I Gave Myself Permission

With the way that the world is now, focusing on our hobbies and passions is something that seems impossible. Nowadays, if we aren't nearly working ourselves to death, we're trying to sleep, take care of ourselves, still make time for friends and family, and somehow still do every day adult things in life. Some of us are getting a degree, some of us are working multiple jobs just for ends to barely meet.

And throughout the struggles and messes of our lives, we lose sight of our passions. We lose sight of who we are. We lose sight of everything that we love in life.

I refuse to lose sight of my passion, of who I am and what I believe I was meant to do, of everything that I love in life. I give myself permission to work on my passion- my writing. I give myself permission to allow myself to experience happiness in life through my passion.

Sure, maybe it isn't as easy as it sounds. I still find myself trying to work more, rather than focusing on the novels I want to write. I still find myself feeling guilty for setting time aside out of a busy day to write, when I know that I could be focusing on more "important" things. I could be cleaning, or budgeting, or even running a few errands. I could be catching up on sleep.

But just because I could be doing all of that does not mean I can't focus on my passion as well. There is always time for a balance in life. Sometimes it just takes learning how to manage your time effectively, so that you can find when you can set time aside to focus on your own passion(s).

In March of 2022, I gave myself permission to focus on my passion whenever I had the spare time to do so. I refused to let myself feel bad for not doing other tasks that could have been considered more important than my writing, because writing has always been something that has been important to me. Books have always been important to me.

Next spring, I will have been writing for twelve years. When I first started writing, it was just rewriting the ending of books I read that I didn't like. Not long after, it turned into me trying to write my own novel, that rather turned out to be nearly a fan-fiction of the Disney "Twitches" movie. A few years after that, I turned to writing excerpts that I hoped one day would turn into a novel. When I turned sixteen, I decided I wanted to write my own novels from start to finish, only ever getting a few chapters in before I decided to quit and toss it aside in a bin.

Now I sit here, at twenty two years old, and I have three and a half completed manuscripts. Completely done from front cover to back cover. When I say that the journey to get here wasn't easy, it definitely rings true. There were multiple times I tried to give up writing because I felt like I couldn't do it. There were multiple times all I could do was stare at the screen or the page and wait for the words to form, just for them to never make an appearance. I once even made the mistake of throwing everything I had to do with my writing away. (Truly, I regret that decision every day. It is the only thing in my life that I regret.)

Each time I gave up my writing, I found myself back with a pen in my hand writing out an outline for a novel idea that had popped into my head. Writing became inescapable. It consumed me down to my very core. It seemed that every time I gave up writing, I found thousands of ideas, characters, plot lines, titles, and cover ideas floating throughout my head and screaming to be written down, internalized forever in ink.

It took nine years of me fighting with myself to complete my first manuscript from cover to cover. I even had it published before I truly knew anything about the writing and publishing world. I just knew that I wanted to write books, and that I wanted to self publish them even if nobody read them. (To my surprise, I had sold a few copies!)

With eleven years in the writing game now, I have taken the time to study and educate myself in the writing and publishing world. The world I want to be a part of, and the world I am a part of.

Currently, I don't have anything published as I wait to properly wide distrubute my works of writing. When I published the first time, I wasn't entirely comfortable with putting my work out there. With exploiting my passion for all to see, everywhere possible. Shortly after I unpublished, I started to heavily research everything about editing, writing, and publishing I could find. I took notes on articles, and spent many nights awake until the sunrise reading and research everything possible, writing down everything I found important, or anything I thought could come in handy later down the line.

I even went as far as trying to go to college to major in English and Creative Writing with a concentration in Fiction Writing. After a semester of classes, I learned that everything they would have taught me, I either learned myself already, or I would shortly be teaching it to myself through research and studying before they even got the chance to get to it.

Despite wanting to get my degree in Creative Writing, I dropped out of college. A lot of people tried to persuade me otherwise, trying to convince me that a degree could make my writing better. But the more I was pushed to continue my college career, the more reasons I found why it wasn't necessary for me to put time into college that I could have been putting into my novels.

A degree wouldn't make my writing better, only I can make my writing better. Writing gets better by doing, just as anything else. You're not going to be good at something because you have a degree, and you're not always going to be good at something right away. I remember looking back on my fan-fiction of "Twitches" a few years later when I found the red and white spiraled notebook I had written it in. By this point, I had been writing for roughly four years. I remember reading it and thinking, "wow, this is awful." I would probably still feel the same way about it, because it was. Maybe for someone who was eleven years old it was amazing, but it definitely is way below my standards of work now. Eleven year old me was as proud of that piece as I am about my last three manuscripts. That's what's important.

Most importantly, I don’t think anyone would read a fiction book solely because the author has a degree in creative writing. I don’t believe that it would be a deciding factor.

Since dropping out of college, I have found myself happier with my writing career, and the directions I have been taking it. It may be a slow process that I wish could happen sooner, but I was always told that the best things take time. That patience is a virtue. That everything happens for a reason, and what is meant to happen will.

When I was growing up, I always thought that I would be the one reading the books, and not the one writing them. It's weird being on the opposite side in the book world, but it's the weirdness that is absolutely amazing. I've traveled to many places, and I've met so many people without ever leaving my home. I love every adventure my characters take me on. I love every place I have traveled to. I love every plot twist my characters throw my way.

But most of all, I love the way writing makes me feel. I love the "aha" moments I have when my writer's block finally leaves and I have two thousand words flowing from my brain, to my fingertips, to my screen. I love the ups and the downs. I love the frustrations, and the "what do I do now?" And I always love the moments that I'm writing the last chapter, my best friend watching the screen as the words slowly form and we know that we are coming to the end of the most recent adventure with the characters we've grown to love, and maybe even hate.

Giving myself permission to focus on my passion has truly been the best thing I have ever done. It is something I will never regret, and something that will stick with me until my last breath.