I’m sitting in a parked car outside a CVS reading an essay by a stranger about their father’s death, and I’m crying in a way that feels both genuine and slightly performed, even though no one is watching. The essay is good. The kind of good that makes you feel like the writer reached into your chest and rearranged something — except they didn’t, because they don’t know you, and the thing they rearranged was already loose. The car is still running because I haven’t turned it off. The air conditioning is on. I’ve been here for twenty-two minutes.
After I finish the essay, I do what I always do. I open the Notes app on my phone and scroll down to a file called “ESSAY IDEAS — ACTUAL,” which is a title I gave it during a burst of optimism in March. Inside the file there are seven bullet points. The first one says: “The specific embarrassment of crying in your car during your lunch break (working title).” The second one says: “Why I keep buying notebooks for a version of myself who doesn’t exist.” The third one says: “Draft: the time Mom said X at Thanksgiving — expand.” There are four more. I wrote the first three in a single evening and the last four over the following week. Then I stopped, because that’s what I do. I stop.
I look at the first bullet point. I look at it for a long time. Then I close the Notes app, open the browser again, and find another essay to read.
The Loop
Here is the loop. I read a personal essay. I feel moved — sometimes to the point of tears, sometimes to the point of that specific chest-tightening that means something has been articulated I couldn’t articulate myself. I feel inspired. I feel the itch to write. I open the Notes app or a laptop. I see the half-finished outlines, the abandoned drafts, the titles that sounded clever at the time and now sound like someone trying too hard. I feel a wave of shame that is both familiar and completely ineffective at motivating me to do anything about it. I close the laptop. I open my phone. I find another essay.
The loop has been going on for about two years, which is roughly the amount of time I’ve been saying I want to write personal essays “seriously.” I put that word in scare quotes even in my own head because I’m not sure what it would look like to do it unseriously. I suspect that’s part of the problem.
What I’ve noticed about the loop is that it feels productive. That’s the insidious part. Reading good writing does make you a better writer, technically. Exposure to language, structure, voice — all of that seeps in. I believe this the way I believe stretching is good for you, which is to say I believe it in theory and almost never in practice. But reading essays is not writing essays, the way reading about stretching is not stretching. The fact that both activities involve the same medium — words on a screen — makes it easier to confuse them.
I have read probably four hundred personal essays in the last two years. I have written maybe six, and three of those were for work, which means they don’t count in the way I need them to count. The ones I wrote for work had briefs and deadlines and someone else’s expectations shaping them into existence. The ones I want to write — the ones sitting in the Notes app like patient, increasingly resentful dogs waiting to be walked — have nothing but my own desire and my own shame. That combination, it turns out, is not a great engine.
What We’re Really Consuming
There is a difference between reading for craft and reading for feeling, and I have been telling myself I’m doing the former when I’m mostly doing the latter. What I want, when I open another essay, is not to learn how it was constructed. What I want is to feel the thing the writer made me feel — that specific recognition, that oh, you too? — and then to have that feeling count as evidence that I am engaged with writing, that I am part of the conversation, that I am doing the work even though the work is writing and I am not writing.
This is the part where I’d like to say something about how the internet has turned vulnerability into content. I think that’s true, but it’s also too easy, too general, and it lets me off the hook. The internet has turned everything into content. What’s more specific, and more uncomfortable, is that I have turned other people’s vulnerability into a substitute for my own. I am consuming their courage as a way to avoid my own. I am reading about their dead parents, their divorces, their shame, their bodies, their money, their specific and unflattering Tuesday afternoons. And I am using the fact that I cried as proof that I am capable of emotional honesty, when the actual proof would be sitting down and writing the essay about my own father that I have been circling for a year.
The Authors Guild recently updated their guidance on what makes writing worth preserving — not just technically proficient, but human, rooted in what they call “your original voice, thinking, and creativity.” They’re worried about AI and about what happens when authentic human writing becomes “a rare luxury good” (AI Best Practices for Authors – The Authors Guild). I share that worry, but I also have to admit that I’m part of the problem in a different way. I’m not replacing human writing with AI. I’m replacing my own writing with other people’s writing, and calling it research.
Pew Research has found that Americans report feeling “worn out” by media consumption while simultaneously believing that staying informed is “crucial” (News Habits & Media – Research and data from Pew Research Center). That paradox — exhausted by consuming, guilty about stopping, convinced that stopping means you’ve failed some obligation — is exactly the shape of my reading habit. I feel worn out by other people’s essays. I feel guilty for not reading more of them. I feel that reading them is essential to being a writer. And I am not writing.
The Specific Shame of the Half-Finished Draft
Let me tell you about the essay I keep almost writing. It’s about my father. It’s about a specific afternoon when I was fourteen and he said something to me in a hardware store that I didn’t understand until I was thirty-three. I have the image — the fluorescent lights, the smell of mulch, the specific way he held a bag of screws — and I have the feeling, which is something like grief but for a person who is still alive. I know what the essay is about. I have known for a year.
What I don’t have is the draft. What I have is a bullet point that says “Draft: the time Dad said X at the hardware store — expand.” The word “expand” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. It implies there is something to expand from, when really there is just a memory and a feeling and the conviction that if I could just sit down and write it, it would become something worth reading.
But here’s the thing I’ve been avoiding saying, even to myself. I am afraid that it wouldn’t. I am afraid that the essay in my head — the one that is so vivid and so right that it almost doesn’t need to be written — would become, in the actual writing, something smaller and clunkier and more ordinary. That the feeling would flatten into sentences. That the thing that feels so true inside me would become, on the page, just another essay about a dead-ish relationship with a parent, the kind I have read four hundred versions of in the last two years.
That fear is not unreasonable. Writing is, in fact, the process of turning feelings into sentences, and sentences are never as big as feelings. But the fear is also extremely convenient, because it means I never have to find out. I can keep the essay in the Notes app, where it remains perfect and unwritten. I can keep reading other people’s essays, where they have done the brave and stupid thing of actually writing theirs. And I can cry in my car and call it engagement.
Admiring Honesty in Others Is Not the Same as Practicing It
I want to be clear about something. I am not talking about the value of reading. Reading is good. Reading widely is good. Reading essays that make you feel less alone in your specific mess is, I think, one of the few genuinely good things about the internet. I am not arguing that I should stop reading. I am arguing that I have confused reading with doing, and that the confusion serves a purpose.
The purpose is this. Reading someone else’s honest essay lets me feel honest by proximity. I am not the one who said the embarrassing thing about my father in a hardware store. I am not the one who admitted to crying in the car, or to ghosting a friend, or to the specific shame of buying vegetables I know I will let rot. But I read the person who did, and I cried, and the crying felt like evidence. See, I’m capable of feeling. See, I’m open. See, I’m the kind of person who engages with real writing about real life.
But I’m not the one who wrote it. And the gap between admiring honesty and producing it is the entire distance between my Notes app and a published essay. I have been standing on the admiring side of that gap for two years, feeling good about myself.
This is where I should probably name what keeps happening. I’ve been circling around it for paragraphs, which is, come to think of it, exactly what I do in the Notes app. I have a friend who writes for a living — actually writes, actually publishes — and she once told me that the difference between people who write and people who don’t is not talent and not discipline. It’s tolerance for the ugly draft. The willingness to write something bad and look at it and not abandon it. She said this while eating a salad, and I nodded like I understood, and then I went home and did not write anything for three weeks.
The thing I haven’t been able to do is tolerate the version of the essay that is worse than the one in my head. And reading other people’s finished essays — polished, edited, structurally sound — has made that tolerance worse, not better. Every good essay I read raises the bar for what I think my essay needs to be before it earns the right to exist. Every beautiful sentence someone else wrote is a sentence I am now sure I cannot write, and so I don’t write any sentences, and the Notes app stays where it is.
Naming the Loop Doesn’t Break It
I have been in therapy for three years, and one of the things I have learned is that naming a pattern is not the same as changing it. This is disappointing, because naming is much easier and feels more like progress. I can say “I am consuming other people’s vulnerability to avoid my own” and feel the click of recognition, and that click feels like a step. But I have said versions of this sentence to my therapist at least four times, and each time I say it, I am saying it about a slightly different manifestation of the same problem. The naming is not fixing anything. It is just making the pattern more articulate.
What I need, if I’m being honest — and I’m not sure I am, because being honest is the whole point and also the whole problem — is a way to tolerate the gap between the essay in my head and the essay I could actually write. Something that would let me generate the ugly draft without the expectation that it arrive polished. I have thought about trying a structured approach — something like an unsloppy story tool that helps you get the rough thing out before you judge it — but I haven’t tried it yet, because trying it would mean admitting that I need help writing. I have built an identity around being someone who can write, and the gap between that identity and the reality of my Notes app is the most embarrassing thing about me.
Which is, of course, exactly the kind of thing that would make a good essay.
Still in the Car
I should probably tell you that after I finished reading that essay in the CVS parking lot, I went inside and bought allergy medicine and a bag of pretzels. Then I drove home. Then I sat on my couch and opened the Notes app one more time and looked at the bullet point about my father and the hardware store, and I did not write anything.
I did close the app, though. And I did sit there for a minute without opening anything else. And I said out loud, to no one, in the way you do when you are alone and slightly unhinged by your own circularity: “You’re just reading instead of writing.”
That’s it. That’s the thing I named. It didn’t fix anything. I didn’t go home and write the essay about my father. I didn’t delete the Notes app or commit to a daily writing practice or do any of the things that would make this story have a tidy arc. I just sat with the fact that I have been consuming the thing I should be producing, and that I know it, and that knowing it hasn’t stopped me.
But I am writing this. Right now. This is something. It’s not the essay about my father, and it’s not the essay about crying in the car, and it’s not any of the seven bullet points in the file. It’s this — an essay about not writing essays, which is either the most hypocritical thing I’ve ever done or the first honest thing I’ve written in a year. I’m not sure which. I’m not sure it matters.
The car is still running. The air conditioning is still on. The Notes app is still closed. But I opened something else — this document, this page — and I wrote on it, and it is not good, and it is not the essay I keep almost writing, but it exists. It is a sentence on a page instead of a bullet point in a phone. And for right now, in this specific, unremarkable, unoptimized moment, that has to be enough. I don’t know what comes after this. I don’t know if I’ll write again tomorrow or if this becomes another thing I started and abandoned. But I wrote this. And I’m going to leave it there, unfinished, the way most things actually are.