The Fear of Starting Out

Monday, September 28, 2026

Happy Monday, my friends! We all have our own motivations. One of my friends is motivated, almost beyond anything else, by FOMO or the fear of missing out. She might be ill, have low capacity, or generally not want to be around other humans, yet the fear of what she might miss and the stories she might not be part of is enough to motivate her to do the thing or go to the event. Until relatively recently, I didn’t quite understand FOMO. I was content to be part of some stories while relishing the moments when I decided to prioritize myself, my time, and the stories I might create on my own. To be clear, FOMO isn’t motivation only for people who can’t create their own stories, but I could happily acknowledge the times when I did my own thing and not fear what I might miss.

Recently, I’ve sensed a different fear for me: FOSO or the fear of starting out. Every week you read a new short essay from me and if you’re not a writer or preacher you might assume that producing ideas or keeping those ideas to a relatively short space are the hardest part of my writing practice. No, consistently the hardest part of writing for me, across all of my writing, is getting started.

When I first started using AI as a tool in my writing, I thought that the power of Claude, personally my favorite AI model, could help me get around that fear and its sometime paralysis of getting far enough into an essay or article that I felt like I could write without being held back. But finding the right amount of AI writing to distinguish “getting started” from making an essay “AI-assisted” and sifting through endless AI-generated outlines and reference papers to find starting points created even more noise hiding the elusive entrances to writing something I can proudly publish.

Ultimately, FOSO, if we can really call it a “fear,” is not a fear of starting, but a fear of not producing the best content. The hardest part of preaching, writing, and producing other forms of content is often not the main content or the conclusions but rather is writing the first few lines. Many authors save writing the beginning until the very end.

What do you struggle to start? When is it easier for you to create the end before you create the beginning?

Let us pray: God, you created the world from nothing and though we tell the stories of that creation in orderly patterns, we wonder if you too struggled to start. Was creating light the obvious first step or did you wonder if something else should come first? In that you create too, support us when we strive to create in our lives. Bless us with the grace to accept our beginnings and our ends, our greatest creations as the scraps we edit away. We ask this in your name, Great Creator. Amen.

Blessings on your weeks, my friends! Please let me know if there is anything I can do for you.

Faithfully,

Ben +

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