: Re: How do you get over the fear of exposing yourself in writing? I really feel like writing, in all its forms, is a very nice way to express myself especially since I'm an introvert, but I'm

@Jessie137

This sounds like a variation of Impostor Syndrome.

A quick internet search suggests the first step is to acknowledge that you have an anxiety that is interfering with your writing. Congrats, you have just done that by asking this question.

The next step is to know that you are not alone. This is an anxiety that effects many writers.

Unfortunately, after these two steps the advice becomes a bit vague but usually culminates in "Keep writing!" which is the standard advice for all writers in all situations.

According to wikipedia (I am not a psychologist), the accepted approach is to find a group to discuss the issue with others who've had a similar experience, and practical exercises intended to demystify the anxiety by putting aspects of it into concrete form such as writing lists.

If I understand you correctly, the real anxiety is not that you are a bad person underneath, but that people will "read between the lines" and discover something you didn't intend to convey. The best way to control how your writing is perceived is to become a better writer. That takes practice, and practical experiments that are designed to explore the situations and mechanisms where this could happen.

I suggest short practical writing exercises where you can explore ideas of deliberately revealing someone's "raw truth" (it does not actually need to be your truth), and deliberately withholding a raw truth while talking around it. Also writing to explore the perception of "authenticity" and "inauthenticity" through the eyes of others. The goal here is not to turn your personal anxiety into catharsis, but to develop confidence with the tools of writing and how they are used to convey indirect subtext and inferred meanings.

In any creative communication, the reader will form opinions about the "voice" that is narrating, but there are ways to show the narrative voice is not the voice of the author, that the narrator is unreliable or wrong, or the particular POV or "issue" is being deliberately slanted to provoke the opposite feeling in the reader (Mark Twain was a master at creating "simple folk" who remain sympathetic even as the reader understands their moral follies and intellectual limits).

I believe that if an author struggles with an issue or needs to debate the right way to approach it, that decision process is already interesting enough to include within the writing somehow. It gives more dimension to insert the debate, but it does not need to be depicted as your debate or your struggle. You can show someone else's struggle and you don't need to provide their answers. Maybe by exploring these feelings you can become a better writer, allowing your personal concerns to inform your experience and style. That's probably the best any writer could hope to do.

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