Joan Westenberg has been on a roll lately. All of their new essays are worth reading, but I particularly enjoyed The Unbearable Lightness of Cringe, which reads as full-throated entreaty to overcome our fear of other peoples’ judgements, and just make and share the damn thing!

A truth (widely known) that most people won’t say out loud: your worst tweet is still better than your best internal monologue. Your rough draft is more useful than your perfect idea. Your awkward podcast episode reaches more people than the one you never record.

Once you understand that, you stop filtering yourself through the imagined judgments of people who don’t matter.