While writing my last post On Making Sense, I asked myself, multiple times, why it always takes me so long to start writing again after having published a blogpost. It is a weird thing that has always tended to happen, ever since I started this blog at the beginning of the year.

It feels strange to me, because I really enjoy writing. Ordering my thoughts and emotions and putting them into words seems to have an almost therapeutic effect on me. I always feel a lot lighter and more at peace after doing it.

But I think I’ve now figured out the reason why, or at least part of it: Every time I finish a post and am happy with it, I seem to lose the confidence that I could ever again write something like it in terms of quality or ingenuity. Not that I think that my posts are exceptionally high-quality or particularly ingenious, it’s rather that I think to myself:

“That actually wasn’t half-bad … It can only go downhill from here.”

And then it takes me weeks, or even months — depending on how quickly I discover a new topic I’m excited to write about, or revisit my “post ideas” list — to progress from:

“Hm. Should I write another post? No. I don’t think so. I want the next one to be at least marginally as good as the last one, and I don’t think I’m capable of that right now.”

to:

“Damn. I don’t know … I might actually be able to write a decent text about this.”

Which is, as a whole, not a particularly positive mindset to have, I imagine.

So yeah, I think I need to remind myself from time to time that if I stop doing something for fear of failing to become better at it, I will actively manifest exactly this fear. If I do, on the other hand, continue to do the thing, thus accepting that mistakes will happen, have to happen, in order for me to improve and to grow … well … then I will, in all likelihood, one day, be able do the thing in a way that is not only as good as, but possibly even better than “half-bad”.