Posting Bad Things Is Healthy

minor humiliations build character

This post I did last week wasn’t that great. I had other things going on. My more ambitious ideas were proving difficult to lasso. I’d attempted to finally finish an essay I’ve been writing about ego death, but the third draft proved worse than the first. So I just had to put something up. Posting it was a moment of personal defeat, a tiny humiliation. Throughout the day, I occasionally remembered that I’d posted something bad, and I felt a hot, waxy twinge of mediocrity in my midsection.

It’s a feeling that occurs to me fairly often. Doing a twice-weekly newsletter means that about 1/3 of what I post, I feel is fairly bad. Not, like, awful. But obviously mediocre. 

I’ve come to think of this as healthy.