Befriending Self-Doubt

This was not the essay I intended to publish this week, but as often happens, something other than whatever I’ve been attempting to control for manages to spill out of me. If I’m being entirely honest, the essay I was hoping to publish this week is a jumbled mess of typed notes and handwritten chicken scratch, and every time I’ve worked to wrest some form from the chaos, I realize I don’t have a solid enough grasp of what I’m trying to say yet. As such, I’ve been experiencing some doubts about my capacities as a thinker and writer, so I thought it might be useful to write about how manage this pesky demon, which is guaranteed to haunt anyone brave enough to follow their desires and ambitions.

I spent much of my late twenties paralyzed by self-doubt. I was working on a novel then, and some days I would feel so crushed by my lack of faith in myself that I could barely eke out a sentence after hours of sitting at my desk, and any sentences that I did manage to write were inevitably stilte…