Hey Jessica,

This is great advice! I actually found your post after deleting one of my most recent posts on a whim. Maybe I was being too self critical, but when I thought about what I had written in the post, I felt that I was being insincere and a humblebrag. And I also realized that maybe I deleted it because I was self-conscious about what other people would think of me after reading that piece. I deleted a piece of my truth because I cared too much about what other people might think about me. But maybe my intuition was right as well — maybe the whole time when I was writing I was being disingenuous and was trying to embody a persona that I wanted readers to see me as.

Who knows — I haven’t really decided what was the right thing to do, but your post certainly helped me see the merit of keeping posts around even though we might see them as bad because no one reads them. I love this line:

“If you believe that a story isn’t your best work, go in and edit it. Don’t give up on your hard work. Make it better. There is a reason you wanted to share that message and you shouldn’t be quiet because people aren’t listening right now”

Because the things we write once will never be perfect — writing will always be a process of reaching toward perfection, yet never actually reaching it.