“Amazing things are going to happen for you this year, 2023 is your year,” my therapist declared a few months ago. It didn’t really take much convincing on her part—I had already told myself that several times. But it was good to hear it from someone else. Everyone needs a little bit of affirmation. Even the most confident individual has moments of doubt.

As I start to wind down again with my therapy sessions it’s good to take a moment to reflect. This is my second real stint with therapy (there was also a stretch in college that I don’t count), and it was just as helpful and informative as the previous one. I was willing to go back because I know that it works, I’ve seen it in action. I’ve made meaningful changes to my thought process and life style. And I came out of it a changed man. 

However, my reasons for going were different this time. When I first went between 2018 and 2020 I was depressed, anxiety-ridden, and lacking confidence. I was melancholy and pessimistic. Putzing through life with no direction. Looking for meaning but lacking purpose. Not coping with stress and adversity in a healthy way. This time around, I wasn’t in a state of emotional distress. My mental illnesses hadn’t come back to haunt. But I was looking for answers, and it’s safe to say I found some. 

Many of you know by now that I’ve gone off the beaten path, but this might be new to some. In February of last year I stopped doing the 9-5 thing. I’ve come to realize that it’s not what God intended for me. There are much bigger things in store, and a standard workplace limits me from reaching my full potential. My time and focus were being spent on something that I wasn’t interested in and didn’t feel fulfilling. I wasn’t making the best use of my talents and abilities. My greatest strength—my command of the English language in written form—was something I wasn’t able to display properly. The seed of talent had always been there, but because I wasn’t watering it, it had no room to grow. In order to facilitate that, I needed to step out of my comfort zone (yet again) and try something different. Leaving the work force entirely wasn’t the first step, but it was the most meaningful one. But just because I’m not “working a real job” doesn’t mean that I’m not hard at work. You could even argue that I’m working harder than ever. 

Unfortunately, in my line of work, progress and improvement aren’t always the most tangible. Comes with the territory. In more obscure or subjective fields it’s easy to overlook the amount of talent and the effort it takes to excel. For some who are more academically inclined it’s hard to see the merit in artistry, but everyone listens to music right? Everyone appreciates visual art. Everyone loves a good story. It just may not necessarily be in written form. At the end of the day though, everything comes down to storytelling. A song tells a story. A movie tells a story. A painting tells a story. And with each written story (so to speak) comes an untold backstory. 

We don’t see the effort that’s put into perfecting one’s craft. We don’t see the fuckups and the failures. We don’t see the process and the progress, only the finished product. We’re more than capable of judging the finished product (everyone is entitled to their own opinions), but unless we’ve been in someone else’s shoes it’s hard for us to understand the process, let alone judge it. In creative fields such as these it’s hard to say what the process should even look like. It’s different for each individual. There’s no standard operating procedure, there’s not really a rulebook. Steps may overlap but they may also differ. That becomes more clear to me the farther along I get in my journey. 

And boy has it been a journey with several twists and turns. I wouldn’t want it any other way, however. If everything always turns out as expected then it gets easy to get complacent, and to stop challenging yourself to reach greater heights. I’ve said before that complacency is the enemy of growth. You seek comfort in life, but you don’t want to get too comfortable—you need to find a balance. You want to constantly be bettering yourself, to be learning more. After all, the latest version should always be the best version. That’s why the process is so important. I wouldn’t have found out certain things about my craft if I hadn’t tried them. When it comes down to it, life is just an unending series of trial & error. 

That’s just how it goes right? We’re just trying things out to see if they stick. Career-wise, parenting-wise, life style-wise. It’s not unique to writing specifically, or artistry in general. We’re all figuring things out as we go along. We spend hours practicing and tinkering. Nothing I write is perfect on the first try—not my blog posts, not my poems, not the chapters for the novel/series I’m working on. I’m always switching words around, deleting sentences, and changing scenes. I’m trying things until I find something that works. This is the same for painters, musicians, and sculptors. For researchers, businessmen, and athletes. We’re all trying to hone our technique, and perfect our craft. Trying to make the best product possible. 

That’s what brought me back to therapy. Some of the things I had tried were no longer working as effectively. Like I said, I was looking for answers. Not the answers to life’s questions, but I needed to know what was next. As you know, 2020 was the year that I started writing in earnest. I had just quit a job that had become far too taxing on my mental health. The plan was to take a few weeks off to detox and debrief. But I am not the type that is willing to sit still for extended periods of time. After one or two weeks of vacation I start to get antsy, feeling like I need to do something productive. For years, I had been making up excuses and reasons not to write. I no longer had that luxury—I had run out of reasons. The time had come for me to embark on my journey. And I’ve learned so much in the last three and a half years since.

Through that time, my confidence has not wavered that much. But for a while, that confidence was unwarranted. I wasn’t where I needed to be as a writer, and I didn’t even know it. Part of it was ignorance, and part of it was naivety, but an even greater part of it was the fact that the start of my journey coincided with the start of COVID. Unbeknownst to me I was writing in isolation. I didn’t have any outside input or feedback of any kind, and that held me back as a writer. I didn’t have an accurate gauge for my ability. And I didn’t have a realistic outlook for where I stood. I didn’t even talk about things in the right way. The way I was approaching my journey was all wrong, but you live and you learn. I think about things differently now and that’s what matters.

I know what steps I need to take to get to where I want to go. I know what aspects of my writing are my strengths, and where I need improvement. I didn’t necessarily need to see a therapist in order to find this out, but it certainly helped. What I needed was someone to bounce ideas off of. What I needed was a greater goal in mind that would keep me motivated. What I needed was to be willing to try new things. I needed to approach this with an open mind. I can say with confidence that doing that has allowed me to get the most out of therapy. Like many things in life, you get out of it what you put into it. Therapy works, but only if you do your part. You have to be open and honest with yourself and with your therapist. You have to be willing to uncover your past trauma in order to move on. You have to be able to embrace the pain in order to bring about healing. 

All this was stuff I had already worked on the first time around. My mental health didn’t need fixing, but that doesn’t mean that none of this was relevant. Going into this second stint with this new perspective was interesting to say the least. You don’t often see a healed individual back in therapy again, unless they’ve suffered a setback. That was the position I was at. I was able to sit across from my therapist, look her in the eye and tell her, in person, that therapy works and that it healed me. That was as much a blessing for me as it was for her. But there were reasons why I found myself back in that office. 

Similar to the circumstances surrounding my first stint, I had found myself in a bit of a rut, feeling stuck. For two years I had been writing in my free time while working a 9-5. My intention had been to finish my manuscript, get it sent out, then quit my job. I thought I had arrived, but turns out that I still had a long ways to go, and had a lot more that I needed to learn. I had spent the time thinking I knew how to write, when in fact I was only just learning how to. I had allowed hubris to get the better of me. For the past few years, I’ve tried to approach life acting like I know nothing and that there’s everything left to learn. Unfortunately, I had lost sight of that—thinking that I was better than I was. I naively thought that once I finished writing my manuscript that it would be ready for publication. I’ve since disavowed myself of that notion and I’m much better for it. 

As it happened, I ended up quitting my job before I finished my manuscript, although I had set an arbitrary deadline for when I expected it to be completed. I quit with the expectation that spending more time on my writing would help me to improve as a writer, and it did for a time. But the gains were limited and that took me by surprise. By the time the summer rolled around, I was feeling tired and burnt out. I had cranked out around thirty chapters (out of a planned forty-five), and there seemed to be no end in sight. There were serious issues with my story and I didn’t know how to fix them. I started regretting the decision I had made to quit my job, wondering if I was, in fact, built for this. It took some time for me to come to the conclusion, but eventually, I realized that I needed therapy once again.

Fast forward about a year, and my manuscript is still unfinished and therefore not yet available for public consumption. I have too much pride to show a work in progress to people I care about. But that doesn’t mean that no one has seen it. That’s the main difference between this year and last—I’m no longer writing alone on my creativity island. I have since found an online community of like-minded individuals who are looking to accomplish the same dream as me. Last year I was spending way too much energy worrying about “what comes after.” I didn’t have writer friends in real life, but I was wondering if I could use what friends I did have to help me with editing and revisions when the time came. I was putting the cart before the horse—this energy would’ve been better used focusing on becoming a better writer and on finding a writing group. That being said, I’m in a much better spot than I was a year ago. I stopped stagnating and I started improving again. I talk differently, and I think differently. Nine months of therapy will do that to you. I came out changed before, and I’ve come out changed again. I used to be just a man trying his hand at writing. Now I’m a writer trying to become an author. 

Pursuing my dream wouldn’t have been possible without a reality check. It was inevitable, either I was going to be treated to one early, or I would be treated to one late. Luckily for me, it happened early, and I’m grateful for that. It happened to me before I really had a chance to get rolling, and that’s the best thing that could’ve happened to me. It is going to take hard work either way to get to where I want to go, but I needed to be put in my place. My excessive, unwarranted pride was going to be my undoing if I had allowed it to continue on unchecked. And it was certainly looking that way. The isolation in my personal life and in my writing was a bubble that was getting ready to pop. 

It shouldn’t really have come as a surprise to me even though it did. There is always a limit to how much you can improve on your own. It’s naive to believe otherwise. Oftentimes the best way to learn is through teamwork and collaboration. Why else do they force us into group projects in school? To teach us how to work with others, to show us how to delegate responsibilities, to highlight our strengths and weaknesses. This is a lesson that I needed to be reminded of. I can’t do this on my own—I know that now. My writing style isn’t just my own. It’s a culmination of my stylistic choices, what I’m good at, what/who inspires me, what I learn from people that have gone before me, but most importantly what I learn from my peers. I need to see other people’s writing and to critique it in order to see how I measure up. I need feedback and suggestions, positive and negative criticism. Just because I think that I’m a good writer doesn’t mean that I am one. 

For a while, my confidence outweighed my talent. The potential was there, but my technique needed to be honed and refined. Beneath the crap there was gold, but I needed to uncover it and chip away at the shell. My mistake was not realizing that there was a shell to begin with. For those two and a half years before I went back to therapy, I thought I was closer to the end than I was to the beginning. I had grown a lot as a writer in that time, but little did I know that the growth that came after would be much more meaningful. In the last nine months I’ve been steadily improving the quality of my writing. “New” chapters have been slow, but the rewrites of old ones have been fruitful. The old and new versions are night and day. I’ve started using a new five-color coding system that gives me an idea of what shape each chapter is in—spoiler alert: most of what I wrote wasn’t good enough. I have also developed a more objective sense for what “good writing” entails. I didn’t have that before. 

Oftentimes these days I find myself talking to other people about my writing. (I think) it comes about organically. “What do you do for work/fun,” feels like the right time to talk about it. Sometimes the conversation progresses as expected, but other times it doesn’t. Reactions tend to range from, “oh sweet. When’s it coming out?” to blank stares and apathy. The latter reaction used to really bother me, but it doesn’t so much anymore. I realize now that some people aren’t going to take me seriously until I have published works to show for my hours of toil. It’s hard for some people to see the hard work that goes into an endeavor until it pays off. It is what it is. I used to think I had a good sense for when it would pay off. 

But I’m willing to admit now that I don’t. The truth is, this isn’t entirely in my hands. The writing part is, but what comes after is not. A lot is put into publishing a novel. And a good portion of it is not writing. However, that’s something to worry about down the line. I’ve put the cart before the horse before, and I’m not going back down that road. I know better now. Good things have come in 2023, and they will continue to come if I stay focused. I’ve bettered my craft. I’ve discovered my voice. I’ve gotten into a groove where my level of talent nearly matches my confidence level. I’ve finally come to a place where my writing is good enough. I’ve discarded the shell, and I’m left with ore that needs to be refined. I’ve learned how to write, but it doesn’t mean that I’ve arrived. I still need to chip away and make it shine. Eventually a grand story will emerge, but I can’t rush the process. One day soon the time will come when I can reveal my baby to the world. I don’t know when that day will be, but I assure you it’ll be well worth the wait.