Last month, I wrote a post that never got published. It was written out, formatted, edited and ready to go. As far as I could take it, but I hovered over the publish button and decided against it. There was nothing controversial there, but it criticised a poor take from someone who is well liked, and I couldn’t do doing with the hassle of replies.

In many respects, the unpublished post in question did its job. Much like the others that I get halfway through and never finish. It got the thoughts out and on to ‘paper’ instead of swirling in my head. The self-censorship didn’t lose me anything, and perhaps gained me a lot of peace, but I still find it funny that I couldn’t publish it on my blog. A space that is reserved for me to reflect on the things I want to write about.

I repeat, there was nothing offensive in the post, simply a retort to the terrible take. The issue that I foresaw was who it was towards. If you offend the community in question, then tend to swarm and reply in droves. All putting in their opinion, even when not asked, which is great, up to a point. I felt as if I wanted to publish it without seeing it anywhere else, perhaps if it were kept away from the blog’s main feed it could still live — but that defeats the point.

As such, it just sat there, doing nothing and annoying me, so I deleted it today and this post is my cathartic release instead. In both deleting the post and publishing this one, I have balanced my blogging chi, but there is still some weirdness there for me. I think that perhaps social media makes it too easy to reply, and too easy for me to read them.

If the reply took effort to reach out to me personally, or write their own blog post, this may put off even the most motivated of people. Even then, it would be very unlikely that I would see it without visiting their blog directly. I have had these protracted discussions before with fellow bloggers through link posts, and they generally go down much better than those thrown at me in 280 characters.