Embarrassment Killed It Before Failure Could

There are people in my life I’ve known for YEARS who have no idea I wrote and published a book. Not because it failed. I think I just became embarrassed by the audacity of trying to write one in the first place.

And lately I’ve been thinking that embarrassment probably kills far more dreams than failure ever does, because failure at least requires trying first. Embarrassment gets there earlier. It convinces people that wanting something deeply is somehow cringe unless success is already guaranteed in advance, so instead, people quietly redirect themselves toward paths that feel safer, more respectable, easier to explain at dinner parties, LinkedIn networking events, and family gatherings where everybody subtly wants reassurance that your life makes sense.

Which is strange, because I used to LOOOVE writing.

Not in some dramatic “I was born to be an author” kind of way, but in a very normal, obsessive-kid way where making things up just felt exciting. My friend and I used to carry around black composition notebooks and spend free periods writing separately before immediately interrupting each other to pitch plot twists back and forth like we were two executives in a tiny writers’ room nobody asked for. Looking back now, I think what I really loved wasn’t even necessarily the writing itself. It was the feeling of making something out of nothing and then watching another person light up because they could suddenly see it too.

But eventually pRactIcaLity enters the chat. At some point, people start explaining life to you almost entirely through employability, and you begin hearing the same warnings over and over again: writers struggle financially, artists are unstable, filmmakers are broke, creative careers are risky. Slowly, almost without realizing it, you start reorganizing your inner world into two categories:things you love and things that make sense.

By high school, I had already started trying to reshape the dream into something more “reasonable.” Journalism felt like a compromise because people always NEED news, right? Storytelling still mattered there. Writing still mattered there. I wrote for the school newspaper, got deeply into speech and debate, loved figuring out how ideas emotionally land with people, and why certain stories stick while others disappear immediately.

Eventually, I got selected to attend this journalism conference in DC, where they picked one student from each state, and I remember being genuinely excited because these were REAL journalists. Adults who had somehow managed to build entire lives around writing.

And then almost every person on stage started talking about how financially difficult the industry was. They talked about instability and burnout and shrinking newsrooms and how hard it was to sustain long term, and I remember sitting there slowly feeling that familiar emotional deflation of:oh.Okay.Here we go again.

Which is funny looking back, because I don’t think they were trying to discourage us. They were probably trying to prepare us. But when you’re young, warnings sink deeper than nuance does, and I quietly translated the entire experience into:This dream is unrealistic, too.

So I pivoted toward “real jobs.” Which, honestly, still feels like one of the funniest phrases we collectively use as a society, because WHAT even is a real job??? As if entire categories of human beings are just participating in elaborate side quests while other people are doing Official Adulthood correctly.

In college, I started exploring consulting, tech, investment banking, all the things ambitious students are supposed to look into when they’re trying to become employable adults. And honestly, there’s nothing wrong with any of those careers. I met incredibly smart people doing meaningful work. But I also remember this strange feeling of watching everyone optimize themselves toward success while quietly wondering whether they actually felt alive inside any of it.

Maybe some people did. But for me, something always felt slightly disconnected, like I could logically understand why a path made sense while simultaneously feeling absolutely no emotional pull toward it whatsoever. I guess in that way, for the first time, I wasn’t a very good professionally trained hoop jumper.

And the weird thing is that even while I was trying to become more practical, writing just kept sneaking back into my life anyway.

Looking back now, I honestly think storytelling kept leaking out of me no matter how many times I tried to redirect myself toward something more employable. In college, while simultaneously writing an 80-page thesis, I somehow also decided it would be a GREAT idea to design an entire 70-page magazine from scratch, which in retrospect feels like a genuinely unhinged way for a person to spend their time. And after traveling around Europe for four months, I came home and literally designed a printed newspaper just to recount the trip because, apparently, my brain refuses to experience anything without eventually trying to turn it into a story.

And the embarrassing part is that I still kept treating writing like some cute side hobby, instead of maybe the most obvious pattern in my entire life.

At one point, I took a break from school. I even titled it “Gap Year 2.0” … you know, since I had already taken another gap year. My parents hated it. But I insisted I needed this time because I had no idea what I was doing in college, and during my second gap year, mostly because I suddenly had endless free time and nobody was asking me about practicality for once, I accidentally started writing a book.

And I really do mean accidentally.

I wasn’t strategically trying to become an author. I didn’t have a publishing plan. This was before ChatGPT, too, which honestly feels important to mention because it was literally just me sitting alone trying to make sense of things through writing, and weirdly, once I started, the entire thing poured out of me. Over 40,000 words in a couple of months. Actual chapters. Actual themes. Sentences that somehow connected into something coherent and emotionally true.

The book was called Creative @ Work, and looking back now, I think what I was really trying to understand was how creative people carve out lives for themselves without completely disconnecting from who they are, which is honestly still the exact same question I’m trying to answer now. Funny how life does that.

The surprising part was that people actually bought it.

It ended up in bookstores. My parents were incredibly proud of me, significantly more proud than I was of myself. One night, they invited a colleague over for dinner and excitedly told him I had written a book that was selling copies and had ended up in Barnes & Noble, and he laughed and said something like:

“Oh, nice, so are you gonna become one of those starving writers living on your parents’ couch?”

And what’s strange is that I genuinely don’t think he meant to be cruel. But I swear, something inside me immediately shut down. Not even embarrassed by the book itself necessarily, but embarrassed by the AUDACITY of trying.

And I think that’s the part I keep coming back to lately because people talk all the time about fear of failure, but honestly, I think fear of embarrassment kills far more dreams before they even have a chance to fail. Failure at least requires trying first. Embarrassment shuts things down much earlier than that. It convinces people that wanting something deeply is somehow ~cringe~ unless success is guaranteed in advance, so instead they slowly redirect themselves toward paths that feel SAFER, more RESPECTABLE, EASIER to explain at dinner parties.

And to be clear, I’m not anti-pRactIcaLity. Please please please pay your rent. Please have health insurance. I’m not sitting here telling everyone to quit their jobs and move into a warehouse to make experimental films. But I do think something strange happens when people become so focused on employability that they lose touch with the things that naturally make them feel most ALIVE.

Eventually, you become incredibly good at consuming other people’s creativity while quietly suppressing your own. You know how to analyze films, recommend books, build taste, recognize great work, but making something yourself feels terrifying because creation requires REVEALING your inner world instead of safely reacting to everyone else’s.

At the same time, though, maybe the things we return to over and over again, despite embarrassment, despite practicality, despite trying to optimize ourselves away from them, are trying to tell us something.

Because even now, years later, after spending so much time trying to become a more practical version of myself …

I’m still sitting here writing this.