Never ever have I ever shared my writing for the express purpose of being critiqued and judged by others. School papers and submissions to be edited for the magazines and blogs I have written for over the course of my life don’t count to me for some reason.

This year I enrolled in a memoir writing class especially because I would be workshopped. The class is all online and run by a writer whom I have followed on social media for a while so the process seems trustworthy. The plan is like this. I would utilize the class and workshopping to polish some pages to submit to a writing workshop I want to attend in the summer. Then I hopefully will have more pages and maybe even may have something semi-publishable – even if just a chapter as an essay by 2019.

For the class, I was in the first group to be workshopped so naturally I procrastinated in turning over what to me felt like a draft of a first chapter of a memoir. I was nervous submitting something not just for the instructors but also to my fellow students who didn’t know shit about me save what I wrote in the class intro.

The biggest thing was of course my fear of being found out as a horrible shitty writer and having to give up as a 40 year old woman on my lifelong dream of being a “real” writer (never mind that I’ve been published before – fears can be irrational).

Spoiler alert – I’m not a shitty writer. At least not in the opinion of other people who are probably just as scared to be found out as shitty writers (I’m not saying they are). The feedback I received from my fellow students and instructor was actually (mostly) really helpful and seemed to follow common threads in terms of areas I need to work on.

This means now more writing, more polishing and then more submitting for judgement.