The Things That Make Us Doubt Ourselves

I sometimes wonder if writers are supposed to be more confident than I am.

There are days when I look at something I've written and think, Is this really good enough? Am I doing this right? Do I even know what I'm doing? Then I start thinking about grammar.

Grammar has always been a source of self-doubt for me. I know the basics, of course, but there are rules I struggle to remember and things I have to stop and question. Sometimes I read something I've written and wonder how I can consider myself a writer when I don't always know whether I've put a comma in the right place.

For a long time, I interpreted that as a personal failure. I've come to understand it differently.

When I was a child, my family moved from New Jersey to Oklahoma. It was a significant change for me, and one thing I didn't fully understand at the time was how much the move would affect my education.

The curriculum wasn't the same. Things I had already learned in New Jersey were being taught again. To me, it felt like I had gone backward. I wasn't learning something new; I was relearning things I thought I had already mastered.

Then, when we eventually moved back to New Jersey, the situation reversed. Now I was behind.

I had missed things while I was in Oklahoma that my classmates had learned. I had to catch up while everyone else was moving forward.

As a child, I didn't have the perspective to understand what was happening. I didn't know that educational systems could differ. I didn't know that circumstances could interrupt someone's progress through no fault of their own.

I only knew that other kids seemed to know things I didn't.

And when you're a child, it's very easy to turn I haven't been taught this yet into I must not be very good at this. I think some of that stayed with me.

It would be easy to blame myself for the things I don't know. It would be easy to look at a published author and compare myself to someone who has already learned the conventions of publishing, developed their craft, worked with editors, and presumably knows exactly where every comma belongs.

But that's not a fair comparison. I'm not a published author. Not yet. I'm a writer who is still learning. There is a difference.

I may not always know the proper way to format something. I may make grammatical mistakes. I may not understand every convention that published authors are expected to follow. There are things I will have to learn if I want to take my writing off my computer and put it in readers' hands.

And I can learn those things. That's the part I don't want self-doubt to make me forget. I can learn grammar. I can learn formatting. I can learn the publishing process. I can learn what editors look for and what agents expect. I can learn the things other writers have already learned.

But nobody can teach me how to be me.

The stories I create come from somewhere inside me. The characters, the strange ideas that arrive when I'm walking, the mysteries I can't stop thinking about, the places I invent, the people I put into impossible situations—those things are mine.

I don't need permission to create them. And I don't need to have everything figured out before I begin. Maybe that's what I'm finally learning about self-doubt.

Sometimes doubt isn't evidence that we're incapable. Sometimes it's evidence that we've encountered something we haven't learned yet. Those are very different things.

The child who fell behind because his circumstances changed wasn't incapable of learning. He had a different path put before him. And the writer who doesn't know every grammatical rule isn't incapable of writing a good story.

So I'm trying to give myself the same grace I would give another writer. I don't have to know everything today. I don't have to write perfectly. I don't have to be published to call myself a writer. I have to keep writing. Because the technical things can be learned. The rules can be studied. The mistakes can be corrected. But the stories? Those have to come from somewhere. And mine come from me.

That's the part I believe in. Maybe that's enough to keep going.