The Stories I Didn't Think I Had

On believing your work is too ordinary to be worth sharing, and being wrong about it.

For a long time, I was sure I had nothing worth saying.

Not in a dramatic way. It was quieter than that. I'd read other people's writing online, thoughtful posts about their work, their lessons, the things that went well and the things that didn't, and I'd think, that's nice, but I don't have anything like that. My work felt too ordinary to write about. Too far in the weeds. Who wants to read about reconciling a planning document, or the details of an extension update, or the small unglamorous decisions that make up most of a week?

So I did what a lot of us do with that feeling. I stayed quiet. I read, I learned, I nodded along, and I rarely wrote anything myself. I was a lurker, and I told myself that was just my personality. Some people post. I'm someone who reads.

What finally changed wasn't a burst of confidence. It was a change in method. I've been leaning on AI for a lot of my work lately, and one day I decided to point it at this exact problem. Not to write for me, but to help me look. I asked it to go through the work I was already doing and tell me, honestly, where there might be a story I was too close to see.

That small reframe mattered more than I expected. Because the problem was never that I had nothing to say. The problem was that I couldn't see it. When you're inside your own work, the interesting parts don't look interesting. They just look like Tuesday. It takes something, or someone, standing a little outside of it to point and say, that one. That's worth talking about.

The first thing it helped me notice made me laugh, because the story had been right there the whole time. It was this. A person who didn't think he had anything to say, using a tool to help him figure out that he did. I'd been so busy looking for some big, polished insight that I walked right past the honest little one sitting in front of me.

Since then I've noticed something about how this actually works, and it isn't what I assumed. I thought the value of AI would be that it writes things for me. It isn't. The value is that it pays attention alongside me. It drafts, and I push back. It points at something, and I say no, not that, but wait, this. It flags a word I've overused or a thought I buried three paragraphs down. I catch the spots where it sounds like a machine instead of like me. Somewhere in that back and forth, I stop handing off the work and start actually thinking. The writing gets better, but more than that, I get clearer.

I suspect a lot of people are sitting right where I was. Certain their work is too ordinary to share, when really they just can't see it from the inside. If that's you, I'd gently push back. The ordinary work is usually where the real stories are hiding. The trick isn't becoming more interesting. It's finding a way to notice what's already there.

I'm still figuring this out. I'm still, by most honest measures, a recovering lurker. But I've stopped believing the quiet was about having nothing to say. It turns out I had plenty. I just needed a little help learning to see it.