I Am Afraid To Write About Myself

I want to be a writer. Not in the distant, someday sense that allows for perpetual postponement, but with an immediacy that demands action. When I close my eyes and imagine a different version of my life, one where I’m fully alive, fully expressing — I’m writing. This isn’t a casual interest or a fleeting hobby. This is the thing that consumes me. I wake up with it. I move through my day with it hovering at the edges of my consciousness. I fall asleep with it waiting in the darkness. Sometimes it even invades my dreams. A giant hole in my heart that only writing can fill. If someone asked what I would do if nothing at all mattered, the answer forms without thought. I would write.

I’ve convinced myself that writing will save me. That somehow transforming my thoughts into words on a page will reorganize the chaos in my mind, will heal old wounds, will finally allow me to understand myself and be understood by others. I see writing as therapy, as communion, as a way to make meaning from the random events of a life. When I think about writing, I feel a physical longing, like homesickness for a place I’ve never been. I believe, with an almost religious fervor, that if I could just write — really write, honestly and fully — everything else would fall into place. The words would carry me across the vast empty space between myself and others. They would illuminate the dark corners of my mind. They would transform me from a passive observer into an active participant in my own life. They would make my existence meaningful.

The root of writing is an opinion. A perspective. A way of seeing the world that comes from somewhere. In order to write anything meaningful, I have to develop positions on things. And to justify those positions, I have to reveal their source. My story. My experiences. How I came to see things this way. I will have to write about myself, my past with all its shame, my present with all its contradictions, my shortcomings that I’ve hidden even from myself. Writing would force me to expose my truth. Every observation would be filtered through my limited perspective. Every opinion shaped by experiences I might rather forget. Every story colored by biases I might not even recognize. Even fiction would betray me. My characters would wear pieces of my face. My plots would reveal my fears. My settings would expose what I find beautiful or threatening in the world. Writing requires this terrible visibility. This willingness to be seen. This insistence on saying “here I am, this is what I think, this is how I see things.” The narcissism of it terrifies me. Who am I to believe my thoughts deserve attention? Who am I to claim that my perspective matters?

I am afraid to write about myself. I’m afraid to confront who I actually am beneath the careful self-image I’ve constructed. I’m afraid to acknowledge the gap between who I pretend to be and who I am in my most private moments. I’m afraid to name the excuses I’ve been making for years — that I don’t have time, that I need more education, that I’m waiting for the right moment. I’m afraid to admit how often I sabotage myself, how I start projects with enthusiasm only to abandon them at the first hint of difficulty. I’m afraid to face my own mediocrity, to accept that I might pour myself onto the page and discover that what emerges is ordinary, forgettable, unexceptional.

Visual by Harsh Darji

I’m afraid to write about my childhood. About the constant, low-grade anxiety of never having quite enough. I am afraid to write about my mom who lost her father in the 1993 Mumbai riots. How she is overly emotional. How I became her emotional caretaker when I was still a child myself. I am afraid to write about my dad, who struggled with his own set of problems. Some I am still afraid to name. I am afraid to write about the horrible things I did to my younger sister. The strictness. The control. The impossible standards I set. I am afraid to write about how I believed I had to be the family savior. The pressure I put on myself to study harder, achieve more, become someone worthy of our collective sacrifice. About the lies I created for friends. Vacations we never took. Possessions we never owned. Experiences I fabricated to hide our reality. I’m afraid to confront the shame I still carry in my body. This belief, lodged in my cells, that our financial struggle somehow made us less worthy as humans. I’m afraid to admit that even now, with money in my account and security in my life, I feel the ghost of that early deprivation. I catch myself hoarding opportunities. Saying yes when my soul screams no. Living from a place of fear rather than freedom.

I’m afraid to write about my relationships. About the girl I left when someone more interesting appeared, and how I never actually asked the interesting girl despite clear signs from her and her mom that they liked me and wanted me to ask her daughter out. I am afraid to examine what truly stopped me. The fear of inadequacy that whispers I’m not enough? Or the ego that insists I am the prize to be pursued? Both contradictory thoughts can exist within me simultaneously, each drowning out the other depending on the day. I’m afraid to confront the pattern that appears in every connection I form. How I build connections only to systematically destroy them when they become too intimate, too demanding, too real. I’m afraid to write about my history with therapists. How I’ve never made it past two sessions with any of them. How I always find some intellectual deficiency to justify my retreat. Some reasons why they couldn’t possibly understand the complexity of my mind. I’m afraid to write about my addictions. Not just substances but behaviors. The ways I’ve found to avoid sitting with myself. The numbing rituals that have become so familiar they feel like personality rather than choice.

I’m afraid to write about writing itself. About how difficult I find it to focus, to organize my thoughts, to translate the vivid images in my mind into coherent sentences. I’m afraid to admit how often I use AI to generate what I cannot produce myself, how I’ve come to rely on technology to compensate for what feels like a fundamental deficiency. I’m afraid to face the possibility that perhaps I’m not “naturally” a writer after all — that this thing I am chasing is a fantasy. A convenient mirage that allows me to feel special without requiring actual effort. That my romanticized vision of the writing life bears no resemblance to the reality of the discipline it demands. That I am in love with the idea of being a writer rather than the act of writing itself.

Most terrifying of all, I'm afraid to write about who I am in the world—my values and how often I fail to live up to them, the small daily betrayals of my better self, the gap between what I believe and how I actually behave. I'm afraid to examine the times I've been cruel when I could have been kind, selfish when I could have been generous, cowardly when I could have been brave. I'm afraid to face my own moral inconsistencies, the ways I justify actions that, viewed objectively, don't align with the person I want to be.

This fear extends far beyond writing. It’s really about seeing myself clearly, about stepping fully into consciousness, about taking responsibility for who I am and who I might become. It’s about abandoning the comforting fiction that someday — when I’m better, wiser, more healed — I’ll finally begin. It’s about accepting that there is no perfect version of myself waiting in the future; there is only who I am now, with all my contradictions and failures and unfulfilled potential.

I am tired of this fear. I’m exhausted by the energy it takes to avoid myself, to maintain the elaborate architecture of denial and postponement I’ve constructed. I’m weary of living at half-capacity, of speaking in a whisper when I could be using my full voice, of hiding when I could be seen. The price of safety has become too high. The cost of silence has become unbearable.

Today, I choose vulnerability over protection. I choose presence over hiding. I choose the messy truth over the comfortable lie. Not because the fear has disappeared — it hasn’t. Not because I’ve suddenly developed unshakable confidence — I haven’t. But because I’ve finally recognized that the alternative to facing this fear isn’t comfort but a different kind of pain — the pain of unlived potential, of words unsaid, of a voice that never found its true register.

I’m still afraid to write about myself. And I’m writing anyway.