Things get so, in such a state, that you can't not write.  Not just that you can't face writing, but that you can't avoid it, as if it were the only healthy and positive thing to do in a cluttered life.

Charlie Rose--to continue a dialog started below on 'self-confidence'--interviews chess master Magnus, a young guy with the right kind of tousled hair.  Maybe he, as a young player, was over-confident, but that he grew into it.  But anyway, he knows that a player can perceive danger or trouble or a threat, thus wiring himself into a failure self-created.  And so, yes, unless we are confident, and building on our confidences, we hold ourselves back.  We don't speak up, we don't apply for jobs that could lead somewhere, we don't go and talk to the pretty girl who had just rebuked us, and down the line until we create living hells for ourselves, because, yes, everyone else 'gets it,' gets the 'be self-confident thing.'  Fake it to you make it.

The author of Lincoln's Melancholy, Joshua Wolf Shenck, gives us a very interesting portrait of a man who's own mind could mess with him rather severely.  "I'm not a well man," the poor guy is quoted as saying, his head down in his hands even as he should be celebrating a moment of political gain.  One can posit that to have to deal with such things, as his own moods, intangible stuff made awfully real and unhappily so, might have ended up giving him a kind of wisdom.  If his mind may have been telling him, so that he could almost feel it, that the sky was falling, he may have learned a circumspection, an ability to ignore it, thus having a perspective on human behavior.  But yes, it would have been a journey for him.  And it is also true that he seems to have always possessed a fair amount of self-confidence, maybe in no small way attributed to his own physical strength (and ability to win a wrestling match.)

I putter away at this blog.  It speaks to the few strengths I have, I suppose, whatever those might be, as well as my weaknesses.

Chekhov went and wrote about the prisoners of Sakhalin, with the knowledge that no one really cared, as far as the public view, about all these souls rotting away and dying in such condition.  But that lack of caring and public will or interest was not going to change what he himself saw as necessary and worth reportage.

Maybe you fight a battle for a long time, take the wounds inflicted, lick them, and then over the years you slowly begin to realize, that a large part of the enemy in it all, is within.  And maybe that sort of liberates you from holding back so that you can do the right thing.