Back in February, Leandra Medine (who inspires me in writing, in fashion, in living) wrote a piece for her site Man Repeller that has stuck with me ever since. Entitled What I Realized About My Self-Esteem Problem, she discusses her tenuous relationship with her self-esteem and self-worth, and how at a certain point she realized that she did not trust herself. I realize that so very often I do not trust myself. I call myself a writer without believing it, I have goals and dreams for a future that I do not believe, I dread telling anyone what it is I want out of life because they will laugh in my face at the very notion.
For many years I played up a confidence that did not exist except in small doses. It was easy to feel confident as the only student at my high school to get into All-State Choir, it was easy to feel confident getting medals for knowing about Socrates and chiaroscuro and the Rite of Spring because I was seventeen and no one else my age cared about it. I felt like a big fish and I felt like I was living in a very small pond, but I was terrified of what else was out there. Out there, everyone would know that I wasn’t all I presented myself to be!
And so, somehow, I decided to move to New York City, possibly as a punishment for even having the gall to do so. A voice in my head constantly tells me that I don’t deserve to be here, that I’m ungrateful to want anything more than I have. That everyone is figuring out that I’m nothing. That I’ll never have the confidence to truly go after what I want.
Sometimes I have to work on a project to keep my mind too busy to entertain that voice. It may be what I’m doing right now. I don’t know if it will ever go away, and I don’t know if I have the wherewithal to finish a project and try to silence (or at least muffle) that voice. For now I plug along and try not to decide it will never be good enough so why bother even trying.
I’m on page 24 of my pilot, and I have dozens of other ideas floating around my brain. Here’s to somehow getting them out of my head and actually letting people read them. Eventually.
Emily Merrick has a blog 
If my experience tells you anything, it’s that when you’re a writer, you keep writing. The first time I told friends (IRL, not online) that I was writing a book, I thought I would die. And it was Stuart and Pam. Fear is a liar. Look up the song.
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