Perceptions

Every once in a while I torture myself by reading back over old things I’ve written. When I go back 20 years, it’s… mind-breaking how bad my writing was. But there seems to be a sweet spot where I go back just long enough that I’ve mostly forgotten what I wrote (a few months for blog posts) but I’m still close to the present day… And I have a strange experience…

I read my writing as if it was written by someone else (because I don’t completely remember writing it – especially if it was a one-off blog post that I didn’t spend a lot of time with).

And every so often I hit that sweet spot of not remembering something I wrote – and being close enough to the present that I had most of my current writing skills… and… I’m not completely horrified by it. Sometimes I think, “Wait, this isn’t too bad… this is almost decent writing…”

But it’s usually one-offs, things I didn’t spend much time on, things I didn’t… think about when I was writing them.

And maybe that’s the secret. Maybe I try to hard and I write worse when I’m actually trying to write well.

Or maybe my perception is too broken to judge my own writing abilities.