Mirror Weakness
Myers and Briggs are liars. Strengths Questing inspires a form of tilting in which the windmills exist, but the knight—errant or otherwise—does not. You are not any of the cast members of Friends, no matter what BuzzFeed tells you. Personality inventories offer concrete notions of the self to those who take them too seriously that are as much fiction as any character invented by any writer ever. I’m not implying these “tests” are irrelevant or do not reflect certain character traits we often possess. Rather, it’s what we do with the results that’s dishonest; lies coming in the form of turning very faint glimmers of the complexities comprising who we are into stable, quantifiable badges we wear at corporate mixers or excuses we use not to push into our weaknesses when that’s exactly all we need to do.
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On pressing into weakness:
I’m going to be a little lot vulnerable here. I have devoted most of my adult life to writing. And 22 years on, I can say one thing with certainty. I don’t know if I’m any good at it, and my suspicion is that I may never be more than passable.
This isn’t a case of compliment fishing. I’m not asking for people to tell me I am. Please note the lack of question marks.
Rather, I’m being as honest as I know how to be. Writing is an uncertain enterprise. I am never certain I’ll have an idea when I sit down to the keys. I am never certain the ideas I do have are worth writing. I am never certain I’ll be able to write in in such a way that does my ideas justice. I am never certain anyone else will see my stories and ideas as worth publishing, and my stack of rejections doesn’t necessarily help with that. But most of all, I am never certain what I write will matter to anyone else.
Add all that up and the fact that I don’t know if my writing is any good or not is really the most lucid conclusion I can draw.
And still I write. Maybe it’s stubbornness. Maybe it’s pride. Maybe it’s a distinct lack of creativity in that I don’t see any other options. I guess maybe I’m just too curious. About the next corner. The next idea. The next reader. Maybe it’s that I just haven’t reached the end of hope yet. So I write.