On making mistakes and not starting over

On making mistakes and not starting overLast week, I wrote a blog post that I now regret publishing. I felt it was too negative, I was complaining too much, and it didn’t feel particularly helpful to me or anyone else. In other words, it was the opposite of everything I try to do here. My first impulse was to delete it, and forget about it. I didn’t: instead, I put a small notice up top, and collapsed the more negative parts with “content warnings”. Trashing the whole post didn’t feel right to me: I spent time writing those words; those words felt true to me at that particular moment. This made me think of Resurfacing posts by Herman, where he writes: One of the things I like best about blogs is that posts stick around (or at least they should). I enjoy scrolling through historic posts of bloggers and reading about what they were thinking about 1, 5, or even 10 years ago—if I’m lucky. One of my overarching goals for this website is thinking out loud through writing, growing with my…