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Wrestling with Self-Doubt

For the past month or two, I’d been struggling with crushing self-doubt where my Writing is concerned. I’m not really sure what triggered this downward spiral. Every writer has thoughts like “jeez, my writing sucks” from time to time, but for one reason or another, I wasn’t quite able to get that particular voice out of my head. I’m realistic enough to know that my writing isn’t all that stellar but I also know that it isn’t totally abysmal. Even so, insecurities about whether anyone will ever read, much less like my work kept building up to the point where I wasn’t able to bring myself to work on a single piece of fiction for the eight whole weeks. The thing is, I’ve gone through phases like this before. I think every writer does, but this time, the malaise was lingering and I wasn’t entirely sure what to do about it until someone suggested the obvious to me. Write about it, that self-doubt.

First of all, I needed to figure out where the anxiety at the root of that self-doubt was coming from. My guess is it was the pressure to succeed. I had neither written enough nor been published enough in 2017 to allow myself to consider it a successful year, writing-wise. Plus, I placed sixth in the first writing contest that I’ve entered and was pretty disappointed because my story wasn’t good enough to at least make the top five. Later, a single rejection letter became my undoing. The funny thing is, the rejection letter wasn’t scathing or anything like that. My story was good, but too short. It felt, though, as if I’d once again fallen hopelessly short of something crucial.

Last year, I made a couple of monumental decisions about my writing. For one thing, I decided to take writing seriously enough to pursue it as a career. For another, I even changed my university major from Communications to Creative Writing with this new career path in mind but by the end of the year, it felt as if I wasn’t accomplishing enough fast enough. I really had to take a step back and remind myself that none of this is going to happen overnight. I’m still learning and trying to juggle school and a full time job with writing. For the time being, it’s an uphill journey but I am making progress every day, slowly but surely.

Now I’m sure my anxiety won’t simply dissipate. I’ll probably continue to wrestle with my self-doubt and having to remind myself that it takes time to accomplish the type of goals that I’ve set for myself. For the time being, it’s enough to simply remember why I write. Writing is something that I simply Love to do. Whether I excel or suck at it is beside the point. Like Ray Bradbury said:

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.



This post first appeared on Tonya R. Moore, please read the originial post: here

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Wrestling with Self-Doubt

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