The Examined Writer — Issue #1
On uncertainty, identity, and the discipline of staying
Welcome to The Examined Writer, a space to slow down, reflect, and treat your attention with care.
This is a new format I’m experimenting with — something to mix things up and sit alongside the essays and reports I’ve been sending regularly. I hope you enjoy it.
A Small Observation
We don’t avoid thinking because it’s hard.
We avoid it because it threatens identities we’ve already committed to.
Real thinking asks something costly of us. It requires opening ourselves to ideas that unsettle the stories we’ve been standing on—the beliefs that paved the ground beneath our lives.
When I realized I was part of the problem—living a life of performance, and through my writing encouraging others to do the same—I lost my footing. The framework I’d been using to understand success and fulfillment collapsed beneath me.
But facing that collapse, and choosing not to retreat from it, was the beginning of something I could finally stand on. It was the moment I stopped performing and began living in closer alignment with what I knew to be true.
A Simple Question
What am I trying to protect by believing this?
The other day, I found myself wondering why it took me so long to start this project. I knew I wanted to write. I knew I wanted to build something of my own. And yet, I kept postponing it.
What I see more clearly now is that what held me back wasn’t a lack of direction, but a belief: that I needed to know exactly what I was writing about before beginning. That belief was a form of self-protection. It spared me from appearing uncertain in front of readers.
Only later did I recognize the mistake. Clarity doesn’t precede writing — it’s produced by it. It emerges through the act itself,
A Short Passage
Every day—as we interact with family, friends, acquaintances, and strangers—we ask ourselves if “what we see is what we get.” And all those other people are asking the same about us!
Being cautious about the degree of congruence between outer appearance and inner reality is one of our species’ most ancient ways of seeking safety in a perilous world. “Is this person the same on the inside as he or she seems to be on the outside?” Children ask this about their parents, students about their teachers, employees about their supervisors, patients about their physicians, and citizens about their political leaders. When the answer is yes, we relax, believing that we are in the presence of integrity and feeling secure enough to invest ourselves in the relationship and all that surrounds it.
But when the answer is no, we go on high alert. Not knowing who or what we are dealing with and feeling unsafe, we hunker down in a psychological foxhole and withhold the investment of our energy, commitment, and gifts. Students refuse to take the risks involved in learning, employees do not put their hearts into their work, patients cannot partner with physicians in their own healing, and citizens disengage from the political process. The perceived incongruity of inner and outer—the inauthenticity that we sense in others, or they in us—constantly undermines our morale, our relationships, and our capacity for good work.
A Hidden Wholeness — Parker Palmer
A Familiar Trap
The brain seeks closure and resolution. But most questions worth asking demand that we sit with them for a long time.
A Gentle Practice
This week, when confusion or uncertainty shows up, give yourself one extra minute to sit with the discomfort before reaching for your phone—or whatever habit you use to escape.
Often, our habits move faster than our awareness. Changing them begins with a small act of noticing: catching yourself mid-pattern and choosing to pause instead.