Building self-confidence as a creative

To put yourself out there is to open yourself up to rejection. How do you hang onto your confidence through it all?

Hi, lovely Creativity Under Capitalism readers!

I want to share that I am sunsetting the Freelance Series, my $5 monthly special issue focused on building a happy, healthy, and sustainable freelance career. The series hasn’t resonated like I expected it to, and I feel that I’ve already shared the insights that will most effectively help other freelancers, so it doesn’t make sense for me to continue pulling time and energy away from other projects in favor of the series. I also have plenty left to learn myself!

If you subscribe to the Freelance Series, I’m endlessly grateful for your support, and I hope you’ve found its issues useful. Subscription fees have ended as of Jan. 1, 2025.

I’ll be archiving issues of the Freelance Series to protect the sensitive information I’ve shared, but if you have a question about freelancing that I’ve answered in the past, feel free to message me for a copy.

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I only worked toward one New Year’s Resolution in 2024. Like a resolution rookie—something I’m not—I made it vague and impossible to measure. In 2024, I wanted to stop allowing myself to feel small.

The idea had largely sprung from my experiences with social anxiety, which has always been a struggle of mine and seems to have gotten worse over the past few years. I was sick of my heart pounding at parties, of telling myself to shut up when a joke didn’t land, of fleeing public spaces when I spotted someone I didn’t like. But I was also tired of limiting myself in general. I’d set relatively lofty goals for myself before and had achieved them; why was I suddenly bowling with the bumpers up?

To be fair, I did take steps toward this goal throughout the year. I emailed pitches I wasn’t 100% optimistic about. I hosted several gatherings in my home. I reminded myself that no one would remember my minor embarrassment at a party. I entered a restaurant knowing someone I didn’t want to talk to was inside.

These steps were effective, but I’ve found myself humbled by the fact that confidence—shorthand for my “not feeling small”—takes more than a year to build. Even less conveniently, it must be maintained.

My creative confidence took its biggest hit yet in the fall. Not only had I fired off my very first fellowship, residency, and grant applications that summer, but I’d also started to query literary agents and submit my novella to small presses. I was nothing if not aware that querying is one of the most brutal processes a writer can endure: you’re constantly getting your hopes up, then being ignored, rejected, or ghosted, only to do it dozens more times in the hope that your manuscript—the thing you just spent years making with love—will someday see the light of day. Still, rejection hit me like a truck. I got multiple emails a day informing me that my application/project/manuscript had not been selected. I’d vent to a writer friend about how much it sucked, only to receive yet another rejection minutes later. It would have been comical, had it not felt like a denial of everything I was and could create.

Amid my sadness, I began to grow resentful of other people’s joyful announcements: their publishing dates, their fellowships, their cover reveals, their contract signings. I tasted bile whenever I saw my manuscript PDF on my computer. For the first time in my life, I began to seriously doubt that I’d ever see my own book on a store shelf. I eventually took a step back from writing fiction when the presidential election happened, and virtually all of my hope in anything at all vaporized, Thanos-like, into thin air.

It has now been nearly two months since I’ve made meaningful progress on my new novel-in-progress or on the short story I was excited about back in October. I succeeded at taking a break through the holidays, telling myself that I needed to refill my cup before returning to the page with gusto. I’ve since restored (some of) my faith in humanity, as well as some of my motivation to write. I’m excited to jump back into my WIPs—and, if we’re being honest, to become a bit of a post-holidays hermit—but I’m cautiously wondering how I can rebuild and maintain my confidence as I continue to navigate the worlds of publishing and career-building.

I really appreciate Erika Gallion’s approach, to start. In a Note published last week, Erika shared that she’d fired off 64 queries in 2024 and hadn’t landed an agent—but she had been published in a literary magazine, won a nonfiction contest (after 3 attempts!), read her work publicly, built up her literary community, and overcome an emotional obstacle involving her work. While the disappointed brain tends to focus on a singular failure, Erika points out that other wins can’t be overshadowed; they shine on their own.

But even if Erika hadn’t been published and hadn’t won that contest, her effort would still be worthy of celebration. We can’t control how other people will respond to our work, but we can control whether we show up for ourselves. And that’s what I’m focusing on in 2025.

Among a few non-writing-related things, one of my goals for this year is to rack up a certain number of rejections that will absolutely break my heart (like the national park residency I applied for and didn’t get last year, or a fellowship I’d kill to experience) and a certain number of rejections that are a bit more run-of-the-mill (pitches, queries, litmags, etc). The idea to focus on rejections was inspired by one of my writing pals, who recommended making a sticker chart and giving myself a sticker for every rejection I received. After a certain number of stickers, I could give myself a prize, which would help to reinforce the idea that rejection isn’t necessarily a bad thing—by and large, it’s a sign that I’m showing up for myself.

My sticker chart—which doesn’t feature the conventional star stickers, but instead a bunch of chubby-faced cats—is a perfect complement to the singular post-it stuck to the bottom of my computer monitor. In my childish, sun-faded pink gel scrawl, it reads: “No once can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

Growing up, I’d hear Eleanor Roosevelt’s take on self-assuredness and scrunch my nose. Uh, yeah, people very much could make me feel inferior without my consent. That’s what bullying and microaggressions and even emotional abuse are all about. But through my least savory writing experiences, I’ve come to realize that Teddy Roosevelt’s badass niece had a point, even if it’s a very tough one to internalize. In the end, the only person who can decide what I’m worth is me.

The same thing goes for you.

What’s been inspiring me lately:

✰ To Be Taught, If Fortunate, a novella by Becky Chambers. A writer friend—what a joy to mention three whole writer friends in a single newsletter!—recommended this one to me, and it quickly became one of the most important stories I’ve ever read. I felt like this on the inside after finishing it:

✰ Orbital, a novel that I actually did not like but that taught me there is a market for relatively plot-free books about humanity’s ability to persevere, which is a theme in my current WIP.

✰ A woman I met at a party last weekend whose screenplay is currently being shopped to Netflix and other major platforms. It’s incredible to meet people who have achieved things like this IRL, and I greatly admire her humility about it, especially as it relates to the precarious editorial process.