Last time I told you about the woman who had been carrying her story for years and couldn’t make herself begin. The woman who’d told it privately but couldn’t go public with it.

That woman was me, six years ago. And what I said was: I eventually figured out that what I was afraid of wasn’t what I thought I was afraid of.

Here’s what I mean.

On the surface, the fear looked like this: I was afraid of judgment. Afraid people would read my story and decide something about me. Reduce me to my hardest chapters. Know that I wasn’t perfect. See me differently because the facade was falling away—and judge me.

And that was real. I’m not going to tell you it wasn’t.

But beneath that fear was another, and it took me a long time to name it.

I was afraid of hurting people I still cared about.

There were people in my story who hadn’t chosen to be there. People I shared history with. People I’d have to sit across from at a dinner table after the book came out. And I didn’t know how to tell the truth about what I’d lived through without making them feel exposed, accused, or defined in an uncomfortable way.

So I held back. It was painful to think about hurting them by speaking about our experience, an experience in which we could have been better, acted differently, been “perfect.”

What I eventually understood, and what took longer to understand than it should have, is that those two things are not the same. Telling your truth and telling someone else’s story. Honesty and exposure. They feel like the same thing when you’re standing at the beginning, but they’re not.

You can be fully honest about your own experience without telling someone else’s story. It takes thought. It takes care. It takes being willing to ask hard questions about what the story actually needs versus what you’re including out of habit, out of hurt, or out of the desire to be completely understood.

But it’s possible. I know because I did it. And you can, too.

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The workshop I’m building is structured entirely around this distinction. The questions that live between honesty and exposure, between your story and someone else’s, between what you’re ready to say and what you’re ready for people to hear.

It opens soon. If you want to be among the first to know, click the link below. Registration opens April 29.

This originally posted on Substack.