I, too, was ambivalent about writing when I first began (as a teenager) because I did not want to reveal my soft spots to the world, @chrismccron. Then, over time, I realized that the more vulnerable I was, the more I was likely to connect; the more intimate, the more universal...

Encouraging paradox to discover and now I think of the writer's task as standing naked in public, stripped to the soul. Unflinching witness and world mirror, through which others gaze into to see their wound & Beauty

As Edgar Allen Poe suggested, 'any (wo)man who dared to lay their heart bare, would produce a work of genius'.

Write on, man!