What We Write Is Never Good Enough

We all have moments where the words flow from us, where every letter pours after the next in a torrent that could drown out every hardship in the world.

But that moment only lasts as long as we keep pushing our minds and fingers forward, forging new lines.

As soon as we step back and we see what has spilled out onto the page or the screen, we recoil.

Then we reread.

And recoil again.

And we never recover.

There is an art and humility that is required to edit, and it is one that many of us don’t often have the stomach for, even on the best of days.

When the words are personal, or the truths are too telling, we reread, and rewrite, and finally, retreat.

It’s often easier to simply hit delete.

It can be cathartic.

To pour out our jumbled thoughts, see their lack of arrangement, and feel the relief that their mess is no longer inside us.

But we become afraid.

Afraid of what people might think if they, too, see our non-conformity, our lack of style, our inelegant stumbling through brambles of disjointed prose.

So we make excuses.

“This sounded a lot better in my head”

“I’m not feeling this”

“It doesn’t really matter what I think”

And we battle with our self-worth and our self-esteem and our self-importance and we usually lose the voice that we thought sounded a lot better in our heads in the first place…

And we hit delete.

It’s often easier to simply hit delete.

But what a journey we have been on!

Simply by writing we’ve travelled across a world of ideas and into a universe of introspection.

You wouldn’t delete all the photos you took on a trip like that…

So don’t hit delete.

Reread, the same way you would scroll through an album to relive those memories or reframe your perspective on what happened.

Rewrite, the same way you would make the colours pop a little more in Photoshop, or crop away the excess from the edge of the frame.

Respond, not to the trolls in the comments but to the voice in your head that says that what you write doesn’t matter, or what won’t ever be good enough.

It doesn’t have to be good enough.

The journey was justification enough.

This article was originally posted on Medium.