The archive preserves the letter that was sent more easily than the courage it took to send it.

The letter survives, the fear does not. The archive holds the paper, the date, the words, and nothing at all about the weeks of hesitation, the drafts destroyed, or what it cost to put it in the post. Physical evidence records actions and loses the interior conditions that produced them, so the past appears full of decisive people who were mostly nothing of the kind.

Assume difficulty behind anything that reads as straightforward, in history and in the people around you. And if you keep any record of your own, noting what was hard is more valuable to whoever reads it than noting what you did. The action is recoverable, the effort is not.