Does a determination to write using words that are long and uncommon make your writing better than those who speak plainly? Not really. I could say that the liberation you enjoy when you break away from self-imposed perfectionism and hyper self-criticalness is so overwhelming that sometimes, when you remember how happy you are and how worthwhile your life is now, it can almost bring you to tears. I could also say that life is fucking brilliant once you stop overthinking anything. 

Which of these statements is more impactful? 

I honestly don’t know, but they say exactly the same thing. When you know that you have an intellectual flair and you acknowledge that you’re a bit different to your contemporaries, it almost always leads to putting an unconscious but severe level of pressure on yourself. Everything has to be perfect, and everything has to be impactful and meaningful – you have to have the wisdom of Seneca and the eloquence of Shakespeare. 

Why, though? You’re just another bloke. Everyone has their own philosophy and moral framework, whether they realise it or not, so why put so much pressure on yourself to explain your own? Admittedly yours is probably a bit more developed, and perhaps you can explain it a bit more eloquently, but that’s no guarantee of contentedness – arguably, it’s the opposite. 

Intelligence is almost a curse if it isn’t coupled with the knowledge required to live a happy life. Men spend days, weeks, months, years, even decades searching for a complicated answer to a simple question that has already been answered thousands of times by god knows how many different religions and theologies. Why do we insist on trying to rewrite a script that already has rave reviews? 

Write what you want, say what you want, do what you want, and don’t think about it too much – it’s awfully tiring.