I made a goal recently to be more honest on this blog, so I've decided to post today about something that I've struggled with for most of my life. As I've mentioned before, I have anxiety and depression and though I I've gotten better at managing both, I still suffer from something that I think most of us have felt the weight of at one point or another.
I suffer from crippling self-doubt.
It rears its ugly head at the worst of times, like when I'm posting a blog post about something important to me, I'll hear a voice in my head saying that I don't have the experience or knowledge to write about it. It tells me that I'm being phony, and that no one's going to want to read what I have to say. It tells me that I should give up.
And there's nothing that I love more than stringing words together to make something beautiful. I love reading over a sentence I've written that sounds like music in my head. Like wind chimes. But my own self-doubt tells me that I'm not good enough and that anything I write will never measure up... that no one could possibly want to read anything that I've written.
How do I overcome it? Sometimes I don't. But sometimes, I tell myself that the point of this life is to live and if I'm living it afraid, then am I really living at all? Sometimes I tell myself that not trying at all is worse than failing. And it's that voice that I try to listen to. I don't want to be too scared to go after the things that I want, and what I want is to write and to be proud of what I write, haters be damned.
What do you do when you start experiencing self-doubt?
