Embarrassed about the email newsletter I sent

In 2020, I started an email newsletter using ConvertKit. But I only sent out one newsletter, which was: Embarrassing story about 4th grade crush.

I finally sent out a second newsletter, scheduled for this morning. It was sharing an update on my life, my Ship It writing, and yesterday’s interview.

I woke up this morning, and saw that my test email received it at the scheduled time. I opened it, and to my horror, it said: Hi [FIRST NAME GOES HERE]

My heart sank. I’m such an idiot. I put a manual placeholder where I was supposed to put ConvertKit’s special code: {{ subscriber.first_name }}

I was trying to connect with my 90 or so subscribers, and what they got feels like a messed-up robot message.

I want so bad to take it back, or edit it and fix it. But due to the nature of emails, that’s impossible. That’s one of the reasons why I experienced so much resistance sending out email newsletters. I’m used to modern messaging apps like Telegram or Discord where I can send a message and edit it after I sent it. That’s also why I’m doing these Ship Its in Notion instead of Twitter. I can easily fix mistakes after being published.

Emails or tweets enforce perfectionism. At least on Twitter, tweets with mistakes can be deleted. But usually I don’t want to get rid of likes or replies just to fix a typo. Emails that were sent can’t be deleted. And so they are an even worse medium.

I suppose I feel this way because I hardly send email newsletters. If I did it every week, then the mistakes would easily be forgotten. I don’t know that I’m going to do that though. Even though I’ve been doing these ship its for 3 months straight, I still don’t have a regular time of day I write them, and sometimes stay up late because it’s the last thing on my daily habit list that I had been procrastinating on for the whole day.

This reminds me of another thing I learned from my first improv class:

So, oh well, who cares? I just have to try harder to act human so people won’t know I’m a robot.