on The Creative Penn:

If you put your words on the page and the book into the world, someone is going to judge you. And that can be a scary thought!

Fear of judgment is something that I’ve come up against a number of times in my writing career,

What is fear of judgment?

It’s that feeling of like, “I can’t write this. I can’t even think this. Why am I thinking this?I’m a nice girl. What will people think of me when I put this book into the world? What will my loved ones think of me? What will my partner think of me? My boyfriend, girlfriend, my mother, my mother-in-law? What will my friends think of me? And then what will people I’ve never met think of me?”

All of these things are fear of judgment, the fear of what others will think, and even what we will ourselves think.