NetSujit World

“If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage.”
~ Cynthia Ozick~

It’s a curse to have a thin skin. For a blogger and a writer, it is deadly. If you need to be liked by all the people all of the time, writing is impossible. Too often I find myself wrestling with my need to be liked and my need to write honestly.

In The Courage To Write, Ralph Keyes says, “If you’re not scared, you’re not writing.” Lately I’ve been scared to death, afraid of exposing too much of my private life and afraid of hurting people through my writing. The result has been a big fat case of writer’s block, not what Keyes had in mind.

To do a decent job of blogging you’ve got to take the risk to expose yourself. To be a good person at other hand, you give people hope by saying, “Yes, I’ve been there,” disclosing just enough of your story to connect with theirs, all the while keeping good boundaries. I’m a blogger and I want to be a good person too (honestly), so I try to do both, walking the tight rope without ever betraying my patients’ confidence or privacy.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t hurt people in the process, family and friends in particular. When that happens I wish someone would just shoot me with a tranquilizer gun like they show it on Nat Geo on the elephants in Wild Kingdom. Wake me up in a hundred years, like what happens in movies. The guilt is that overwhelming. Anyone who writes publicly about life, (and isn’t a complete jerk), knows what I’m talking about.

Personal apologies will be made to those I know I’ve hurt with the hope of forgiveness and if not that, understanding, and if not that, an agreement to live and let live. To say I will never hurt anyone ever again would be an empty promise because I am human and a writer and I can’t stop being either.

Now I get what Keyes was saying. He may as well say, “If you’re not scared, you’re not living,” or “If you’re not scared, you’re not in love.” The shame isn’t in being scared. It’s in letting the fear stop you.