The perfect sentence is the ugly one

Marginal thoughts on giving your ideas the life they deserve

Not gonna lie, it was a lot easier to publish this Substack when I was simply writing to the void. There wasn’t so much riding on saying the most helpful thing, the punchy thing, the most agreeable thing.

It’s easy to say, "write like no one is watching," but there are now 750+ of you who have decided that my words are good enough to welcome into your inboxes. And that means something to me. It’s an answered prayer that I want to steward carefully.

Still, I feel unprepared. Like you showed up to the cookout “early” and caught me trying to get the last bits of my house together—even though the party technically started 20 minutes ago.

I’m ripping and running around, still finding my voice. Still tinkering with my format. Still understanding how I want to show up in a space like this. But now that you’re here, I have to take off my cooking sweats, put my party dress on, and show up in a different way. A more put-together way. The right way.

So I started looking to others as the blueprint:

• Reading every Substack about craft and growth that crossed my feed.

• Studying posting cadence, syntax, and newsletter formats of writers who were successful at this before me—bookmarking, highlighting, and underlining everything.

• Buying every tool that promised to help streamline and systemize my chaotic essay notes, mind maps, working titles, and fragmented thoughts.

• Adding new approaches I’d discover into an already overflowing writing practice.

• Adjusting my algorithms to show me all things writing, all the time.

I did what was asked of budding writers who are serious about their work—lean into the craft.

My most recent work is paying the price for it.

Looking at the folders filled with dozens of half-written drafts, it’s hard to see myself against the influence of others. Sure, my sentences are well-structured and sharp, but they’re equally lifeless and drained of meaning. Every thought fits nicely into the templates I created and follows the right rules, but they’re just sitting on the page, never really seeping into the depths of anything worthwhile. None of this happened before I put a measuring stick to my work.

As I sit here wrestling with the stage fright of showing up authentically to a larger audience, I’ve realized that the work doesn’t need to be sharper, punchier, or stretched into New York Times-worthy potential. It only needs to exist — as mine, not shaped into a mold of what it’s supposed to be.

Creating something that’s “right” means crafting something that’s real, not replicated.

Honestly, having a little taste of virality on my last post has left me trying to capture lightning in a bottle. How the hell did I do that? What made that piece so special? But it wasn’t because I spent hours finding newsletter templates or sketching out narrative diagrams; it was because I shared something authentic. An experience that was ownable to me but equally shared by others. That’s the actual formula.

What I’m learning about creating is that it’s not some special white room in your auntie’s house designed only to be admired; it’s meant to be touched and truly lived in. Ideas are meant to be held, flipped around, and placed upside down as something better… or worse (because who really cares). It doesn’t matter how it looks; what matters is how it feels.

Today I’m reckoning with the fact that some sentences will be ugly. Some posts won’t reach the masses. But they’ll be alive. Not because they’re perfect or fit the idea of what they should be, but because they’re mine.

Thanks for reading! Marginal Thoughts is a bi-weeklyish compilation of working thoughts, questions I’m asking myself, and musings that’ve lived in my notes app for far too long. A home for the ideas that aren’t finished but are worth sharing anyway.

---