writing as a non-writer
recently i’ve had my wonderful friends reach out to me to tell me they like my blog and the way i write. i’m grateful and flattered of course, but i can’t help having my impostor syndrome kick in a little bit.
objectively speaking, and i promise i do not mean this in a self-deprecating way, but i think my friends write a lot better than i do. both misha and enna are self-proclaimed writers and have been writing since god knows when. moi doesn’t consider herself a writer, but definitely writes like someone who has read plenty of books at the very least—so pretty darn adjacent to being a writer, anyway1. outside of being able to make pretty sentences and cool metaphors, my friends write about some pretty vulnerable topics. their blog posts feel raw and honest and sometimes almost a little too close for comfort; like wow, you’re really letting me perceive you this way?
i’ve mentioned to all of my friends that i have accepted i am not a writer. even though i know about this myself, i tend to worry about my writing anyway. “is what i said comprehensible enough?”, “is there a better way for me to say what i’m thinking?”, “is this metaphor accurately portraying how i feel about something at all?”, you know the works. i go back and forth between my posts so often before i publish something but always end up rewriting and editing paragraphs afterwards. i think this way because everyone on this little platform feels like such a writer.
there is only so much i can do to make my writing feel decent enough next to the other posts nestled in the discover page of bear. i simply lack the writing experience everyone else has2, but i don’t necessarily consider this a bad thing. i don’t blog with the intent to write the way a writer would, i think. my blog is just my little home on the internet and sometimes i have friends (that’s you!) over and we talk about stuff. well, mostly what i want to talk about, because it’s a blog and that’s very much a one-way form of communication (although you can leave comments on my guestbook or send me an email)—but you get what i mean.
after wrestling with these insecurities, i’ve come to the realization that with the way i view my blog, the best thing i can do for myself is to just write in a way that feels genuine to who i am. so that's what i have been doing and i think that should be enough.
until next time!
p.s. brandon wrote this blog post recently that i really appreciate. i think when starting a blog people tend to worry about “having nothing interesting to say” and i find that this post does a pretty darn good job of telling you why that isn’t true. so thank you, brandon.