A few weeks ago, after several quiet minutes of willing myself to think a typable thought, I gave up and read the most recent issue of Harpers. Specifically, I read Lost Girls, a story about the lives of Moroccan prostitutes after the Arab spring, written by a woman named Sarah Dohrmann. The article is profoundly sad and not a little distressing, but it’s also exceedingly well crafted, and so it wasn’t long before I found my way to sarahdohrmann.com, which is really just a gateway to her tumblr, Today’s Tuesday, where she has been posting an essay each week for the past year.

One of my more important personal realizations of 2015 was that for better or worse, I now process things – emotions, decisions, conclusions, etc – entirely through writing. Some people appear to be born with this sort of thing pre-installed, but my dose has come late, its arrival coinciding (I'm afraid) with a deeply felt conviction that everything-worth-doing-is-worth-doing-humorlessly. The writing is of a certain type. When I couldn’t decide what was the right way forward professionally, I wrote a long series of little one-act conversations – giving each side of the argument a character and voice. When I broke up with my girlfriend of several years and then spiraled in to a vortex of self pity and doubt, I explained my way (am still explaining my way) back to the surface by writing her a series of similarly long, utterly unsendable letters. When I was having a difficult time finding a spot or a social group in New Orleans, I joined a writing class, and developed a certain chin-stroking tone that I felt matched the seriousness of the task at hand. And all this is to say nothing of the several hundred pages of journal entries that were burned through over the same period, all in the service of excavating a pithier, frownier me.

2015 was also marked by an increasing reluctance to share all this writing. The fear, I think, was that all this stiffness would be taken the wrong way (yeah, that way). And, reading through it now, I'd say that that was a valid concern.  But of course sharing is exactly what I should have been doing all along. There is no better cure for self importance than open doors and an inquiring public. Today’s Tuesday is worth your time. In the hands of another writer, actually cranking out fifty-two essays over the course of a year might cause a sharp turn towards terrible, but Sarah maintains a pretty high bar. They aren’t all good but some of them are truly excellent, and the magic seems to be in the mix. In her final entry, posted just a few days ago, she points out that

By publishing an essay every Tuesday of this year, I had to accept that ego serves no purpose but to debilitate. It wasn’t my low self-esteem that had crippled me through the years, it was my ego. […] I don’t love, or even like, every essay that I have published this year. But they have been good enuf. To accept what is — it’s different from apathy. It doesn’t mean not feeling. It means making peace with your ego. It means not trying to control what others perceive.

Which, from the vantage point of someone sitting frozen before a blinking cursor, thinking up impressive sounding titles to unwritten blog entries, sounds a lot like hey, get over yourself. Easier said than done. You'd be surprised at how daunting the idea of posting to an essentially hidden blog can seem when you feel that you have something to say. But I'd like to think that this is just a phase; that at thirty-two I'm essentially just a recovering thirty-one year old, and 2015 represented the peak of my crippling self importance.

So Sarah, I’m stealing your idea - I'm renovating this little nook to become a weekly essay franchise. My essays won’t be so artfully composed as yours - I expect several will be the opposite of artful - but something will roll down the chute and on screen each week of 2016. If you catch me abusing the privilege (you'll know it when you see it : sweeping pronouncements, somber assessments of self or the suspension of all things grammatical in the service of Proustian breakdowns of my immediate surroundings) then you should revoke my license immediately, but with any luck you won't have to.