Last week I handed in an essay. It was on an ethical dilemma I had seen during my psychiatry placement, and after discussing it with my supervisor, he suggested I write it up and send it to him by the end of the week. I agreed.

The essay wasn’t very good. I only had four days to research, write, and edit and was sick for two of them. It only contained a dozen references, whereas most published articles have over 30. Handing it in brought me a bit of shame, knowing that it wasn’t my best work. So what my supervisor said next shocked me.

“This is really good. You should publish this.”

He proceeded to list out ways in which the piece worked and where I had done well. Then he gave some suggestions on what to add to increase the chances of acceptance. Overall, he gave me praise far higher than my expectations. I walked out of the room almost in a daze, amazed at what had just transpired.

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One of the problems with sharing our work is the anxiety of what other people will think. What if my idea is politically incorrect? Incoherent? Grammatically unsound? It would be awful to lose the respect of peers due to something you created or said. Better to stay silent and not risk it at all, or post only safe, tested ideas.

But what I’ve noticed over the years is something obvious or low quality to you might be amazing to others. In fact, most of my most popular posts I did not expect to do well at all. Conversely, some of the posts I put lots of effort and feeling into received little attention.

This should be encouraging, then, to show our work. Because maybe the idea you have isn’t so bad after all. It might be much better than you could ever imagine. Only way to find out is to throw it all into the abyss.