I'm Embarrassed of My Writing Frequently

i hope this is reassuring somehow

Some people have asked me how I manage to write about personal things without apparent embarrassment. This is a flattering question because it assumes that I am unembarrassed, that I look upon what I do kindly, and regard what I’ve produced, as I would, say, a large family I’d sired, composed of different organisms, all with different colorful merits. But this is not true. I feel embarrassed about my work a fair amount of the time. 

Sometimes the embarrassment is called-for, in the sense that it provides helpful guidelines for future work. Some of the work I did when I was a journalist, for example, embarrasses me now because it expressed a point of view I didn’t actually believe in. When I re-read this work, I see that I’d compressed my actual thoughts into the sludge demanded by a media conglomerate, for the sake of a little status, or a littler about of money. Or perhaps I see something even worse: that these media conglomerates managed to deposit their brain-worms in me, and my opinions temporarily settled into the grooves provided by one or another societal interest, only to reshape themselves upon escape from these entrancing snares. It’s good for me to be embarrassed by this, it prompts me to a greater level of integrity in the future. 

But sometimes the embarrassment is not called-for.