Fear is an interesting thing. What causes fear in one person may not in another. Your fears may seem minuscule when compared to mine. But most (if not all) of us, have fears. We fear spiders and snakes. We fear the dark. Or clowns. We may fear each other. Or death – ours or that of a loved one. There is no shortage of things we fear. For me, there is one thing that I have been struggling with the past few years that has stymied me at nearly every turn…
The fear of failure.
I am a writer. I say this hesitantly because I haven’t felt like a writer for a while now. But I am a writer nonetheless. Technically speaking, I can even say I’m a professional writer – I have been published and paid for that work. However, it has been a while since I cashed a check for it.
My goal since around 1999 has been to be a professional fiction (prose/script) writer. I have written a few screenplays and a couple of short stories. I even earned an MFA in writing. However, that work has yet to pay any dividends. It often doesn’t. Fiction takes lots of hard work and time, perseverance, talent, and often good timing. By the time I neared the end of my MFA program, I was ready to commit, but then I hit a wall.
I need to back up just a bit and say that throughout my life, I’ve had issues with my self-esteem. The reasons why are unimportant for this piece; just suffice to say, that I never was overly confident in my abilities, no matter the task.
By the time 1999 rolled around and my professional desires turned to writing, I began to write. As has often been the case for me, my employment inhibited my writing a bit. I was studying journalism at that time and working in sports information, so I only wrote fiction when I could make the time, which wasn’t much.
When I finally finished my first screenplay around 2005 or so, I was elated. I had never had a feeling quite like that. I did it! I didn’t know how good it was, but I did it. I entered the script into an online competition and advanced to the quarterfinals. Better than I had even hoped for. I was still learning, but I had completed something. My self-esteem was then at the highest it had been in quite some time.
Not long after, my interest in screenwriting took me to a one-semester filmmaking program and then later in 2012 to an MFA program. Near the end of my MFA studies, I created websites (here and at Broken Heart Publishing) where I could blog about my journey in writing and where I could post some of the things I had been writing.
I was excited. My faculty mentors were encouraging. I was ready.
Around September 2013, I began to write short, one-page stories every day as a way to tuneup for the day’s writing. I decided to publish those on my writing website for my friends and family to read. By December of that year, I had written around 60 of these stories and had been making progress on a couple of the writing projects I was most excited about (in addition to the work I was doing for the MFA program). But, as it often does for someone who historically has low self-esteem, a single comment derailed the whole thing.
I had posted a final story on the website and then posted about it on my Facebook page. Whether he read it or not I have no idea, but one of my uncles commented on the post. I would have expected something nice or at least neutral, but his comment truly cut me to the core. He told me I was not a good writer and proceeded to explain why.
I was devastated. I fought back a little, but began to think that maybe he was right. His comments cut deep enough that they breached the reservoir of self-doubt I already had (that I had had for most of my life) and let it seep out until it again infested my thinking and my actions.
By that point, I probably should have been stronger than that, but I wasn’t. As a result, the writing stopped. I had just started the final semester of my MFA work, and by the following May, I did graduate but I knew that those few comments had even negatively affected the MFA work.
I continued thinking about the projects I wanted to work on, but when I thought about sitting down to work on them, I would have thoughts of “Why bother?” or “You’ll never be good enough.” Sometimes, the internal comments were excessively mean.
I was afraid of failure. I was afraid of disappointing my mom. I was afraid that I had been a disappointment to my dad. I mean, certainly I had disappointed myself. So, how could anyone else not be disappointed in me?
It’s been nearly 4 years since that incident. I have more than beaten myself up over allowing those few comments to derail me so significantly. I often sit at my desk in front of my computer ready to overcome the fear, overcome the negativity that has grown within myself. Yet, I never have.
Now I’m ready. I’ve committed myself to overcoming these fears, this negativity. I’ve committed myself to sitting down every day and doing the work. Will I succeed? Who knows.
What I do know is that I will be able to consider myself a writer again, without hesitation. I’ll still fear many things, but failure will no longer be one of them.
