It can be a curse to have a thin skin. For a writer, it is deadly. If you need to be liked by all the people all of the time, writing is impossible. Too often I find myself wrestling with my need to be liked and my need to write honestly.

In The Courage To Write, Ralph Keyes says, “If you’re not scared, you’re not writing.” Lately I’ve been scared to death, afraid of exposing too much of my private life and afraid of hurting people through my writing. The result has been a big fat case of writer’s block, not what Keyes had in mind.

To do a decent job blogging you’ve got to take the risk to put yourself out there. To be a good psychologist, you give people hope by saying, “Yes, I’ve been there,” disclosing just enough of your story to connect with theirs, while keeping good boundaries. I’m a psychologist blogger so I try to do both, walking the tight rope without ever betraying my patients’ confidence or privacy.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t hurt people in the process, family and friends in particular. When that happens I wish someone would just shoot me with a tranquilizer gun like they used on the elephants in Wild Kingdom. The guilt is that overwhelming. Anyone who writes publicly about life (and isn’t a complete narcissistic jerk) knows what I’m talking about.

Personal apologies will be made to those I know I’ve hurt with the hope of forgiveness and if not that, understanding, and if not that, an agreement to live and let live. To say I will never hurt anyone ever again would be an empty promise because I am human and a writer and I can’t stop being either.

Now I get what Keyes was saying. He may as well say, “If you’re not scared, you’re not living,” or “If you’re not scared, you’re not in love.” The shame isn’t in being scared. It’s in letting the fear stop you.

This video by Therese Borchard, of Beyond Blue, helped me get off the writer’s block, see my way through the guilt and start writing again.