The best compliment I ever received was from my friend Caitlin when I pulled up the link to my self published poetry book and said, "look what I made!"
After a moment of excited flailing Caitlin looked at me and said, "that's amazing. You decide to do something and you do it."
You decide to do something and you do it.
It seems so obvious. So elegant and simple. If you decided to do something why wouldn't you just do it? As someone who struggles with anxiety and firsthand knowledge of how mean the world is I understand on a pretty deep level that just because you decide to do something does not mean you'll be able to do it. There are health problems, other people's expectations, finances, the fact that people don't take you seriously as a writer, that all want to get in the way of just doing what you want to do. Sometimes it is just hard to keep believing in yourself when everyone else keeps telling you no. I also understand that there is a big difference between deciding you want to do something and having the resources to make it happen; between wanting to go to Peru and being able to book the trip or writing a novel and being able to push it at enough publishers until someone is kind enough to send you a handwritten rejection letter.
It is simple to want to do something. Doing it is another story.
True story. I have accomplished a lot in my life. I graduated from a really great college, I wrote, designed and published two books, I've traveled Europe and South America by myself, and I created and manage my own art website (that last one you should know considering that is where you are right now). I feel like a failure 98.5% of the time. I self published my books because I couldn't find anyone who was willing to even look at them long enough to tell me no. I spend 40 hours a week at a job I actively dislike and feel completely unchallenged by. And there are all of these other things that make me feel like a complete and total failure because they are short of my expectations of how you are supposed to do things.
I think a lot of us get stuck in that thought process.
If you go to a good college and do well that is supposed to challenge into a good job that challenges you and makes you feel fulfilled. And if you don't you've failed.
If you write a book you are supposed to find a literary agent who will submit it to major publishers and get it published. And if you end up choosing to self publish you have failed.
There is a "right" way to do things and any way that is different is automatically wrong. Forcing my way through an overgrown path and creating my own way to achieve my goal feels like being a failure and not an accomplishment. At the very least it feels like cheating. I think that's especially true of anything in the arts. You can be creative and forge your own path but only to this point, otherwise your art is not legitimate and you've cheated. You only self published, you're not a real author.
Or is that just me?
That's why having someone acknowledge that you made a decision to do something and then made it happen is a big deal. You did it. You made it happen whether you did it in the way you and everyone else expected it or not.
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