Reading through hundreds of my old articles has been unsettling

What if you suddenly realized the whole world has been reading your diary?

I’ve been feeling that way recently, because I’ve had reason to go through most of what I’ve written over the last 15 years. A handful of my old articles left me feeling that I communicated an important idea in a clear way. I was proud of a few of them.

But the overwhelming feeling I had was that I’ve spent years writing things that I wish I’d never shared with the world.

When I write and publish an article here, I almost never read it again. Maybe that is a reflection of my origins in the newspaper business. As a journalist, we would simply write and edit the best we could in the moment — then send it to the pressroom and get started on work for the next day.

Lately, I’ve been writing a book, so I wanted to go through what I’ve written to find ideas I’ve written about that might belong in the book. I found what I needed, but I also found things that made me feel as though I’d left a diary open for the world to read. And it was a diary filled with hurt and angst and need and anger.

It’s been disturbing — not that I felt those things, but that I’ve allowed others to see so clearly inside my mind and heart.

When I started this site 15 years ago, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I don’t expect much from those pieces — and they’re mostly terrible — but they weren’t the ones that bothered me.

Then I spent something like four years writing overtly political articles that were designed to appeal to a certain ideological group. Those weren’t much different from the sorts of political essays written at the same time by dozens of other writers with similar political orientation. They were useless — which is why I no longer write such material — but they mostly don’t embarrass me.

Starting about 11 years ago, I had given up on writing about politics, but I was unclear about what — if anything — I was going to continue writing. At about the same time, I had become extremely unhappy with my life. At some point, I started writing more and more personal things. Some of them were decent. Some of them now make me cringe.

It’s not that there’s anything terrible. I didn’t admit to anything I’m ashamed of. It’s just that I treated it more like a way to work out feelings about a lot of the unhappiness I was feeling. Some of that material was pretty good, but when I look at a lot of it, I wish I’d kept those things private.

A lot of what I wrote wasn’t good enough to publish, but I was just sharing a lot of feelings and fears from a place of serious vulnerability. That’s unsettling.

I think I’ve found a better balance lately. I’ve kept the willingness to be vulnerable and to be brutally truthful about myself and my failings, but I think I’m doing it in a way that’s more appropriate — and more useful — for readers.

The truth is that almost nobody wants to read a diary of a stranger. It’s not especially useful to most people to read about my loneliness or my fears about my future or how I feel about romantic love I’ve lost.

At some point, I realized that my mission was to focus on the dysfunctional culture around us and how individuals can react to that. I didn’t make that sudden switch one day. It was a gradual change. But that’s the vast majority of what I’m writing about today.

What matters to me now isn’t simply documenting my own feelings and fortunes, but trying to understand the cultural forces shaping our lives and how individuals can respond in ways that lead to a healthier and more meaningful life.

For a long time, the things I wrote about were all over the map. There was no unifying theme to any of it. It was a mess. Today, I’m publishing things that should connect with a very specific cultural and social demographic. I feel as though I have something to say to this narrow slice of the world — and that “mission” feels important.

I think that’s why I’m finally ready to write the book that I’m working on.

My vast archives — something like 2,500 articles — represent a strange personal journey that I’ve taken for the last 15 years.

There’s a part of me that wants to delete about 90 percent of what I’ve published. For now, though, I’m letting it sit out there in the digital ether. Much of it is too raw, too personal, too vulnerable and too angry to share with the public — but maybe it was something I had to get through to find the voice to say what I need to say now.

I hope you like the direction I’m turning. Whether you do or not, though, it’s a healthier direction for me.