I don’t remember any pre-calculus, but I remember every mildly awkward sentence I said in 2022.

Not the important conversations, either. I remember the joke that landed slightly wrong at a birthday dinner. The strangely aggressive “Are we done?” I said to a professor after a meeting. The exact moment I told someone “miss you” before hanging up, despite several compelling indicators that they did not, in fact, miss me back. I remember everything about these moments, down to what I was wearing, where I was sitting, and the spiral that followed soon after.

A few years ago, during my first performance review as a Resident Assistant, my supervisors told me my greatest strength was self-awareness.

I remember thinking: That’s a kind way to say “crippling anxiety.“

Self-awareness is one of those traits everyone treats as unquestionably virtuous. It belongs to the same category as patience, humility, and returning your shopping cart to the designated area instead of leaving it diagonally across two parking spaces. Therapists recommend it, employers praise it, and friends bask it in because self-aware people are usually sensitive to others’ feelings.

Self-aware people often make everyone around them more comfortable largely because they are never fully comfortable themselves.

They are, generally speaking, easier to argue with because part of them is already worried you might be right, and they care how they’re perceived by everyone at the end of the debate—not just by their own side. Self-aware people don’t want to be right; they want to have been fair, appropriately toned, emotionally intelligent, and if wrong, ideally the kind of wrong people later describe as “coming from a good place.”

Writers are especially vulnerable to this kind of thinking.

Once you’ve spent enough time staring at sentences until they become either brilliant or humiliating—usually humiliating—you start noticing things most people move past: shifts in tone, awkward pauses, accidental implications, and the difference between what someone says, what they mean, and what they were trying not to say. 

Because that’s fundamentally what writing is: paying attention to the things most people move through too quickly to notice. It’s thinking through a conversation word by word, then sentence by sentence, then silence by silence, ruminating on rhythm, subtext, contradiction—any evidence of something sitting just underneath the surface.

A conversation happens in real time, then again on the walk home, then again in analysis, then again while retelling it to someone else. By the fourth replay, you’re no longer remembering the interaction itself so much as your interpretation of it—the tightened, edited cut your brain pieced together afterward. Cleaner, more coherent, and usually far less forgiving than the original moment ever was.

You become aware of your own voice in the same way you become aware of breathing: Once you notice it, you immediately start doing it worse. You’ll be halfway through telling a story at dinner with your closest friends, who have always loved you dearly, and suddenly think: 

Am I talking too much?

Why did I use that word specifically?

Did I interrupt them or was that a socially acceptable overlap? 

After the last one, you’ll spend the next week trying to seem less like a person who interrupts people—by contributing exactly 43% less. Meanwhile everyone else gets home, takes off their shoes, and turns on the TV. 

Writers, unfortunately, rarely experience anything only once. Sometimes, being a writer feels indistinguishable from recreational overthinking. The problem is that eventually this habit extends beyond the page.

It’s not difficult to apply the same scrutiny you direct toward yourself to your writing.

I’ve always loved writing because it rewards the exact habits that make living exhausting. Spending forty minutes mentally reassembling a conversation sounds unhealthy right up until you turn it into an essay, and dissecting every moment of your life becomes strangely respectable once it can be described as “a strong, specific voice.” The same compulsions that make living feel crowded inside my own head suddenly acquire value the moment they produce a paragraph.

That’s the weird thing about being “good” at self-reflection. People assume it leads to clarity, but often it just leads to better recognized insecurities. You become incredibly skilled at identifying your flaws while remaining strangely incapable of leaving them alone. 

It feels like standing outside yourself with a red pen, endlessly revising a draft no one else noticed needed editing—because maybe it didn’t. As a Resident Assistant, I said the right things at staff meetings, acted conscientiously toward my residents, and tried hard to make people around me feel respected. Yet at that point in my life, I genuinely could not tell the difference between self-awareness and self-hatred. All I could ever think about was when I had said the wrong thing.

That first official performance review arrived after years of unauthorized ones that happened alone in the shower. My internal monologue had the production quality of a prestige documentary, though my inner voice lacked the soothing timbre of David Attenborough; you’ve never heard a narrator so hostile toward the subject.

Self-awareness probably has less to do with constant reflection and more to do with knowing when to stop. Knowing when your guilt is self-indulgent. Knowing when you’ve learned the lesson and are now just pressing on the bruise.

Because contrary to what I used to believe, not everyone is thinking about you. 

Sometimes you do something embarrassing. Sometimes you misunderstand someone. Sometimes you’re selfish, defensive, insecure, dramatic, awkward, loud, passive aggressive, or wrong.

Congratulations on your humanity.

Healthy writing requires knowing when to stop editing before every sentence dies under the weight of its own self-consciousness. You can revise something so many times that all the life drains out of it.

People aren’t that different.