Writing something small can be hard. I don't mean a tweet or a text but a Thing™ of some kind, something that's not a huge piece with a thesis for each section and a table of contents, but still has a few parts and some order and means something.

I reckon at some point in professional middle-manager world, I got caught up in a kind of "bullet-point writing style," which is professionally practical but not the way I want to live my entire life. And whenever I break out of these easy structures, there's the fear of doing "art" or "theory" and comparing myself quite unfavorably to professional writers, artists, or theorists, who write these incredible things like it's nothing.

Or I end up crafting my small thought into the bones of some grand opus, and then I lose interest or just don't have time for the commitment. So I skip straight to the unwieldy opus, without ever just writing the small thing down.

But winds are changing. I'm changing. I'm playing and singing every day, even though I'm a little embarrassed. I learned a TikTok dance and I'll probably learn a few more. I showed off my app on social media, and got some nice feedback. I learned some digital painting and made a couple of cute characters for the app who are learning languages together. I don't want this kind of thing to be a barrier for me; I don't want to worry if it's too loud or too annoying or too try-hard; I just want to write my little thoughts and put them on my little website.

I do have a journal for private thoughts, and I like it – but some things want to be said in public, just because they are public things. Meanwhile, Twitter is dying. I don't know where I'll want to put my small thoughts a year from now, but before I learn to shoehorn them into some new platform and format I want to at least confront this fear – why is it so hard to just write something on, my own site (which no one reads), and put it out there?

In just one day you can go from: too bashful to be heard singing or seen dancing, too shy to walk the way you want to walk and wear clothes that say a little more, too afraid to let your voice rise to another pitch and fall back down throughout our conversation – it's exhausting and frankly boring. I'm growing too tired to keep on shrinking from that fear that something I'm doing might be creative, might be seen as taking effort, being a Big Thing but failing to match professional quality.

So I'm going to practice this: just, writing something small, and letting it out. Maybe I will learn to love the fear. Maybe it will go away entirely, or fade to a more appropriate size. Or maybe I will succeed with other things first, like if I just end up singing and dancing more, and then all this anxiety about writing and being judged just ends up feeling kind of small.