There’s No End to Desire

By the end of 2019, I found myself in therapy because it felt like I was hopeless. With so much going on in the world, hearing no about fifty-eleven times, and trying to manage the responsibilities of everyday life, I was waking up feeling like the world was on top of me more than feeling on top of the world. I was used to being able to will things in my life to happen with sheer determination and ambition, but 2019 was a lesson in patience. 

The reality of striving for anything is that you have to keep going. If you are a spiritual person, you know that God has a great plan for your life and if you can trust that even when it’s too foggy to see in front of your face, that really should be all the motivation you need to keep putting one foot in front of the other. 

To put it in perspective, going into 2019, I told myself that I needed to take a step back. I needed to do less and really focus on writing because ultimately that’s what I hope to be able to do with this part of my life — write. But it was like the moment I took a step back, I immediately felt like I wasn’t doing enough. I had no announcements. I had no great fellowships, or publication announcements or agents beating down my door. I had a lot of tries. I applied to retreats, I submitted short stories, I pitched articles, and it felt like at every turn I was being rejected. 

As much as we know that we shouldn’t take those things personally, after about the 50th, “Unfortunately, we will not be able to …” you can’t help but start to feel like you aren’t good enough. 

But after going to therapy, I realized so much more about why it felt personal. That all my life I’d been striving to be enough to do enough to be accepted and this wall of “Nos” felt insurmountable. It felt like nothing I did was good enough and only reinforced feelings I was already having about myself. Things that I covered up with achievement and ambition. Holes that no matter what I achieved would never be filled because it needed to come from within. 

After a short stint of meetings with my therapist, I felt WAY better. In many ways, I just needed someone to talk to who could give me an objective point of view. I was able to understand the source of some of my emotions which was instrumental in being able to move forward in a more positive and healthy way. So, rolling into 2020, I was good. I was in a space where I realized that none of those things completed me or made me a better person. I realized I was more than enough in and of myself and that if God never blessed me with another thing, I had all that I needed. I was reminded in books I read, sermons I listened to and movies I watched that essentially there was “no end to desire.” 

Of course, the moment that it clicked for me, things seemed to start to turn around. After a grueling year and a half of querying my novel, I received an email from an agent saying that they actually loved my book. “Loved it.” This, mind you after countless rejections, countless, “it just wasn’t a good fit for me” from tons of other agents. I couldn’t even read the email correctly because I was so used to reading, “no.” 

After a call and following up with some other agents that still had my full manuscript, I signed a contract with my agent and now we are working on getting the book that I had honestly moved on from — I’m already knee-deep in a second manuscript and wrote ideas for a third — ready for submission to publishers. 

And it’s one step in a very long journey, right? A publisher still has to be interested, we have to make edits, then if a publisher is interested, you have to get it ready to sell, etc. But, it’s a testament to patience and knowing that eventually, if you keep asking and believing in yourself and in your work, doors will open when the time is right. 

I also wrote down some goal publications that I wanted to write for this year. I’ve learned that instead of trying to answer every pitch call I see, to really target my freelance work and at the beginning of the year, I had a pitch accepted by one of the three already for a feature that I’m extremely excited about. 

These are great things and if I hadn’t done the work on myself in the last quarter of 2019, I might have a skewed view of these wins. They are great things that I’m excited about, but just like the rejections, the acceptance doesn’t make me either. I’m enough within myself. I’m a good writer whether anyone else pats me on the back or not. This career of writing is not an easy one. There is no blueprint that I can follow or family connections that I can cash in on. 

I’m just a little girl from Philly who loved trips to the library with her mother and dreamed that one day maybe I could write stories like those too. No one said that the journey would be easy. But here we are. 

I decided to keep asking. To keep writing. To keep working. To get better at my craft and it looks like doors are opening. It doesn’t mean that more won’t be slammed in my face. But I’m equipped now in a way that I’ve never felt before.