Blog Post #400: Still Learning to Be Less Self-Conscious

This is post number 400. Not because I had to, but because I keep finding myself in the writing.

Eight years of showing up with words. Some short, some rambling, some sharp, some scattered. But all of them carrying pieces of me.

The number itself isn’t the victory. What matters is what the words have pulled out of me, forced me to face, and sometimes given back when I thought I had nothing left.

Somewhere along the way, I noticed something:

Writing for other people makes you more self-conscious.

Writing for yourself makes you less.

That’s a strange thing to admit at #400, because you’d think I’d be writing by now with perfect confidence. Truth is—I still catch myself wondering how it will land, if it will resonate, if it will be “liked.”

But I’ve learned that comfort doesn’t come from the applause.

It comes from the discomfort of showing up real.

Two million followers won’t make you less self-conscious. Neither will 400 posts. But each time I’ve chosen authenticity over performance, I’ve walked away lighter. A little freer. A little more myself.

So #400 isn’t about an audience. It’s about clarity.

It’s about knowing that even when I step away for a season, even when the words go silent, I’m still being shaped.

And when I return, it’s not to prove something.

It’s simply to stand in my own skin.

Four hundred posts don’t stand here on their own. They’re stacked on the voices that encouraged me, the readers who cared enough to follow, and even the ones no longer alive who still feel close when I write. Each post has been its own small piece, but together they’ve become something larger than I could’ve planned. And for that, I’m grateful.

And fittingly, this post carries Picture #400 from the collection I began at the very start. What began as a simple practice — one picture, one moment, one story at a time — has grown to over a thousand. But this one feels like it was always waiting for today.