“Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do—the actual act of writing—turns out to be the best part. It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony.”

This week marks a year since I read a blog post somewhere written by someone that extolled the virtues of writing consistently.

At the time, it seemed practical; wishing to keep up with family and friends back home yet unwilling to message each person all the time individually, I thought that writing was the best way to keep in touch. Furthermore, it would kill two additional birds with the same stone: Neither would vocabulary skills erode nor would I mentally atrophy from lack of reflection. The last thing I wanted was for the year to become a stagnant echo chamber of lost musings and seeds of ideas sown on rock.

But along the journey, I noticed something else happening entirely and organically. Rereading past essays would find me laughing at obvious insecurities and character flaws at some points but experiencing moments of frisson with others. Scattered among the paragraphs of what one author calls the “shitty first drafts” were small glimpses beneath the surface at the unfiltered. Of fears and aspirations, both light and dark, and of the truth straining to rise to the surface.

There have been weeks where it has admittedly been mostly just shit. Of course, manure is what fertilizes soil for flowers to grow. Wow that was a horribly trite analogy. But the idea stands. My current hypothesis is that the ratio of shitty to great writing is proportional to the ratio between the boring and thrilling moments of life. Yet at the start I expected more, finding only much later that the search for literary perfection stunts the process, nipping creativity at the bud, depriving the words of its force. You can’t force perfect writing. But you can force shitty writing.

When you narrow it down, the fear of writing shitty is just writing shy. Shyness, like its more pernicious cousin fear, is the nagging sensation that you have nothing to say, nothing to contribute. Banishing shyness from writing paradoxically necessitates it receding from everyday life. The search of things to write about provides a convenient excuse to do things, initiate action, takes risks, and explore. It forces you to sit, hand rubbing on chin, knee crossed over knee leaning back in a chair, and think more closely about life as it happens.

In her short treatise on writing, Anne Lamott tells us to “remember that you own what happens to you.” But if you make no attempt to remember, there is nothing left to own or cherish. Each newsletter has been a small attempt to claim what is mine by experience but otherwise forfeited by a lack of reflection.

At some point, I became less a writer than a typist. Each week, I would sit and listen. To friends, teachers, surroundings, and most of all, to myself. As if my fingers were my secretaries that would type a memo each week and tell the rest of the body what the heck was going on. This required taking risks—addressing fears that might otherwise have been suppressed and expounding ideas the might offend. “Nothing should really scare a writer more than the moment when they are no longer scared,” wrote Captain America and Black Panther scriptwriter and author Ta-Nehisi Coates. I hope that I continue hold these fears while I stare at blank paper in the future.

Thank you to the 130 of you who have endured my weekly ramblings. It is my hope that you saw through the written haze at whatever nuggets of truth resonated with you. Thank you for responding with support and constructive criticism when both were desperately needed. Thank you for pushing me to chase the lions in my life in search of true stories, whether you realized your eyes were motivating to me or not. Because in the end, writing is about trying to fit words to the truths wandering around us.