When I was in high school, I discovered I love to write. Throughout college and the years after, I wanted to make a career out of writing.
I knew it was hard, and it would take connections, and the right niche, and the right voice, and a lot of effort. Everyone told me that few people make it, but I thought I could be one of the people who made it.
But lately, I’ve been feeling this dream slip away.
I’m almost 27 years old and rarely write anymore.
And I know I could still make it. If I put more effort in, it’s possible. There are a thousand books I could read, a million “how-to”s I could follow, a billion pieces of advice I could act on to become a writer.
But most mornings, I wake up and the ghosts start whispering into my soul about how I’m not who I thought I would be by now.
I thought I would have tons of fans by now. I thought I would have multiple books and enough income to support my family and me by now.
Moreover, on a personal level, I thought I would be more patient by now. I thought I would be more tender, and more gracious, and better at expressing my opinions verbally, and wouldn’t be so anxious all the time, and would have learned to comfortable in my own skin, and wouldn’t be so badly out of shape.
A lot of the things I thought I would be, I’m not.
And most days that really gets me down. It makes me feel embarrassed and ashamed and like a failure. And those feelings paralyze me.
Do you ever feel this?
Do you ever feel the weight of all the things you haven’t become?
Will you tell me if you feel this?
Because sometimes I feel like I am the only one.
And I know. I know. I should just fight the resistance, right? I should give the ghosts a dose of truth? I should slay my doubt, my fear, my insecurities, and all the dragons that feed on me? I should hustle harder and grind more, right?
But most days, I don’t feel up to it.
Do you ever not feel up to it?
Will you tell me if you ever don’t feel up to grinding, to hustling, to fighting for your dreams?
Because sometimes I feel like the only one.
And that, too, makes me feel ashamed. It makes me feel restless and trapped.
Lately, I’ve been considering killing off my dreams. Putting them down gently, in a family plot underneath an expansive tree, in a place where they can’t taunt me from the grave.
I’m wondering if I need to go through the grieving process of mourning all the people I will never be, all the dreams that likely won’t come to fruition, all the ways I thought my life would be perfect.
Perhaps I need to come to peace with the fact that who I am right now is enough, and how I love is more important than what I accomplish, and I’m valuable despite what I haven’t and won’t become.
And if you feel the same as me, maybe that is what you need to do, too.
Maybe we need to put to death our dreams, our expectations, our future identities.
And then, after the grieving, after the mourning, after the process of death has been completed, perhaps, we will find that springing up from the grave is a fruit tree.
Perhaps we will find that our broken dreams have been transformed, have been given new bones, a new form, a new spirit.
Maybe we will find that out of death has come a resurrection.
———
You’re certainly not the only one, and you’re definitely not alone in this. I’m with you. I think this is millennial culture—the odd and pressured expectation that if we haven’t arrived yet (or at the very least, feel comfortable with we’re at right now), then we must be failing. I hate it. We’re so hard on ourselves, and it’s muddying up the free space we need to be creative. Maybe God can help us figure out how to adjust the time limits we gave our brains back when we began. Makes me mad that satan would spit such terrible lies.
You have far too much talent and grit and courageous vulnerability to quit now, and the world would truly miss out if you didn’t put your words out there. It’s okay that it takes a long time. Just keep trying, and the words will follow along and figure themselves out. You have beautiful stories in you that you don’t even know about yet, and they will change lives. They might just need a little bit of wide open space to to plant and grow.
You must keep writing. Like you’re holding back the darkness or keeping the gates closed against armies. It’s most certainly a war. Please keep writing.
Lauren, thanks for sharing your thoughts and thanks for your encouraging words. Really, thanks. After thinking about what you said, perhaps it is less about putting dreams to death, and maybe more about putting to death the expectations (i.e., accolades, money, timeframes, etc) that come along with the dreams. Maybe putting to death the pressure and the expectations helps create the space we need to create art without fear of acceptance or judgment.
Josh, I often share your posts with friends. I like the honesty and emotion that goes with them. I’d be sad if you stopped writing.
I had to read this three times because it resonated with me so deeply.
Music was my first love. I’ve wanted to be a musician since I was 14. I studied music in college. I moved to a big music city and wrote and played and collaborated and struggled and drained my savings recording an album. A few years ago I realized I wasn’t loving it anymore, the business of it, and shifted over to writing. The more I wrote, the more I realized writing was also my first love – the music came and swept me away into dreams of being on the radio and being famous and all the other shiny stuff – but at the core of it, I just loved writing a good song, and at the core of THAT, I just loved writing.
So I started writing books.
I’m 34 now and just at the beginning of my writing journey. I can tell you that most writers don’t even publish anything until their late 30s or early 40s, because it takes so damn long to hone your craft. If you actually finish a book or two, you’re miles ahead of most who give up because honestly writing a book is a pain in the ass (that said, it should still be fun, if you love it). Here’s the key: drop the expectations. If someone could look into the future and tell you that you’ll never get paid to write, would you still write? When you’re creating art, whether it’s writing or music or painting or drawing, the reward is not tied up with the outcome; it’s in the fact that you’ve created something. You made stuff. You tried. You can look back on your life and go, “Hey, I made all of that. Cool.” If you shove it all away in a drawer with feelings of disappointment, it’ll be a big fat “what if?” Having a “what if?” is a heavy burden to bear. Only hang it up if you absolutely aren’t finding joy in it anymore. If the perceived payoff isn’t worth the effort. If you don’t love writing simply for the sake of writing, even if no one else reads it. If it feeds your soul, please don’t stop.
Yes…who you are right now is absolutely enough. How you love is FAR more important than what you accomplish. But I think a big part of who you are and how you love is in being creative, creating things, and if you stop creating things, your soul gets stifled (at least for me). Write what you know, and tell a good story. That’s it. You have so much time, years and years. I was overjoyed having come from the music industry where 26 is ancient, to the world of writing where it truly doesn’t matter. JK Rowling published the first Harry Potter book when she was 32, and many have been much older than that. That’s the norm. You can write around a day job, you can write with a family – you don’t have to be Stephen King and shut yourself in a room for hours at a time at all hours of the night. You work it into your life because it’s something you love, and if you end up selling a bunch of books, awesome; if you self-publish and some friends and family buy it, awesome. The reward is in what you’ve created.
Keep on keeping on, and I hope to read your books someday. 🙂
~Ren (fellow CC)