measuring up.

One of my issues as a writer is the fear that I'm never going to be good enough. That nothing I write is ever going to be PERFECT, and if it's not perfect, what's the point? And that fear is paralysing. It eats up my motivation and desire and tells me "YOU'RE NOT AN AUTHOR. YOU'RE A PHONEY. A PRETENDER" and makes me want to crawl under a rock and sleep. Or re-read A Moveable Feast by Hemingway. And by re-read, I mean read the parts where he talks about meeting Fitzgerald. OH, YOU SO CRAZY, FRANCES SCOTT.

Let's count the ways in which I'm going to literary hell.

But I guess insecurity is the curse of writing. In the very process of putting words onto our screens, we're letting ourselves be vulnerable. This is our creation. This is something from our minds which shows who we are. There'll always be a part of ourselves in our stories, and it's hard to dissociate the fear of rejection of our stories from the notion that they're really rejecting us.

Par exemple, le jour d'autre. I was asking X (okay, I'm going to be honest with y'all: you're going to be hearing about X a lot. He's on my mind all the time. It's pathetic.) to come with me to a charity function, and he said no. Now, he didn't say no, Jessica, I'm turning you down because you're an obsessive-psycho-stalker-freak. He said no, I have to organise job interviews and I'm really busy, but let me know for the next one?

I still obsessed over every little detail of it more than is probably healthy. But my point is this: we're all afraid of rejection because writing is so incredibly INTIMATE. Writing is something that defines who we are as people. And let me tell you, writers are pretty damn AWESOME. En fait, I'd even say that we're LEGEN--wait for it--DARY.

Don't be afraid that you don't measure up, or that you're not good enough, whether it be as a writer or as a person, because, even though it sounds completely NAFF, you do. You've put pen to paper and you've created something, and that's more than most people will ever acheive.