Not So Clever, And That's Ok
I'm not a blogger. This is the third post I've made in about 10 years. I feel that I ought to write more, and that I ought to be capable of writing very well, but the more I try to write, the more it becomes apparent to me that my thoughts are not clear, my memory is poor, and my ideas are not original. Writing publicly without endless rounds of refinement becomes a risky act of exposure and self-sabotage.
To someone like me, who was taught to pride himself on his intelligence (something I am still deeply struggling to recover from), this is a particularly brutal realisation: no matter how robust my world understanding feels, it quickly falls into disarray when I try to communicate it.
But as I learn more about the power of vulnerability and the benefits of self awareness, I begin to understand that this quality of writing is a feature and not a bug: I can use the act of putting my thoughts on paper to practice uncoupling my sense of self worth from my intellect—a premise that is easy to know yet so difficult to believe.
And so I come to the conclusion that I ought to write (and blog) more often. To grapple with humility and shake off the dishonesty and incoherence I have when I think myself simultaneously more and less competent and therefore more and less worthy than those around me.
I'm deliberately posting this without taking too much time to edit, to lay out my thoughts in all their knots. I'm learning that it's through more writing and not restraint that I will untangle them.