On Being Kind To Yourself

If you aren't kind to yourself, you ain't gonna last long as a writer.

This is a subject that deeply resonates with me, because I'm convinced that almost all of my writing sucks. And when you're convinced your writing sucks, well, not only are you not being kind to yourself, you're pretty much guaranteeing yourself a life of misery and inadequacy.

What's all the more shocking is how incredibly easy is it to make utterly false, unfair and cruel comparisons with our writing. We compare ourselves, unreasonably, to history's greatest authors. We compare ourselves unfairly to well-known authors who employ teams of editors to help them punch up their prose.

Worst of all, we compare ourselves to ourselves. To an ideal that we may never reach, or to the best writing that we wrote in our past. And so on.

Are any of these comparisons fair? Or logical? Can everything you write be the best thing you ever wrote?

Don't suffer needlessly. Be more kind to yourself than that.