I felt a particular modesty intended for personal essayists, which goes like this: You should be beautiful, write about yourself all day. Or a slightly more generous version: I could never do that – I’m very private. As if the problem with personal writing is an excess of courage rather than a lack of craft.
I have been writing about my life in public for several years now. I wrote about my family, my failures, my more shameful conviction. I can tell you with certainty that this is not an easy road. This is not the lazy way. It is, in many ways, the most technically and psychologically demanding form of writing that the internet has created, and it is systematically underestimated by almost anyone who hasn’t tried it.
The indulgence critique takes it completely backwards. Personal writing is not difficult because you have to be brave enough to share. It is difficult because you have to be competent enough to take care of others.
The problem is no one warns you
When you write about external things—politics, technology, culture—there is a natural subject-object divide. You are an observer. What you analyze is sitting there, available for examination, and your job is to say something true and useful about it. Your own psychology is largely irrelevant, or at least controllable.
When you write about your own life, that separation dissolves. You are a researcher and researcher at the same time. Each sentence involves a double act of attention: you try to see the experience clearly, given that you are the experience. The instrument of observation is also what is observed.
This is not a philosophical abstraction. This poses a very specific and practical problem: you can’t trust your own account. Not because you’re dishonest, but because memory is selective, the self-image is protective, and the version of events you carry around in your head has already been edited by years of self-explanation. The raw material of personal writing is not your life as it happens. This is your life because you have already learned to tell yourself that. And that version almost always flatters you, or at least makes you the relatable center of a story that’s far more confusing than this one.
The real work of personal writing is struggling with one’s first draft toward something more definitive. This is not modesty. This is one of the most difficult types of honesty.
Why art is invisible
Part of the underrated personal writing is that when it works, the art disappears. A good personal essay reads like someone telling you the truth—direct, unguarded, a little rough around the edges. It feels like a conversation, like a confidence, like a writer just sitting down and letting loose.
This effect is completely manufactured.
The casual confession in the third paragraph? It was probably the twentieth draft of a sentence that started out as defensive and overwrought. The detail that made the whole piece suddenly real—the particular brand of cereal, the thing someone’s hands did, the completely wrong thing that was said—took half an hour to pull from memory, suggesting the wrong version.
The end that feels inevitable?
There were probably six other endings before it that were too neat or too dark or too obvious to say something.
Private post hides your address. That’s the point. But that is why people who have never built any scaffolding think there is no scaffolding.
The ethical weight that no one talks about
There’s another dimension to this that doesn’t just involve craft: personal writing almost always involves other people.
Your stories are not just your stories. The fight you had with your partner, the way your mother looked after you that Christmas, the person who disappeared without explanation—these are all also someone else’s memories, someone else’s version of events. When you write about them, you make a unilateral decision about how to communicate the shared experience to the public. This decision carries real weight, and managing it responsibly requires a kind of ongoing ethical negotiation that most other forms of writing simply don’t require.
Some writers are concerned with getting permission, which changes the writing. Some deal with it by changing the details, which changes the truth. Some do it only by writing about people who have died or moved away or who cannot be objected to. None of these solutions are clean. They all require judgment calls with consequences.
A political columnist doesn’t need to call a senator and ask if it’s okay to mention them. He is a personal essayist writing about his father.
What the critique of indulgence is really about
I think the disdain for personal writing often has less to do with the writing and more to do with feeling uncomfortable with the intended invitation.
A personal column asks you to pry into a stranger’s inner life. He says: my experience is worth your attention. To some readers, this claim seems presumptuous, especially when the writer is not famous, if not exceptional, and is not telling a story of obvious historical importance. The average person writing about an ordinary experience can feel like a compulsion.
But this concern does something interesting. It makes the assumption that only certain lives—the dramatic ones, the important ones, the lives associated with household names—are worth public scrutiny. Personal writing is, at best, a direct challenge to this assumption. It insists that the texture of regular life, examined carefully enough and honestly enough, contains something worth knowing. Not because the writer is special, but because a serious act of self-examination creates generalizations—it forces the reader to suddenly realize something about their own experiences that they didn’t have before.
This is not modesty. That’s one of the things that literature has always been.
That’s actually the hard part
I want to be honest about what I find the hardest because I think it’s the least discussed thing.
This is not a weakness. Vulnerability is manageable after you’ve done it a few times – you find your threshold, you learn what you can let go and what’s still too raw, you develop a tolerance for short exposures to get published.
The hardest thing is to be curious about yourself without being self-absorbed. That’s a really narrow target. Very little interior and fabric is felt, but not noticeable. It’s too much, and it becomes the navel-gazing of a writer more concerned with his own emotional processing than conveying anything to anyone else.
The personal essayist must grasp a paradox: write deeply from oneself, but at the same time distance oneself from it. The goal is never your feelings. Your feelings are the starting material, the entry point, the thing that fuels the writing. But the goal is always the idea your feelings are pointing to—that if you get the sentence right, someone reading alone at midnight will feel less alone.
This balance is difficult to maintain. It requires technical skill, honest self-evaluation, and genuine interest in other people, which can coexist with the necessary selfishness of putting your own life first. It is not a balance that you can only maintain with courage.
Most posts online are easy to dismiss because most are, in fact, dismissible. But the personal essay, when it works, is one of the hardest things to fake. You can make a mock examination. You can fake the range. You can’t fake the earned, concrete, lived truth of life honestly explored on the page. You either did the work or you didn’t, and the reader always knows.
