Nothing to Say Here
You are a good writer until you’re not.
In 2006, my English teacher asked me to meet him after school to further discuss a question I’d asked about that day’s lesson.
Clearly I expected him to tell me I was failing his course and would have to take freshman English all over again, because the quiet girl, Anxiety Personified — she never gets asked to stay after school unless it’s voluntary.
It turned out my performance in freshman English was beyond satisfactory. Actually, he had been so impressed with my question about the iceberg theory that he’d printed out the most famous examples from successful writers so I could understand how to fulfill my destiny as A Promising Young Writer.
He said, Sign up for my colleague’s creative writing class. Anxiety Personified never disobeys an authority figure’s direct order.
Three years later the instructor teaching that course told the entire class he wouldn’t be surprised if I published my first novel within five years, and I wanted to die.
I have nothing interesting to say. I never have. I simply think about the world and scribble ideas down as if I’m the first person to ever consider them. Everyone writes. Weaving words into tapestries does not make me special, perhaps it only marks me as unwell.
It is 2024. Every book I write rots imprisoned on my hard drive. There are three reasons I write as a deteriorating millennial: To make money, to expose my words to enough editors that one of them will give me money, and because my mental health spirals can only be soothed by pounding at keys until paragraphs materialize.
People read them and I don’t know why. Why are you reading this? Is it because you’re spiraling too?
I used to write because people said it must be what I was born and survived for. Now I’m lucky if my words pay for groceries. I am unemployable because I wrote one million words in 2019 (no really, I counted) and ever since then nothing I’ve written has made me desirable.
Your work is so well-written and clear! Is it good enough to make a living? Am I good enough to warrant a following? Maybe I would be if I could think of something to say that mattered.
When you grow up being told that you’re good at exactly one thing, and you do the thing, and the thing does not yield the sparkling utopia you were promised, what’s the point of wandering through adulthood still thinking you can turn words into magic?
I am asked, Do you believe in yourself? and of course I don’t. I never will again. Every time someone recognizes that I can write readable things and that I’m fast and curious and ambitious, they twist compliments into demands.
Give me four articles a day. Five. Six. Every day of the week. Can you come in this weekend too? You want to feel good about your words? Earn it.
So I write until my fingers freeze and my brain is made of clouds and there is nothing left for me to say. I have never believed that I am good at this, but I sometimes like to imagine that I deserve to trade my words for shiny objects.
The more I dream of stability, the more capitalism pulls me apart.
If you write a hundred more like this, you will be golden.
Instead I’m just dust. It’s not fair that I can’t shine the way my mentors always said I could. I tried. I never meant to fail so tragically.
Anxiety Personified lets people down all the time. That doesn’t make it right.
What if I never come back from this? What if everything I write from this moment on disgraces everyone who ever used to know me?
Writing is supposed to change the world. Now I write to feel something, and even that doesn’t always produce results.
It’s humiliating to have fallen so far below the hopes and dreams of the people who once believed in me. What’s worse is that it’s all my fault. I could have tried harder. I could have written more.
I could have pretended I was better than I was, because confidence wins awards but self-deprecation traps you in a perpetual state of writing dark personal essays on the weekends and letting everyone read them for free.
If I could go back to 2006 and warn my younger self about the future, I would tell her to major in marketing instead.
