“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”
—Ernest Hemingway, A Call to Arms
If you ask me to describe what freelance writing has been like for the past months, I will tell you that it feels like pulling out a tooth. Slow, excruciating, painful.
Nothing glamorous or exciting. Nothing that makes me feel like an accomplished author. I oscillate so quickly between hope and despair that I feel like being driven into a corner of madness.
But the desperation has fruits of some sort. I started pitching (exaggerated gasp!). I, who have always struggled with pitching or any way of putting myself forward—a byproduct of impostor syndrome. This crippling belief that I am not good enough.
But I need to pay the bills, and the the knowledge that those said bills exist makes me think all sorts of stories. So I pitch. A little clumsily maybe—it's my first time, editors, forgive me—but it's the first step taken in the direction of where I want to take my writing.
A few weeks ago, I was at a conference. On the last day, I had a brief chat with someone who asked how life would find me in five years. "Where do you see yourself in five, ten years?" is such a basic question, and sometimes we give little thought to our answer, rambling about some grandiose dreams we think we have that we don't always care about.
But that day, for the first time, my heart's desire found its way to my tongue, and without knowing how or why, I said out loud: "I want to be telling the stories of people around the world."
Like Tyler Austin Harper, who told the story of extreme fishing. Or this writer who went on a quest to Nigeria to find the people scamming his mother. Like this guy on Reddit who saw someone climb out of a manhole and got so curious, he just had to find out for himself if there was another world down there (there is!).
A few times now, I’ve come across people who have such interesting stories to tell…and I keep imagining what it would be like to tell their stories. To give voice to their lives. And it makes my heart beat faster, and I feel hot and cold and excited and nervous and scared all at once.
In my other social media accounts, I've become quite loud about storytelling. Why? Because in this monotonous world of AI we live in, where everyone sounds the same, storytelling is one thing—the soul—that AI lacks. It can churn out content that sounds smart, but it can't tell a story to tug at your emotions.
Also, storytelling has always been a favourite of mine. It's why I fell in love with reading fiction books when I was a child and why I continue to read them still. It's why I love memoirs like Just Mercy and A Year in Provence. Because they aren't just telling you facts, they're telling them to you in such a way that draws you in.
So in this process of writing and looking for clients and tooth-pulling (figuratively), I won't deny that it is all very confusing and tiring right now. Most of the time, the system feels broken (and it probably is or it's adapting to a whole new megatron type of robot). At other times, it feels like I am broken.
And yet at the same time, this brokenness and confusion and despair are making me bolder. More courageous. Maybe shining some in places of strength I did not know I had in me.
Like Ernest, dear old chap, says, "many are strong in the broken places."
I don't know if my pitches will land anything. I don't know if my words will take flight. But it's the first step to doing what I want to do. It's the step I've always been quite afraid of. And if anything, it has at least taught me to start even if I am afraid and uncertain and inadequate. Even if I am broken and flailing. Even if I don't know what tomorrow holds or what next month will look like. It's a start.