reasons he’d identified. I didn’t want the people in my life to know me more than they had to. Not the core people, but the people who seem to always lie on the periphery, judging all the same. The business of words has always been my lifeline. Reading raised me between pages and folded corners, and writing is the way I pay off that debt. Sharing my words on Substack or elsewhere felt like admitting to a certain level of greed, a desire to be seen, not just to create for art’s sake. I do want that. It can feel bold, even shameful, to want validation so brazenly. Who am I to think people would even want to read what I have to say? In sharing my writing, I wanted to find a community of people who understood. Even more than that, I wanted to create that place, those brief moments for someone to feel seen. I didn’t know if people would understand that, or if they would think I, too, had fallen victim to the allure of views and dopamine-fuelled numbers. That’s a part of it, too, I guess.

I thought that if they’d found it, they would be confused as to why I shared so much in my writing. That’s surely, there must be some payoff for being so vulnerable on the internet, for such a small crowd. I adore my handful of readers, though. I still notice the first usernames and profile pictures. If anything, it still feels intimate, focused, just me and you and my half-formed thoughts. A feeling I try to remember whenever I feel one of my essays didn’t do as well, or I struggle for the words to say.

I saw this image and I was reminded of how I felt reading I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. That’s the kind of feeling I’ve been chasing.

Oddly, I never felt this way about my other creative endeavours, or maybe not as strongly. I shared my photography and videography with little hesitation. Perhaps because in those cases, you only got to see the final product. You see the photos, the videos, the aesthetic titles, and perfectly curated clips cut to a soundtrack I poured over for hours without seeing the days I spent obsessively hunched over a screen. You don’t see the times I doubted the composition, tempted to throw out the SD card in frustration. Creating can get quite ugly, quite raw and often long and boring. You don’t see that in the final cut, but you see that in my writing.

Rawness is rarely ever appreciated in real time. Somewhere between our overexposure to social media and capitalism, we’ve prioritised clean, palatable, pristine images. Easy to build, easy to break. Watching the mistakes is only ever worth it when we win. I’m reminded of how quickly Doechi’s vlogs gained traction when she burst into popular culture. They were proof of her hard work and dedication, but they only went viral after the success came. If she hadn’t made it, those clips would’ve likely gone unnoticed. They would be just another entry for the list of unrealised potential, a waste of her vulnerability. We often view vulnerability as a weakness, and yet we complain when the stars of today seem not to share their rough moments or evidence of ‘the come up’, as if we would have appreciated it in real time. “Industry Plants”. Posting on Substack is the antithesis, you get my words as and when I write them, each letter at a time.

a couple of film scans

I did, however, realise something very quickly. The beginning of my Substack coincided with a new chapter in my life, one where I’d meet a handful of new people. With them, I had no problem saying I was a writer, that I had a TikTok I posted on frequently or that I talk to cameras. That I’d been quite happy when my father gave me new mics or tripods to invest in my craft, for an audience of ten or a hundred. When the slate was clean —no context or preloaded versions of myself weighing heavily on the bond — it was easier to usher in the new one. With the others, I often waited for a milestone or achievement to couple the announcement with. “I write about things, and people actually read it” sounds better than “I write sometimes”.

It’s a testament to my inherent overthinking. I thought that this development would be a jarring addition to whatever image they had of me, not that it’s my burden to uphold these. In reality, my writing makes perfect sense to anyone who’s ever known me and knows me well. When I told my mum, I thought I needed the numbers to validate my 'hobby’. In reality, she probably saw it coming from a mile away, with all my rambling and reading. She’s perhaps always known because she’s a writer too, one who didn’t share. My father didn’t bat an eyelid, nor did my friends, apart from expressing excitement at my excitement. The numbers are a shield. We hide behind them when the confidence wavers, letting the statistics speak for us when we’re too exposed. I’ve begun to decouple myself from them. I don’t like how susceptible I am to them, watching them. It makes me feel cheap. It makes me feel inauthentic, and that is worse than worrying about the opinions of people who would never say it to my face.

I’m teaching myself to care less. I care less with each passing day. Not about the work, not about the words. I’ll always be obsessed with them. But about the numbers or the opinions. The periods when I can’t write, and about the essays I love, despite the reception. I write because it’s how I make sense of things. That’s all that matters.

So I guess I do want more people to (authentically) stumble on my Substack and tell me about it. I want to have more conversations about what I love and why I love it. My favourite moments to date are the messages I get with details of the moments you can relate to. And even if they don’t find it, I’ll probably tell them.

Regardless, I’ll be here, doing what I always wanted to do. Writing. Writing a lot. And sharing some of it.

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Hey guys, hope you liked this week’s essays. In true Onyiverse fashion I thought I’d go back to my roots and write about something that inspired me fairly recently.

As per usual, you can find me on TikTok, Instagram (daily media recommendations) and Arca (curated recommendations)

Don’t forget to watch this month’s episode of our show What My Brain Eats with Salome. It’s the show were I dive into my guests media recommendations, the reasons they love them (and a little gossip on the side)