Never Let Someone Make You Think You Can't

I’ve been feeling a little down lately about my writing and noticed that I’ve even started discounting my work as something that no one would think is good enough before anyone else has even read it. I think it’s normal to have doubts sometimes, but I’m here to tell you (and myself) to never let someone else make you think you’re not good enough or that you can’t do something. 

I think there are a few superficial reasons why I’ve started having these doubts. For example, I’ve yet to get any “likes” in a pitching contest, and have now received several rejections from agents, including agents about whom I was pretty excited. There also are some deeper reasons for these doubts. There have been people in my past who I thought respected and cared for me, but in reality treated me like I wasn’t good enough, or like I wasn’t doing enough. Without realizing it, I’ve been letting these people from my past still have too much influence on how I view myself, which has to stop. There will always be these people in the world, but you can’t let them define your self worth. I’m not going to let them define mine anymore.

I’m going to give myself the benefit of the doubt on those pitching contests. There literally were thousands of pitches in all of them, and hardly any agents participating in at least one of them. It’s more likely that my pitches just weren’t seen than my pitches weren’t good enough. And those agent rejections? As the form rejections say, publishing is a subjective business. It doesn’t mean my work is bad. But you know what? My first queries weren’t the best I could do. My query letters and manuscripts needed some revisions, so I made those revisions, found new agents to be excited about, and jumped back in the query trenches 

Never let someone else make you think you can’t. Keep moving forward because you know you can.