There's a version of writing most people don't talk about, and I think it's the more important one.
It's the kind where you open a notebook, write something messy and half-formed, close it, and nobody ever sees it, which should be actually fine.
I think a lot of us got into writing because we wanted to share something, express something, be understood by someone. That's a beautiful reason to start. But somewhere along the way, the publishing became the thing, and the writing became just a step you do before publishing, and I think something got lost in that shift.
Writing, at its core, is how you find out what you actually think. When I sit down to write something out, I usually discover I don't understand it as well as I thought I did. The thoughts in my head felt coherent enough, but the moment I try to put them into words, I can see clearly where the understanding runs out and the vague feeling begins. That moment of seeing it clearly is the whole value of the exercise, and it happens whether or not anyone ever reads what you've written.
When you write for an audience, even a small one, you're solving a communication problem, which is a worthwhile thing to do, but it's a different activity from thinking something through. Public writing is shaped by who's reading it, how it'll land, what someone will take away. Private writing is just you and the page and whatever you're trying to understand, and you don't owe it a shape yet.
I'm not saying don't publish. (Clearly I did, you're reading this.) I love the process of putting something out. But I've started to think of them as two separate practices that do two separate things, and collapsing them into one means you only ever write when you have something ready to share, which means you only ever think in public, which is a strange and slightly exhausting way to live.
The reason this practice gets skipped is that there's no visible reward for it, nothing to show, nothing that compounds in a way you can point to, just a slightly clearer understanding of something you were confused about before. That's actually worth a lot, we've just trained ourselves to not count things we can't measure.
You don't need much to start, a pen, some paper, fifteen minutes before the day picks up speed. Write about something you read recently, or a conversation that's been sitting with you, or an idea you keep returning to without knowing why. You're not trying to write something worth sharing, you're trying to understand something worth understanding.
The strange thing is, when you do this consistently, the writing you do for other people gets better too, because you've already done the thinking in private. By the time you sit down to write for someone else, you have something to actually say.
Most of the things I've written that I felt genuinely good about started as a note I wrote for no one, a half-thought at 7am, a paragraph that didn't go anywhere, a question I didn't know how to answer yet. I'd come back to it later and realise it had become something, mostly because I let it sit somewhere instead of waiting until it was ready.
That's what private writing gives your ideas, a place to exist before they're ready to be anything. It's worth giving them that.