One of the most disorienting experiences has to be realizing that the skills you take for granted might actually be important and have value.

I think sometimes imposter syndroming is intellectually safer than allowing yourself to feel any sort of confidence.

Or I guess I should say feels intellectually safer. Anyway, sometimes it feels safer not to believe in yourself than to shoot as high as you think you could and face the real possibility of failure.

This might be a really obvious thought, but it just occurred to me that the difference between writing fiction and nonfiction is that in fiction, you construct a world and a story, and your job is to create the illusion that there is stuff going on outside the boundaries of what you’re showing, or that the world is somewhat messier than the way you’ve depicted it.

When you write nonfiction, you do the opposite. The real world is an inherently messy place, and your job as the writer becomes trying to construct this illusion of order through what you choose to include (or not), how you choose to present things, and how you order or juxtapose different events and/or ideas.

I just had the striking realization that my tendency to have one foot in and one foot out of multiple disciplines might have something to do with my tendency to want to write about them.

Being an essayist is all about having an interesting perspective, and being scattered is definitely a way to do that. How good of a way to do that is it? I don’t know, but I’ve yet to run out of ideas.