On Self-Doubt, Self-Worth, and How to Manage Your Self-Esteem as a Writer

In 2017, the author found herself at a writers' conference, racing across Manhattan to catch a train to New Haven after discovering the bus route she was holding a ticket for had been canceled. Outside the station, she haggled with a few cab drivers over the fare and ended up in a cab driven by a man who asked her if she had a boyfriend. Despite his persistence, she firmly declined, and he eventually left. The author later wrote an essay about that incident, which became one of her first published pieces.

At the conference, the author sat among a few hundred mostly white women, taking notes on the lectures or scribbling away for ten minutes on a given prompt. The atmosphere was filled with a sense of desperation, with everyone terrified of their impending irrelevance. The author aspired to write a book that many people would want to read, but the real challenge was how to manage self-doubt and self-worth in the realm of writing.

In 2012, the author attended an artist residency where twenty-five artists came together for dinner after a day of solitary work. While some were energized or spent after their day, writers seemed to emanate a kind of dreary stagnation. Their day involved deleting thousands of words or writing sloppy pages they would discard the next morning. Despite the difficulties, there was no tangible labor involved in their work.

In 2021, the online literary journal 3:AM Magazine gained infamy for publishing a creepy poem by a white man about a popular woman writer of color. The website traffic soared, but the magazine's primary visitors were writers looking to submit their own work. Each poem was accompanied by a large headshot and bio, making the author's image more prominent than the poem itself.

Many authors the author met in her coaching practice confessed that their self-worth was bound up in their writing, seeking advice on how not to feel like their worth lies in their work.