Launching this newsletter has been a living, breathing exercise in doubt.
I have literally lost sleep over this. No self-pity party—just the truth.
My core contention is that we cannot banish doubt, but we can accommodate it.
And accommodation can feel uncomfortable because it requires change.
To accommodate is to shift; something has to give.
I’m picturing the slim snake swallowing the fat rat. The snake’s ambition is huge and therefore the meal takes a while to digest.
Doubt asks: Why did I ever think I could pull this off?
Making room for doubt means giving those digestive juices time to work their magic while you keep on keeping on.
The more I dwell on this topic, the more I feel like the girl clutching a hammer until everything looks like a nail. (Can I hold the hammer while also digesting the rat? Hmm.)
Case in point: I was struck by this recent admission from Errol Morris, one of the giants of contemporary documentary filmmaking, as reported by David Marchese in the New York Times.
“I think my whole life has been dominated by feeling like I’m a fraud of some kind… How is my work different than painting by numbers? Is it that different? Thinking you’re a fraud may be similar to thinking that you don’t know what you’re doing. I don’t know, really, what I’m doing.”
Long may our doubts bloom.