And I’m ambivalent about this, as I am in matters of any significance. I often wonder, in my more self-indulgent moments, by which, I suppose, I mean all the time, what I might have achieved if I had not so often and so easily fallen prey to self-doubt: all the things I might have written, all the books and essays and so on, and how good they might have been.

I feel certain, in these moments, that I would be a great deal more successful and productive if my inner critic had not been afforded this tenured position from which to shoot down anything not measuring up to its supposedly exacting standards. But then I invariably remind myself, with some gratitude, of all the dreadful fates I’ve been saved from by the graceful intercession of self-doubt, all the misguided and misbegotten ideas that never made it off the pages of their respective notebooks because they had no business being written in the first place.

To put it in the sort of simplistic terms that I’ll no doubt come to regret using: self-doubt is the best friend and the worst enemy of the writer. Because being a writer isn’t like being a tennis player or a boxer, where you presumably have to hunt down and ruthlessly eliminate the source of any flickering shadow of suspicion that you might not be destined for victory. As a writer, you have to take your own misgivings seriously; you have to attend, now and then, to the little voice in your head or the booming baritone in your gut that wishes you to know that what you are writing is entirely without value.

The trick, of course, is to know when to listen to it and when to tell it to shut its stupid fat face. I say this as someone who has never quite learned that particular trick. And so because I seem congenitally predisposed to doubt myself, I tend to err on the side of caution with these things; I tend to listen to what the inner critic is saying, on the assumption that it probably knows what it’s talking about.

Erring on the side of caution has, paradoxically, always been one of the major forms of erring in my life. I am cautious, at times, to the point of outright recklessness. My dealings with the physical world are characterized by a peculiar form of clumsiness: the clumsiness of the excessively careful man.

As a driver, for instance, I have a tendency to overcorrect for minor errors and to take somewhat extreme measures in the evasion of essentially trivial hazards. And I have, more generally, a weird inability to prioritize respective levels of physical threat: I’ll have a clutch of magazines in one hand, say, and a mug of steaming coffee in the other, and one of the magazines will begin to slip from my hand, and instead of just letting it fall to the floor (because, really, how terrible could that be?), I’ll foolishly try to prevent this tiny disaster by grabbing at it with the other hand, in which, let’s remember, I’m already holding the mug of steaming coffee, thereby initiating a much greater disaster, involving smashed mug, damaged magazines and serious unintended consequences in the form of stained trousers and scalded kneecaps.

My trouble with self-doubt is of a piece, I think, with this reckless carefulness, this tendency toward overcorrection. Self-doubt, like physical caution, is a useful prophylactic against serious error, but there’s a point at which it starts being more a cause of problems than a prevention.