I’ve always been sort of a writer. I started keeping a journal when I was very young, and as I got older I gradually made more effort to write things I could share with the world. I wrote for my high school newspaper. I contributed a few pieces to my college newspaper. And then when blogging came along a few years later, I started a blog, a very low stakes way to put stuff I wrote out in the wild. I was never extremely prolific, but there were things I wrote and shared that I still find entertaining and that I’m glad I put on the record.

But then when I finally worked up the courage to write things I could submit for publication, I found that a funny thing happened. The harder I tried, the less I liked anything I wrote. I think that’s at least partially related to the taste gap that Ira Glass talks about, but also, I started to question the value of what I had to say. Say I wrote an essay, spent tons of time on it, submitted it to multiple places, and had it rejected each time. Did that mean I should keep trying to find a home for it? Keep revising it? What if I’d lost momentum and interest in the topic? Should I give up on it? Let it die in a lonely folder somewhere? Did the thing that I said not count because I couldn’t find a way to say it better? Or was it that it wasn’t worth saying in the first place?

One of the interesting things I have discovered about writing essays is how it puts you face to face with who you are as a person. You put words on the page and provided you’re being honest with yourself and you’ve said them as accurately as you can, you have to confront things that might make you uncomfortable. Prejudices, peccadilloes, ways that you never intended to be but are nonetheless. I’ve been struggling to make the point lately that in order to be a good writer, you have to be an exceptional person. What I mean by that is that you have to be able to overcome so much of your own bullshit in order to win your audience over to your point of view. And I would argue that is one of the keys to writing well—your reader doesn’t have to like you, but they should certainly feel like whatever you have to say is worth listening to. And if it’s obvious (or even not so obvious) that you’re full of shit or failing in some way to paint a full picture of the situation at hand, you’ll lose them. So for me, a lot of times when I’m having trouble finishing a piece (or seeing it through to publication), it’s because I lack confidence that I’ve done the topic justice.

Anyway, all of this is to say that I am coming back to blogging in the hopes that it helps me be more forgiving of my own flaws. To just put things out there and see what happens.