You can always do a Quick Edit.

Once, not too long ago, I wrote a letter to a politician, which got published on a Substack whose daily newsletter was read by at least several thousand people. I’d written the letter of just under 400 words in a two-day period of self-torment, insomnia, and anxiety. Writing it felt urgent, as all things related to politics are urgent, and, at a time when I feared that the hands of every powerful entity were merging into an autocracy that would slowly suffocate me and everyone else, it felt that if I didn’t write the letter, I would be frozen in history’s textbook of disappointments. It was one of those especially heightened times.

I was proud when I sent it to the politician and even prouder when the publisher of the Substack approved it, posted it, and shared it with his followers on Twitter.

Within sixty seconds of posting, a commenter laughed at my egregious mistake: throughout my argument, I’d used the word “ancestor” when I surely meant “descendant,” an error which not only confused readers about my identity—the understanding of which was essential to the entire point of the letter—but which also lost me all credibility as a high school English teacher.

Of course, I was horrified.

I hoped that a power-walk in the neighborhood I used to play in in elementary school would soothe my panic. But my brain was too wired to the digital forest of infinite distraction; leaving my phone behind only stoked my imagination: surely, there were hundreds of commenters who were probably saying what thousands of readers were thinking—that I was an idiot. In my haste to get something written, I’d neglected to check every word, just like in my haste to get a literature degree, my haste to become a teacher, my haste to find a husband, I’d skimmed over the finite details, the everyday habits, the immersion in one’s reading, one’s learning, and oneself that it takes to really achieve any of these deserved milestones. I’d yet to read enough Charles Dickens or Oscar Wilde to call myself enriched, nor did I remember much about the plot of Hamlet, which I still haven’t read since eighth grade, and I still come across vocabulary words that I really don’t know, not because I’ve never seen them before, but because I’ve damaged my memory with a diet of scrolling. I’ve never found a husband because I’ve never stayed still.

Even the walk felt useless; each step was just a shallow attempt to feel productive on a day when I’d accomplished the opposite of nothing.

“You’ve got to learn to take criticism,” my dad said.

For God’s sake, I thought. I’m a teacher; everyone who’s ever attended school has felt entitled to tell me everything I’m doing wrong. At the time, I was getting my master’s in creative writing, and most of my courses practiced the workshop model, which involved live, honest critique. I knew how to take criticism.

It was the shame that I couldn’t take. Before sending it off, I had re-read the letter aloud at least fifty times, cut and pasted paragraphs to re-order the sequence of my argument, tweaked words and phrases for precision and clarity, reconfigured the syntax to achieve a flow that reflected my outrage but also my rationality. For two days, the letter stomped at the crook of my neck and sucked at my eyeballs. For two days, I’d scrutinized myself and my writing but hadn’t thought to question the accuracy of the word “ancestor.”

This critical commenter—along with everyone else who affirmed his scolding—was correct, and I was ashamed because I’d ignored the paragon rule of polishing writing: a writer must check every word before declaring that she’s finished.

Few things are so urgent that you should miss a blunder that could compromise your competence as a writer.

But to me, writing feels urgent. I probably receive at least twenty notifications a day that my fellow Vocal writers are posting something, anything that they can to get their voice out there. I’m envious. All day, I scribble ideas for stories and essays in my notebook, truncated observations or epiphanies that I swear I’ll elaborate on later when I get home, when I’m at my desk in the corner of the living room, the only place in the world where I can deposit the thousands of thoughts that I suppress all day when everything I do is dictated by a bell.

I do make time to write. A few days a week, I write in the morning before school, and I spend Monday evenings at a coffeehouse, sipping a decaffeinated maple latte, lingering in the stories I craft on the weekends when I’m not only a teacher but also a writer. I reserve almost every Saturday morning for a project on the page. I know what I’ve started, what stories are germinating in the soil I keep on a notepad; I know the compost that I’ve almost deleted but reserved for elsewhere and how it could nourish what’s on the way.

But, back to the letter and back to my failure: I’d written it while we were on break from school. Though I was sure that the world was ending and that my rights were eroding (they were) and that if I didn’t write to this particular person at this particular time then I would look back one day and know that I had done nothing at the most important time in my life—I still made the time to be meticulous. I still devoted every waking hour of two days to writing that damn letter. And I still wasn’t thorough enough to catch that error.

That’s why I insist I’m never done with anything. I keep everything hidden in a file, while I hide behind my teacher email inbox that’s always full and my gradebook that needs constant updating and a nation that believes that its schools are broken and that’s why its children are, too. I insist that I can’t make the time to write well if I also want to teach well.

Yet, I envy people who post on Vocal every day.

I recently asked a writer how he was able to post on here so often. I spend hours writing, rewriting, editing, deleting, re-adding—was I sabotaging myself?

He was kind, but concise: don’t worry about the criticism. If someone points out an error, you can always do a quick edit.

Easy as that.

Really, it all does seem so silly. Two years ago, on the day of that vocabulary catastrophe, I was, after all, able to email the owner of the Substack, who, mind you, had not caught the error either. I requested an edit, he fixed it, and by later in the afternoon, no one was commenting anymore. In fact, no one was even reading it. The owner of the Substack posted two more stories, everyone read and commented on those, and I was back to being irrelevant. Even now, the only people who know that this happened are the ones that I tell about it.

I don’t regret posting the letter before it was ready. I regret that one mistake could evoke in me such panic that I still torture my writing with such a strenuous routine of edits that it collapses, becomes irrelevant, and goes nowhere.

The other day, I wrote about recognizing that Vocal is Heaven. This year, I also celebrate that in Heaven, mistakes can be edited. I give myself permission to make them.