A tale as old as time. You need to submit writing to get it published. Having an established following can help you get published. You need to post examples of your writing or at least snippets to build a following. Most lit mags won’t accept work previously published, including on your own socials. So you can’t post a lil poem to Instagram and then submit it. You can of course submit, ideally get accepted and published, and then post on your socials. But many mags have a lead time on replying to submissions. Or maybe you don’t get accepted into your first choice but you want to give it another shot with it second, third, and fourth choices of lit mags and none of them accept simultaneous submissions. So waiting to post that lil poem could take months and months. By the time it’s accepted and published, you actually hate that lil poem. You’ve moved on. You have a new favorite poem that you can’t share because you’re about to submit it to at least seven lit mags.

It’s fine. You don’t need a social media following. You believe in your work, you’ve had poems and stories published before social media was a really big thing. God, you’re old.

You’re also an overachiever. You know you don’t need a social following to get published, but you love this stupid thing called writing and you want to share it. You want your words out there in the world, alive. And so you want to do everything possible to give them the best chance at that being alive thing. You want to post your dumb lil poems on Instagram.

So now you have to choose. Which poems go to submissions and which poems go to the Internet? You know some of your poems are just too long to post well in a tiny square. But if you only post shorter pieces, are people going to think you’re one of those bite-size-only instapoets, that’s just like

using line breaks

to make things seem deep?

I’m unsure if this is a uniquely neurodivergent experience, or something more universal.

Anyway.

As I was failing to fall asleep tonight, I was thinking about a poem I wrote shortly after I first met my husband. I already knew I was in love with him, but I’m not sure if I’d said so yet. And I was thinking about this poem because I was thinking about my husband and feeling all sorts of gratitude for the wonderful human I get to share my life with.

But it occurred to me that I have never actually shown him this poem. And this poem was just short enough to fit and format into a tiny square if I made small compromises on a couple line breaks. And maybe it would be nice if he saw I tagged him in this when he woke up.

At this point I accept that I’m too wired to sleep. I just spent the evening listening to a very talented friend, Leslie Early, work on a demo of one of her new songs in a recording studio. I’m regularly inspired by Leslie anyway, watching a breakdown of the music making process was incredibly cool and interesting, and I tried to get into bed while I was still way too wound up from all of this.

So I decided to give up on sleep for a moment and retype up the little poem and format it all nice as I can and put a nice little background and then – gah. Maybe I should submit it?

Suddenly I’m down a Reddit rabbithole of distraction. I’m writing song lyrics based on a post in r/songwritingprompts. I’m whisper singing the song into my voice memos so I don’t forget the melody but my husband’s asleep and I’m trying not to wake him.

It’s hours past my bedtime. I’m posting the damn poem.