All my stuff is dented.

I frequently drop my water bottle. The metal is dinged, scratched, and dented.

My phone has a heavy duty case for the same reason. The screen’s a little cracked but it still takes a gorgeous photo.

These things are not indestructible. 

They’re resilient. 

Not because you can’t see where they’ve fallen. 

They’re resilient because they can handle a lot of drops. 

It’s the same way with writers who are still in it after all these years.

So much of a writing career is all those drops: the rejections. Obstacles. Rewrites and revisions and false starts.

None of that creative energy is ever wasted.

Society says we should feel bruised, broken, and out of commission, when in fact we have so much more to give.

The transformation of our art includes the difficulty. Without the cracks, we wouldn’t see the world the way we do. We wouldn’t understand the power of our own relationship to our work. 

The drops are what give us perspective. And yet in the short term, they can hurt.

How do we support ourselves to pick back up and keep going? How do we make sure we don’t get destroyed by the process?

That’s what I’m thinking about this month. 

Our theme is resilience. 

And if you’re currently going through the wringer of submissions, I’ve got a little round up of my past writing on rejection to bring you solace coming up soon.

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xo,

Photo credit: Riho Kitagawa on Unsplash.