How I Find the Will to Believe in My Creative Self Even Though I am Trapped in this Hell-scape We Call Reality.

I just went to Kathryn Milewski's Vocal page and.....damn.

Kathryn Milewski is incredibly talented. She's won many challenges, and for good reason: her prose is honest, relatable, and vocal enough - if you will - to earn its place on this platform. I subscribed right away.

But as my eyes passed over her words, I could not help the familiar tug of that doubtful, halting feeling which passes over the souls of creatives time and again. How can I, a senior biology major at a science and technology focused university, possibly measure up?

I want to make it clear: I am not a writer. Not professionally, at least. I never really wanted to be a writer, either. Not until recently.

It was one of those strange moments in life. A turning point, a significance you cannot recognize until months have gone by and the memory is still clear and untouched in your brain.

In March of last year, COVID had become somewhat of a concern on campus. Spring break was on the horizon, and all the students were abuzz with packing, gearing up to head home for the week. Or longer, much to our excitement. We were all hesitantly optimistic about the outcome of the virus. There were rumors that the second half of the semester would essentially be canceled. You can imagine my amusement when I ended up spending the entirety of my junior year on Zoom calls instead.

It was that very last day of school where I sat drenched in a pool of afternoon light at my desk and wrote out the first draft of my sci-fi novel. I should have been packing, but I left campus with an idea that weighed heavier on me than any suitcase or tote bag ever could. Even now, I still can't stop thinking about it. How to work it into my already busy life. How to get into the industry of professional storytelling.

I spent all of quarantine writing and ended up with a semi-complete draft of 37,00o words. Me, a biology major who thought she enjoyed fiddling with pipettes in the lab more than anything else.

But here's the real meat of the point I'm trying to make here: This isn't just a story about my life and how I discovered my writing and blah blah blah.

It's about us.

It's about all of us, who seek the nuance of inky scratches over blank, unfaltering white. Us, who love to daydream and can't seem to make anyone understand the significance of the unreal, the incomparable. Fathomless, scenario-building, romantic, character-obsessed, us.

I think (and perhaps you would agree) that sometimes the world makes us feel like we aren't needed.

Here is how I go about respectfully disagreeing with that. Defying God, or the cosmos, or whoever the fuck had the audacity to create reality as we know it.

It always boils down to this question:

Does my voice even matter?

The knee-jerk reaction is immediate. No. You are a middle-class white girl. A carbon copy of a carbon copy. There are already those who live and breathe storytelling, and they do it better than you. This isn't what you signed up for, anyway. You should be writing your lab report for Biochemistry.

Or whatever other insincerities I spout. There is something so uncomfortable about being genuine. Like many people, I'd wager it's because we're not really meant to be comfortable, not for too long. To be without pain, without shock or delight or misery, is to forfeit living. Think about it. When are you gripping at the pages of your favorite book? Is it when Bella is having lunch with her friends? Or is it when she's writhing on the floor, arm full of vampire venom?

Okay, I suppose that is an extreme example. But we consume media because we like to live. We like to think about the pain and the love and the bits of human experience we are starving for amidst the dreary society we've all been forced to participate in.

And us creatives, we are more starved than most.

So here's my advice.

The question is not whether your voice in particular matters. The question is more about how are you going to make it matter.

I'm going to be frank. I think everyone's voice is meaningful. I think all the souls in the world have at least one sentence, one tidbit of advice, or song, or story, that is worth it. Even if it's only one person that gets it. Even if that one person is yourself.

So, creatives - we're already starting out in a good place (if you're being optimistic)! Your work matters to you. And believe me when I say that can be enough.

But when you're ready to be uncomfortable, here's how to silence those doubts. Here's how to go the extra mile.

Start living.

Actually, perhaps it would be more accurate and less cliché to say start pretending.

I know you love your characters and your plot, but there has to be room in your head for you, too. Your journey. This quest is unforgiving, and requires those with the strongest of wills, the fiercest of wit, and the sharpest of tongue. Sounds like an adventure, right? Writing, in itself, should be an adventure. It's self discovery, it's battling with doubt, it's everything you've got against the odds. Classic plot devices.

Hype yourself up. Be a biology student diverging from the path of science. Let sunlight dust the tips of your fingers as they fly across the keys, eager to spill out the idea that came to you so suddenly it changed the course of your life. Struggle, and struggle some more.

As bestselling author Leigh Bardugo once said, it is the days where the task becomes the hardest, when the mountain seems unscalable, that matter most. Not the easy days.

Do whatever it is you think you can't. Become someone your characters might befriend or cheer on.

Just pretend.

Sit in the coffee shop window with a beret at a tasteful angle and say to yourself: I am mysterious.

I am bold and impassioned.

I am starving for life.

I am a writer.