When the void talks back
Who will you listen to?
I need you to internalize how good you are at this.
A writer friend said these words to me recently, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about them.
I need you to internalize how good you are. I’m serious.
I can’t promise those are the exact words, but they’re close enough. I started to laugh off the encouragement, the way I always have in the past—Aw, shucks, thanks, but you’re only saying that because you know me. But this person spoke the words with such intensity that I stopped and, for the first time in my life, really listened to what they were trying to say.
Stop doubting yourself.
Stop rejecting yourself before you even try.
Stop saying you don’t belong out here with the weirdos and creatives and artists who want to exist in an ever-shifting space that constantly stretches the boundary of possible.
Stop making yourself small.
Writing takes a certain sort of madness, but it is a pleasure to write.
Creating anything and turning it over to the world requires a bold optimism I’m not sure I will ever master, but being afraid and doing it anyway is a motto of mine.
They say if you’re planning to get into publishing, you need to develop a thick skin. But the thinner the skin, the closer we can get to the truth when we write. I don’t want this business to turn me calloused and hard and unable to draw on my vulnerabilities, the pain points that make me so brilliantly human and allow me to connect in a world that seems to grow more distant with every passing second.
Art is subjective. One person sees God in a sunset. Another, changes their entire life plan because of a piece of graffiti etched onto the freeway overpass.
Who do you listen to when one person says, “I stayed up all night reading your book. It was so good I couldn’t put it down!” and another goes out of their way to write a Facebook message that simply states, “Thanks for wasting my time.”
For every positive review, you get as many negatives. For every person who loves your book and says it changed their life, there is someone who finds it uninspired and pointless.
Well-meaning friends and experts will say, Don’t read your reviews. Stay out of the reader space. Reviews are for readers, not for writers. Focus on your next book.
But every writer I’ve ever met is a little vain. More than that, most of us write for reasons bigger than ourselves.
We write to be understood.
To understand.
We write to connect.
To be seen, remembered, memorialized.
We write ourselves into a narrative where before we had never existed.
We write to try and bargain ourselves out of our own inevitable death.
We write for fame and fortune and the chance to have tea with (insert your favorite literary giant here).
We write hoping we won’t have to spend the rest of our lives screaming into the void, but when the void starts screaming back, where does that leave us?
When it’s finally time to release that tight hold you’ve held on your art for all these years, when it’s time to let the rest of the world see this cracked and glazed piece of your soul, who will you listen to?
The voices who believe in you? Or the voices who would cut you down?
If you’re going to listen to anyone, listen to the cheerleaders, the believers, the supporters who want you to triumph. If you’re going to listen to anyone, listen to the voices that tell you to keep going.
But there may be another option.
What if you don’t listen to any of them? The negative voices are detrimental, but the positive ones can cause just as much mayhem if you’re not paying attention.
What if you treat comments about your art, good or bad or indifferent, like iridescent bubbles? Here for a while, floating away, bursting, disappearing, unimportant in the larger scheme of things. Bubbles don’t change the landscape. They don’t matter, but for a fleeting moment.
My writer friend didn’t simply tell me how good they think my writing is. They told me to internalize it. To let it sit inside me until it soaked into my bones, becoming the deepest well from which to draw my creative fury.
You can waste an entire life letting other people define your worth, measuring yourself with likes and follows and star-ratings. You can lose yourself in the noise.
Or you can turn inward and listen to the sound of your own wild beating heart that’s telling you to create, even when no one else cares.
Let the quiet soak into your bones, internalize what you already know to be true: you’re good at this, so keep going.
