The difficulty of sharing

Sharing can be hard. Part of the reason this blog exists is so I can learn to share, and to learn to write first drafts without caring too much. (In case it isn't obvious, every post on here is a first draft.)

Knausgaard writes about his friend, Thure Erik, and how in spite of him having a light all of his own he also found sharing his work difficult:

One evening he asked if I wanted to read something he had written, I said yes, of course, he passed me two sheets, I began to read, it was an absolutely fantastic introduction, an apocalyptic explosion of dynamite in an old rural world, a child running out of school and into the forest, it was magical, but when I happened to glance up at him he was sitting with his head hidden in his great hands like an ashamed child.

'Ooooh, it's so embarassing,' he said. 'So damned embarassing.'

What?

Had he gone mad?

An passionate amateur takes a piece of himself that no one has ever seen and uses it to write on. When he passes it to someone it isn't sharing, it's lending, and it returns marked and scuffled and he must somehow find a way to put it back into himself and carry on.