When I was 12, a teacher once told me: “Nothing will come out of you.”
Exactly like that. I still remember the feeling in my body when I heard it.
And honestly?
It’s probably a sentence I’ll carry with me forever. Not because I believed her (yayyik).
But because comments shape people more than we think.
That sentence could have broken someone else. Some kids would have believed it.
Accepted it as truth. Shrank themselves around it.
I chose something else. I decided I’ll spend my life proving her wrong.
And deep inside, even as a child, I knew:
I was meant to do amazing things.
I think a lot about the weight of our words.
How one careless comment can stay with someone for decades.
How openness, creativity, visibility, and confidence can disappear because of one sentence said at the wrong moment.
Especially when it comes from someone we’re taught to trust.
Because writing online is a strange thing. The moment you share something real,
people don’t only read your words.
They build stories about you.
About your motives.
Your time.
Your success.
Your personality.
Your intentions.
And the more visible you become, the more projections you receive.
Some people support you genuinely.
Some immediately compare themselves to you.
Some quietly try to reduce what you created into luck, privilege, connections,
or “it’s not that hard.”
And some people simply cannot hold complexity or simply struggle to understand lives, choices, or perspectives that look different from their own.
You can be ambitious and sensitive.
Successful and exhausted.
Present online and deeply overwhelmed offline.
Helpful and still have boundaries.
Passionate and still tired.
But the internet loves simple boxes.
Especially when it comes to women.
This week I listened to a podcast that discussed something fascinating:
How people react to other people’s good news.
Apparently, truly supportive reactions are much rarer than we think.
Because real support requires emotional generosity.
It requires the ability to see someone else shining without immediately making it about yourself.
And honestly?
If I had listened to every comment I received over the years,
I probably would have stopped writing a long time ago.
But then I thought about something important:
How many beautiful voices disappear because they became afraid of judgment?
How many people here say “ I don’t have the time” when they actually mean:
“I don’t want to deal with hard moments or hard feelings.”
How many people stopped creating because someone made them feel “too much”?
Too visible.
Too loud.
Too ambitious.
And maybe this is exactly the deeper responsibility we have in communities, workplaces, friendships, and online spaces:
To become safer people for honesty.
Safer people for creativity.
Safer people for openness.
Because feedback is not only about saying what you think.
It’s about asking yourself:
↳ Will my words make this person smaller or stronger?
↳ Will they leave this conversation more afraid to express themselves?
↳ Or more free?
Presence always has a price.
But maybe we can make the price a little less painful for each other.
Less cynicism.
Less comparison.
More kindness.
More emotional generosity.
And maybe before you focus on writing your next post… Start by supporting someone else’s.
Leave a thoughtful comment.
Encourage someone who is trying.
Support people who dare to share something real.
Because creating becomes much less scary when we stop treating visibility like competition.
And funny enough?
The more you support others genuinely, the more confidence you slowly build to share your own voice too.
Not only to stand on the sidelines cheering for everyone else.
But to finally press “post” yourself.
So maybe the rarest thing today is not confidence.
Maybe it’s the ability to genuinely support another human being without feeling threatened by their light (or Glow 😉)
With love,
Anna.
P.S. I’m building something special 😃 The Glowers community for founders, investors and creators who want to grow fast, loud, and real.
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