Becoming an Explorer Instead of an Expert

Learning in public sucks. More of us need to do it.

These past couple years have been full of the relentless and humbling experience of learning. Like I’ve said before, I’m deeply grateful for the writers who are helping to shape my ideas about the world, and teaching me a thing or two about how to reckon with my own writing

Part of me is shocked that I am still a writer after over a decade of publishing my work. I have been putting permanent words on the page since my twenties. My early twenties. Part of this shows great dedication to the craft. But as you might imagine, some of those things I wrote for the whole internet to see were very stupid. 

I think all writers feel this to some degree. Our work evolves. We learn. We integrate. We write better things. I like to think it’s not just me who feels especially prone to making written mistakes that I’ll probably mull over on my deathbed. 

When I look back at my early essays, I try to have more compassion than the comments section. I was so young. So undereducated. I had spent most of my life growing up in a wildly unregulated evangelical Christian school where the drama teacher taught math, the choir pianist taught history, and the science teacher didn’t believe in science. And while I ended up completing my bachelor’s degree at a non-religious state college, it felt like I barely scraped by, lying my way through so I could pass as normal and competent. 

Writing was the one arena where I didn’t feel like a total fraud. I could string together sensible sentences. I knew where the narrative through line was. I had a decent idea of how to bookend essays so they packed a punch. But these skills, I eventually learned, are not the same thing as having good ideas or being an intelligent individual. 

It took me a long time to learn this because editors seemed more than happy to publish a wide variety of my very bad ideas. My half-baked hot-takes. My judgmental bullshit. My bumbling baby feminism. Back then, I figured if my words were good enough to print, they must be smart, right? 

My intelligence feels like something I’ve been eager to prove my entire adult life. I’ve tried to slip my unsavory writing under the rug, hide the holes in my education, and cover my mistakes quickly so no one notices. I desperately want to hold my own with the writers of my generation whose ideas are not only eloquent but seemingly impenetrable. When I look at my own writing I can see the holes, or worse yet, I can’t, and I fear that everyone else can. 

There are times I look at my book, which I am also desperately proud of, and want to light it on fire. I have a much broader understanding now of the mental load and emotional labor, and feel the weight of everything I didn’t yet know how to say when I wrote Fed Up. I felt pushed to be an ersatz expert when it was written, and even now I don’t know if I am. I forever have to grapple with how incomplete the book feels. How imprecise the language and concepts are. How underdeveloped and half-formed. Just like the woman who wrote it. Like the woman I am. 

I am a learning, living creature in a world where it feels like I am supposed to already have it all figured out. My ideas, especially as a writer, are supposed to be intractable. There seems to be so little room for mistakes, and I am full of them. People want my opinions to be ironclad where they are malleable. My work to appear effortless at its most difficult. To admit not having the answer key feels dangerous, like I’ll be written off as the idiot I’ve always feared myself to be. 

It feels like a compulsive form of torture to write these days, because in some ways I’m just now waking up to the fact that I don’t know what I don’t know. I am an explorer, rather than an expert, even of my own story. My knowledge of language, of history, of feminist theory are still woefully incomplete. It feels unbearable to admit that there is so much for me to learn. To open myself to criticism and say I was wrong rather than hide those things in the shadows. When I feel the gaps in my knowledge exposed, my shame tells me to lay low or lash out, but never admit to not knowing. I can argue my way out of a hole, but I am loath to admit that I dug it myself. 

And perhaps that is because there are so few examples of what it looks like to learn in public. What it looks like to grow rather than to simply be silenced by shame. What it takes to own your ignorance and commit to doing better. We live in a culture that values experts above all, but talk little of the strenuous exploration it takes to get there. I have often been fearful of exposing just how much I don’t know, but denying my ignorance doesn’t make me a better writer. Or a better human. 

I have struggled to admit things like my inability to digest academic writing without rereading and dumbing down each sentence into an approximation I can understand. It’s painful to fess up to the fact that I didn’t have a full understanding of the term I based my book around - or even the widely accepted definition of sobriety when I used it in an essay last week. Yet it’s important for me to say I’m learning, sometimes more slowly than I’m moving, and figure out how to recalibrate that.

I don’t want to cop to my own ignorance. I’d basically rather die than have to say “I was wrong, let me try that again.” But I’m learning that there is value in the messy and uncomfortable process of learning in public, wretched as it may feel. It allows me to grow. It grants other people permission to do the same. It shows that we don’t have to be perfect. That we don’t have to have it all together. That we can gently fill in the gaps of ignorance as we go. We can guide each other forward with grace as explorers in this messy world.

Because we have all been wrong. What matters is that we try again.