As personal essayists, we sometimes worry whether people will be interested in what we have to say since our material is “just” personal experience. That worry exists alongside its cousins “Who am I to write about this or to tell my family’s secrets?” and “What if my experience rubs people the wrong way and is judged harshly by others, especially people who know me?” It plagues those of us who decide we must write to explore and reflect on what we have lived. So for years, even decades, I have remained on the lookout for writings by famous writers about their experiences concerning the vulnerability of writing the personal essay. What follows are some of my long-held favorites.

In his introduction to the 1992 Norton Book of Personal Essays, scholar and essayist Joseph Epstein admitted wondering each time he wrote his regular personal essay for The American Scholar if readers of the magazine would mutter, “Oh, him again,” or worse, “Who cares!” Where, he pondered, “does the personal essayist acquire the effrontery to believe—and, more astonishing still, to act on the belief—that his or her interests, concerns, quirks, passions matter to anyone else in the world?”

His answer: the “world is too rich, too various, too multifaceted and many-layered for a fellow incapable of an hour’s sustained thought to hope to comprehend it.” But through essays, writers “hope against hope to chip away at true knowledge by obtaining some modicum of self-knowledge.” Epstein warned thought that in this chipping the “essayist must also fight off adopting the notion of being in any way a star, at center stage.” I have read Philip Lopate in the Art of the Personal Essay to Dinty Moore in a Writer’s Digest article, among others, and seen that this is so in their eyes, too. A personal essay writer is not going to succeed if they are writing to tell others what they already know. Success comes in figuring out what they might learn if they write about their experience. Because the personal essayist starts out by wondering what she or he will find in a written reflection, effective essays seem to in the end call out, “Here, come and see that all of us are really very similar and most loveable when we move toward healing, connecting, and appreciating rather than summarizing and judging.”

Most of us, though, experienced school training that led us to believe the essay was a much different animal, that we had to have the answers to write the essay, not write the essay to learn the answers. And today, if writers adopt a high, didactic diction, and put forward their insistence on being right, they are most likely still acting under the influence of not only years of schooling but the long-lasting influence of the earliest of American essayists. Those were clergymen who discussed ethics, manners and social and national progress in the sermons they delivered. These early essayists then spread the influence of the pulpit beyond moral issues to intellectual and literary concerns. In 1900, Chauncey Starkweather wrote a special introduction to Essays of American Essayists, published by the Colonial Press, in which he said the clergy had shaped the tone of the essay for decades.

How refreshing and important it is now that all kinds of people in all kinds of roles — parents, doctors, psychologists, poets, physicists, actors, construction workers, caregivers, among others — write personal essays and readers can learn from people who have had organ transplants, become blind, traced their heritage, returned to ethnic observances, practiced meditation, taken on nontraditional jobs, mourned their parents and children or merely allowed themselves to write about remembering childhood trips to the state fair. Special theme-essay anthologies appear on topics such as becoming American, aging, handling grief, mothering and fathering, dealing with criminals in the family, and recovering from cancer, among so many other topics. Whatever their background and areas of interest, today’s personal essayists share in the knowledge that there is a psychological and emotional home to be found in the center of life’s busy swirl. They work in their writing to find this home and keep the general swirl we all live in from subsuming their individual connection to the inner and the outer world. They know that by writing essays they can honor their idiosyncratic personal connection to the world and find universal essence in their relationship to others, their readers. The personal essay helps the writer and thus the reader become one in experiencing some of what is central in finding meaning in human existence.

In “The Rewards of Living a Solitary Life,” published in the New York Times on April 8, 1974, writer May Sarton wrote about coming home from a lecture trip where she had seen many, many people and talked a lot. She was, in her words, “full to the brim with experience that needs to be sorted out.”

She described her home coming this way:

Then for a little while, the house feels huge and empty and I wonder where my self is hiding…It takes awhile, as I watch the surf blowing up in fountains at the end of the field, but the moment comes when the world falls away, and the self emerges again from the deep unconscious, bringing back all I have recently experienced to be explored and slowly understood, when I can converse again with my hidden powers, and so grow, and so be renewed, till death do us part.

As writers, we use language to find a deeper understanding that resides in daily life. We hope that our finding the understanding invites a reader to understand, too, not via a preached lesson but from a lesson lived and written about so it explodes inside the reader as it did inside the writer in self-reflection. In today’s climate of argument, this moment between essayist and self, between self and essay, between essayist and reader is a sacred one. This moment reveals rather than argues. It enters through the senses, rather than the mind. It is a lived moment.

Psychologist Deborah Tannen wrote in a January 14, 1998 New York Times essay titled “The Triumph of the Yell” that intellectual inquiry is not the game of attack and counterattack that our culture has made it into, the spectacles “that result when extremes clash” and are “thought to get higher ratings or larger readership.” Truth, she says, resides not in simplified extremes, but in a crystal of many sides. The essay may thrive in today’s world precisely because it “courts and seduces agreement, even co-opts it,” writer Cynthia Ozick affirms.

Essays demonstrate the capacity humans have for observance and open-heartedness. When we write and read about making and losing friends, moving, hearing children’s nightmares and stories, remembering parents and grandparents, planting gardens, exploring new places, even walking to the same old room and job, we are struggling to stay in touch with life’s meaning.

And here’s one of my own thoughts on the personal essay: Just like in any artistic process, the end result depends on a little magic, a magic the writer is pleased to have experienced, a magic that helped the writer find the words that suddenly led to new insight. We remind ourselves that if we can write so that others experience what we experienced and then feel “the aha” of our insight as if it is theirs, too, we have gone way beyond “just” a personal experience. We have not only recorded some of what is universal to being human, but preserved that experience and called the feeling of it back into the consciousness of others.

Who of us would say, “Who cares?” to that?