Good As a Verdict

I remember when I used to write with no other intention in mind than to get the feelings out… to lay them bare and leave them alone, like setting something heavy down and trusting it wouldn’t follow me. I would spill myself onto the page like dirty water poured from a cup that had been sitting too long, letting the sediment settle somewhere, anywhere that wasn’t inside my body anymore. I’d close the notebook and feel lighter, like my insides had been dusted clean, like I could breathe without that tight, burning pressure behind my ribs. Writing wasn’t a performance then. It wasn’t curation or offering or proof of anything. It wasn’t something to be measured, revised, or weighed for its worth. It was a place to put the ache so it didn’t live in my chest anymore, so it didn’t press its thumb into my throat or follow me into sleep. The page didn’t ask me who would read it. It didn’t ask me if it was polished or profound or even pretty. It didn’t flinch at my mess or recoil from my honesty. It didn’t need a thesis or a moral or a neat ending. It just held me… steady, silent, unconditional. Somewhere along the way, quietly and without ceremony, that changed for me, and I didn’t notice it happening until the page started looking back at me, judging me like an audience instead of a refuge.

I decided to start this blog after a great deal of thought. I knew that meant I had decided to share the inner demons I didn’t want to hold anymore and offer to have someone else sit across from them. In a sense, I was allowing my demons to talk to all of you, to hear my truth through their lens. And the moment something becomes shared, it becomes watched. It’s like stepping out of a dark room and realizing there are eyes everywhere, measuring the way you stand, the way you breathe. It becomes weighed, placed on an invisible scale I didn’t know I was carrying, where every word had to justify its existence. I started asking questions that had nothing to do with truth and everything to do with worth. Is this good enough? Will someone misunderstand this? Will this hurt someone I care about? Will it sound trite, or dramatic, or like I’m asking for something I don’t deserve? I began pre-reading my own pain through imagined reactions, bracing for flinches that hadn’t even happened yet. I didn’t notice I was doing this at first… that’s the sneakiest part of it, the way self-censorship slips in wearing the mask of maturity, the way fear learns the language of responsibility and calls itself discernment. It felt noble, careful, even loving, when really it was just my voice slowly learning to whisper instead of speak.

It wasn’t until my therapist read through my submitted journal entries for the month that something finally cracked open. She flipped through the pages slowly, thoughtfully, the way she always does… like she was listening for something beneath the words, like she knew there was a pulse hiding there. The room was quiet except for the soft sound of paper turning, each page feeling heavier than the last, as if my insides were being handled without gloves. Then she looked up and asked, almost casually, “Which of these did you post?” I didn’t hesitate. I didn’t even think about it. The answer came out too easily, too rehearsed. “Oh. None of them,” I said. “These aren’t good enough for that.” Her head snapped up… not dramatically, not theatrically, but enough that I noticed. Enough that the air in the room shifted, thickened, like pressure before a storm. These aren’t good enough. The words hung there between us, ugly and exposed, and for the first time I heard them the way someone else would… less like discernment and more like a verdict.

She didn’t respond right away. She just looked at me, eyebrows slightly furrowed, eyes searching… not judging, not correcting, just seeing. It felt like standing under a light that doesn’t burn but still leaves you exposed. I could almost hear the quiet hum of her thoughts, the slow turning of mental wheels as she traced the shape of what I’d just revealed without meaning to. And in that silence, something deeply uncomfortable surfaced, like a truth rising from murky water. Because what I heard myself say wasn’t humility, and it wasn’t even insecurity dressed up as modesty. It was something sharper. Something colder. A blade I’d learned to hold to my own throat and dared to call it standards. I shrugged, reflexively, the way you do when you want to outrun the weight of your own words, trying to soften it, to make it sound clever instead of cruel. “I mean… mediocrity is the greatest sin an artist can commit, right?” I offered it like a joke, like a philosophy, like a shield… hoping she’d laugh so I wouldn’t have to sit with how violently I’d just spoken about myself.

I laughed again, the thin, brittle kind of laugh followed by throat clearing that people use when they’re hoping someone will meet them halfway so they don’t have to stand alone in what they’ve just confessed. The kind of laugh that says please agree with me so this doesn’t hurt so much. But she didn’t laugh. Not even a smile. She leaned back slightly in her chair, grounding herself, creating space, and said very calmly, “I want to pause right there.” The room seemed to still, like even the air was listening. Then she asked, “Who taught you that?” And the question landed heavier than I expected, heavier than if she’d challenged me or corrected me outright. Not what made you think this, not why do you believe this, but who taught you. As if this wasn’t a passing thought at all, but a lesson I’d been carrying for years, stitched into me by hands I hadn’t yet named.

I opened my mouth to answer and realized I didn’t actually know. The belief felt ancient, inherited, like something passed down without my consent, etched into me long before I was old enough to argue with it, or even recognize it as a choice. It lived in my bones the way gravity does, unquestioned and absolute. She continued, gently but firmly, “Because what I’m hearing isn’t an artist protecting their craft. I’m hearing someone who has decided that only perfection deserves oxygen.” The words pressed against my chest, and I felt my throat tighten, that familiar constriction that comes when something true is said out loud. She went on, “You didn’t say these pieces weren’t honest. Or meaningful. Or true. You said they weren’t good enough to exist publicly. And that tells me something important.” I stared down at my hands, suddenly unable to meet her eyes. That’s when I noticed the hangnail on my thumb… raw, irritated, easy to make worse. I started picking at it gently, instinctively, knowing that if I pulled it free it would bleed, knowing I’d feel it long after the session ended, and still not quite stopping myself.

“It tells me,” she said gently, “that good has become dangerous for you.” And that’s when it clicked like a lock finally turning, like a quiet alarm going off in my chest. Good wasn’t neutral anymore. It wasn’t sufficient, safe, or kind. Good felt like standing naked in a room without being allowed to move, like exposure without transcendence. Effort stripped of redemption. Vulnerability laid bare with no promise of meaning on the other side. Good meant I tried and this is all I am, and somehow that felt worse than silence. I had decided, without ever naming it, that if my words didn’t transcend, they didn’t deserve space, not even in my own journal. That if they didn’t shimmer or ache or split something open, they were a liability. That if they were merely human, uneven, unfinished, ordinary, then they were a failure. She said, “You’d rather write nothing than write something that’s just… real.” The pause before the word real felt intentional, surgical. Then she asked, “When did this happen? How did this happen?” And I realized I didn’t know when my standards stopped being about care and turned into a demand for perfection.

And I realized she was right. Somewhere along the way, I had become someone who withholds herself unless she can be exceptional, someone who only steps forward if she’s certain she won’t be dismissed. I had learned to treat visibility like a stage instead of a doorway, to believe that if I was going to be seen, I needed to perform. I started to believe the only safe vulnerability was the kind that gets applauded… the kind that earns its keep, the kind that proves it was worth the risk. The problem was that this instinct to withhold had invaded my journal, the last place I thought I was safe from it. She looked at me then and asked, “Do you know how many people stop creating altogether because they believe this?” I shook my head, almost defensively… why would she assume I keep track of all the failures in this world, as if I hadn’t spent my life cataloging my own. “Most,” she said simply. “Because perfection isn’t a standard, it’s a silencer.” Oh. I saw what she did there. The word settled in my chest, heavy and exact. Then she said something I haven’t stopped thinking about since: “Your writing didn’t used to be about being good. It was about being free. Somewhere along the way, you traded freedom for approval and called it growth.” That one hurt… not like an insult, but like salt pressed directly into an open wound. Because it was true.

I realized what I had become in that moment… not a writer who had evolved, but a writer who had learned to flinch. Someone who braces before every sentence, who scans the room for danger even when the room is empty, even when the only witness is a blank page. I had turned my own voice into something that needed permission, something that had to pass inspection before it was allowed to exist. I edited myself into silence and called it integrity, mistaking restraint for wisdom, disappearance for maturity. I left that session knowing something had to shift, because the page was never meant to be a stage where I audition for worth…. it was always meant to be a refuge, a place to collapse without being watched. Good was never supposed to be the enemy of truth, and yet I had weaponized it, using it to keep myself small in the one place that was always meant to protect me from that feeling.

Maybe mediocrity isn’t the greatest sin an artist can commit. Maybe the real tragedy is abandoning your voice because it didn’t arrive dressed as brilliance, because it didn’t sparkle enough to justify its own existence. Maybe the bravest thing I can do right now is let my writing be human again… uneven, unimpressive, alive. Maybe the point was never to be good. Maybe the point was to be honest… and stay.

And somewhere in that realization, the question rose up and refused to be ignored: when did I become the same person, the ultimate silencer, I keep writing about?