Starting my journey as a writer feels like jumping off a cliff into a fog. My whole life, I’ve been a storyteller, but making a living from nothing is a different story. Terrifying doesn’t encompass the emotions I’ve had since January when I left a solid job that paid the bills to chase this dream. I was raised by the kind of people that take pride in a hard day’s work and a steady paycheck so questions like “Where is the money going to come from?” or “What if no one liked my work?”, and “What if I’m not good enough?” come natural to me.

So it took a massive leap of faith for me to finally decide to pursue writing seriously. I knew I had to face the fear, but that didn’t make the fear any less real. Frankly I wouldn’t have made the leap were it not for the suffering I feel in the real world, confined by natural laws and unimaginative bosses. I see so much potential in the world for different perspectives and creative solutions that I struggle to color inside the lines of a world with ridged boundaries. But in my mind, I am free.

Inside my mind I am free to spend ten pages exploring a story so small that most people, confined by the trappings of a busy life, would never have time to care about. I am fascinated by the thistle that flowers in the crack of a busy sidewalk. It’s thorns, its rugged stalk, and yet it’s beautiful purple flower despite the adversity, all tell a story that tickles my soul and I yearn to tell that story to anyone that would care to listen. And so it was, with great trepidation that I leapt from the precipice, stretched my wings and prayed that I would be found worthy before I found the rocks at the bottom.

When I hit “send” on my first query letter, I felt a mix of excitement and dread. The process of trying to find representation is both exhilarating and agonizing. Like many debut authors, I started this journey with no industry connections, no prior publications, and no idea what lay ahead. Right now, it’s just me and the wind out here. I have my manuscript in hand and I love it but I have no idea if anyone else will.

Naturally, I did an enormous amount of research before I set out on the journey so the first thing I did after I sent out my query letter was send thirty more. Then I waited, filling my time by reading more about the industry and starting a new manuscript. All the while, I waited with anxious anticipation for my first rejection to roll in. I knew from reading hundreds of blogs and forums that rejections were common for writers, so I tried to prepare myself, but oh how unprepared I was for what that felt like.

To pour over a query for days trying to get it just right, reading bio after bio, studying an agent, reading their author’s books, getting to know their online persona just to get a canned “This isn’t for me” six months later was soul rending. Worse, as I have come to learn, that is a better experience than most authors are having right now. Most simply hear nothing back.  

For me, that was when the fear of failure started creeping in. As I sent out the second round of queries, I found it so much harder to try. I was climbing a growing hill of dead queries to send each new letter out and each new bio I read sounded more disingenuous than the last.

I know I’m not supposed to take it personally and I recite to myself each time that a rejection isn’t a judge of my talent, it’s a part of the process, but what intelligent human can suffer that much half-hearted rejection and not take it personally?

To be clear, this is not an indictment of the industry I am trying to get into, agents receive hundreds of submissions a week, and they can only take on a few. I know it is supposed to feel insurmountable at times. That is what a dream is, it’s hard. I find the thistle fascinating not because it thrives in lush soil but because it blooms against all odds. It seems poetic to me that I’ve spent so much time examining the thistle growing in a tiny crack between two huge slabs of concrete just to realize that I have chosen its life.  

Although there are days when I want to quit and crawl back to my soul-crushing job, hat in hand, I remind myself why I started writing in the first place. It was never about getting published—that’s just a means to pay the bills. I took this leap to tell stories, to create worlds and voices that matter to me. Writing, at its core, gives me the freedom that the real world prunes, and I can’t abandon that or I am lost.

I hope this doesn’t sound defeatist because I have never been more hopeful. This is just what I imagine the thistle feels like as it watches hundreds of feet pass by it every day, each offering to crush it, snuffing out all the work it put into creating such a beautiful purple flower.

That’s also why I started this blog. I still don’t know what I’m doing and have no clue if anyone is going to read a single syllable I’ve written but I am writing them anyway because that was always the point. Tomorrow may find me dashed upon the rock but to hell with it. Today, I am living for the first time in my life. Words pale and go hollow in the presence of such exhilaration  as living the purpose for which I was born.

So, this is my thistle’s stand against uncertainty. I am taking back this moment as mine. I refuse to let this experience pass by unenjoyed. Instead, I am embracing the terror as the inextricable driving force behind the exhilaration of being weightless and free with arms outstretched as the wind rushes by. Were it not for the rejection and the silence I would not feel this alive. Geronimo.

That said, if you’re a publisher or agent reading this, I don’t love the silence so much that I don’t want to hear from you.