As I clicked publish on yesterday's post, I also clicked through to my blog to just check that it had not broken anything on my site (considering the other changes I made recently to remove things like newsletter signups).
It looked fine, so I closed the browser tab.
I immediately felt this odd sense of being free.
Usually, when publishing a post, I'd check - and keep refreshing - all the metrics I was tracking: views, newsletter opens, etc.
I would have to draft punchy versions of the post to share on X and LinkedIn because I would've been chasing engagement in the past.
But now I have none of that, and I instinctively sensed that as I hit publish yesterday.
I didn't have to spend any mental cycles thinking about what I had just done. There was no goal. Nothing had to come from it.
All of the value of doing the thing (writing, in this case) had already accrued to me.