10 Ways You Can Overcome Your Fear Of Vulnerability (In Your Writing Life)

​

1. Stand in a room full of women and admit that while you wrote bits and scraps of how you can overcome the fear of vulnerability, you know that none of it will compare to anything they wrote, so you gave up before you even started and you spent a half an hour trying not to bolt out of the door.
2. Go home and tell your mother that you fear that you are not a good writer, but still deny her the right to see your writing when she says, Well I don't know because you never show me anything.
3. Go and sit in front of a computer, trying to get out all of doubts for the next hour, but settle down to play Candy Crush on your phone instead, before going to sleep.
4. Wake up Monday morning and write a cryptic messages in your Springpad that you won't share until a month later.
5. Sit at your desk at work and slowly move water bottles away from his picture. Smile at the memories from nearly a year before as you play around with the corners of tape, realizing you should keep it up for just one more day.
6. Open up Facebook and message the one friend you haven't shut out these days, telling her that her week long vacation to Florida has been one of the hardest weeks of your life.
7. Go on your iPad during your lunch break and look over all of your scraps of writing, realizing that there is something worth sharing.
8. Plan your next ten blog posts on your commute home, feeling yourself a little more as the ideas start to pore out.
9. Write about half of the things you want to write about, pressing publish before you change your mind.
10. Write notes to yourself that it's never going to be easy, but each time you share a chunk of your words and feelings, a piece of the wall will come down.

Publish this list and realize that it was so simple, so you edit it with a bonus tip: 

There's no overcoming this. You just wake up each day and go on the adrenaline of I can't keep hiding to at least pretend you can get over this. 


10 Ways You Can Overcome is a weekly blog series that I will be writing as I confront who I am as a person, a writer, and a creative entity in life. I hope my path will be able to help someone out there as they confront some of these issues in their own lives, personally and professionally.