This past weekend, my older son, who is 11, participated in a kidpreneur event. He loves drawing and painting. He can spend hours with his sketch book, following one YouTube tutorial after the next. He enjoys doing landscapes, sketching Marvel characters, and has even gotten pretty good at Arabic calligraphy.

He knew he wanted to showcase his artwork at the kidpreneur event and he decided to create hand-drawn bookmarks and greeting cards.

In the weeks leading up to the event, he spent a lot of time figuring out which designs worked and which didn’t. He had to balance what he enjoyed drawing vs what he knew parents might be inclined to purchase vs what would attract kids.

He created many designs that he didn’t end up using. But he was excited and having fun the entire time while he worked on his bookmarks and greeting cards.

In the final week before the event, something shifted. He started getting frustrated when a design didn’t turn out as he had expected. He second guessed everything, including his business name. He lamented about the fact that he didn’t have enough time to create more designs. Everything about the whole endeavour seemed to be going wrong.

The funny thing (for me, not him lol), was that I was instantly able to recognize what was going on. There’s a particular type of nervous that I get when I’ve been working on a story or an essay for weeks (or even months!) with the intention to submit it somewhere. As the deadline looms closer and closer, my thoughts get more and more self-sabotagish:

This character sounds so silly, no one will connect with her.

The whole story is trash, I should just submit something else.

Nothing is working. Even the title sounds stupid.

My son said things about his art that were so similar to the things I’ve said to myself about my writing, right before hitting 'Send' to meet a deadline. It was like a switch had been turned off and he couldn't assess his work objectively anymore.

In earlier weeks, he would identify and troubleshoot things that weren’t working. For example, when he realized he was spending too much time on a particularly complicated design, he shared the issue with me and I helped him create a template that he could cut out and reuse across different bookmarks/cards. But two days before his event, there was no specific problem. It was just criticism of the whole project.

This mirrors my experience with a story too. When I’m still revising and editing, I can recognize when things are not working and figure out how to make the story stronger. But when I’m very close to being done, when I’m doing a final read to catch any spelling or grammar mistakes I might have missed, that’s when the nonspecific, ‘this is all so horrible’ thoughts come to surface.

I can deal with them now because I know the pattern in myself. I know that those thoughts simply mean I’ve done the best I can with this story, and now it’s time to send it in. Those nerves are related to my work being judged. Whether I get published or not, whether my story wins a contest or is selected as a finalist or not, is out of my hands. And when things are out of my hands, the thoughts that come are also those that I can’t do anything about. ‘This story is horrible’ is something that I can’t address. Whereas when I’m still working on a story, a thought like, ‘This scene is dragging on’ is something I can address.

I’ve had conversations with other writers too about this issue. They reach a point when they read their story and sometimes feel proud of it and at other times feel like it’s terrible. And I tell them that’s precisely the time to let it go. It means you’ve done all the work that you can on it, and you being proud of the story is the feeling you need to stick with. Because that feeling of ‘this story is no good at all’ is self-doubt punching through your confidence and trying to overwhelm you.

That’s exactly what was happening with my son too, in the final days leading up to his event. I reassured him that he did his best work and that it was normal to feel what he was feeling.

Alhamdulillah, he seemed much calmer on the day of the event. It was so nice to see him proudly displaying his artwork and hearing people compliment him on his designs, because we all need reassurance that the work we’re doing is good and valuable.

The harder lesson to teach was to remind him that it didn’t matter how many items he sold. What mattered was that he did the work and showed up with something he was proud of and something that he put effort into. And that the most important part was that he had fun doing it. There were so many times in the weeks prior to the event when he was preparing his artwork that he told me, “This is so fun.” When I’m writing, that’s exactly how I feel. And it’s the feeling I try to hold on to when I submit my work.

We all sometimes feel like we’re buried under an avalanche of self-doubt. That part is unfortunately normal. But you can always rise up from it knowing that you’ve done your best and that nothing can take away from the joy of being creative, whether it’s art, or writing or anything else.

With best wishes & duas for your writing,

Hajera

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