To Every Artist Who Is Afraid

A letter to the one holding the work in her hands and wondering if she is allowed.

LETTERS TO THE UNDERGROUND · FREE TO READ

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To you, reading this alone —

I know what you have been doing with the work.

You have been writing it in notebooks no one will open. You have been recording it into voice memos you have not played back. You have been starting the song and stopping the song before the chorus lands because you are not sure you are supposed to be the one making this. You have been editing yourself in your head before the pen has even touched the page. You have been showing the work to only one person, the safe person, the one who will never say anything hard, because hard would break you right now. You have been calling it a hobby when asked at parties. You have been calling it a side thing. You have been apologizing for it before anyone has criticized it, just in case. You have been carrying this quiet weight for months or years or — I know for some of you — decades.

I am writing this letter to you because nobody told me, when I was where you are, what I needed to hear. I had to find it in pieces, from different women in different rooms across different years, and I want you to have it in one place so you do not have to do the finding. Here is what I would have given my life to be told in the year I most needed it.

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You are not afraid of the work. You are afraid of being seen making the work. Those are two different fears, and learning to tell them apart will change your life.

The fear of the work itself — I cannot do this, I do not have the skill, the idea is too big for me — is often a legitimate signal that the work is calling for growth. That fear is useful. It tells you where to study, where to practice, where to reach beyond your current capacity. You can work with that fear. It is a teacher.

The fear of being seen making the work is different. It has nothing to do with the work's quality. It is the fear that if you show what you are making, someone will laugh, or dismiss it, or tell you you are not as talented as you think, or — worst of all — be silent, which you will read as the loudest dismissal of all. This fear was not installed in you by the work. It was installed in you by the environment you grew up in, by the people who taught you what attention felt like before you were old enough to tell the difference between attention that builds and attention that damages. The fear is real. I am not asking you to pretend it is not. I am asking you to notice that it is not the same as the fear of the work, and that it deserves a completely different response.

The response to the fear of the work is: study harder. Practice more. Keep going.

The response to the fear of being seen is: go anyway.

These are not the same prescription. One is a matter of craft. The other is a matter of refusal.

You are not afraid of the work. You are afraid of being seen making the work.

Here is the thing nobody tells you about being seen. The part of being seen that scares you — the judgment, the dismissal, the silence, the misreading — happens whether or not you release the work. It is happening right now. Somebody, somewhere, is misreading you as we speak, and you are not even in the room. You cannot control whether you are seen. You can only control whether you are seen making your actual work or seen as the version of yourself that is easier to contain. If the judgment is going to arrive anyway, let it arrive on the work that is yours. At least the judgment will be accurate. At least the ones who love it will love something real, and the ones who do not will be rejecting something real, and either way you will know where you stand with the world. The smaller version of you that you are currently presenting so you will not be misread is still being misread. You are just protecting a decoy. The decoy takes the hits and the real you never gets to be known by anybody.

Make the work. Release it. Be misread by the ones who were going to misread you anyway. Be found, eventually, by the ones who were looking for you. They cannot find you if you are hiding. They can only find you if the real thing is out in the world for them to locate.

This is the whole of it.

There is a second thing I want you to know, and it is this. The work will not be ready. It will never be ready. Waiting until it is ready is how fear disguises itself as diligence. There is always one more edit. One more rewrite. One more round of feedback. One more skill to learn before you release. The delay is infinite, because the delay is not about the work — it is about the fear of being seen, which no amount of additional preparation will reduce. You could spend another ten years polishing this piece and the fear would still be there on release day, exactly the size it is now. The polish is a ritual of avoidance. Release the piece when it is good, not when it is perfect. Good is a definable threshold. Perfect is a moving target designed to stay out of reach.

A related thing I want you to hear, particularly if you are a woman, because this pattern is built into our training. You have been taught to wait to be chosen. To wait for the permission. To wait for the gatekeeper to signal that it is now your turn. This training is ancient and deeply embedded and it is also completely incorrect as strategy for the world we live in now. There is no gatekeeper. Or rather, there are gatekeepers, but they are not required, because the distribution architecture of this century bypasses them. You can put the work directly in front of the readers, the listeners, the audience you are trying to reach. You do not need to be chosen first. You can choose yourself. The permission you were waiting for is never coming because the permission is not anyone's to grant. It was always yours to take. This is disorienting if you have spent a lifetime rehearsing the wait. It is also liberating. You are released from the queue. Step out of it. Go.

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The last thing I will say to you, because this letter is already long enough and I want you to hear the close clearly:

I know you think you have to resolve the fear before you can make the work. You do not. You make the work with the fear. The fear does not go away. It goes quiet for longer periods as you practice showing up in spite of it, and it flares up again every time you do something new, which is to say every time you are genuinely growing. A courageous artist is not a fearless one. There is no such thing as a fearless artist. A courageous artist is simply one who has agreed, in a thousand small daily decisions, that the fear does not get the final vote. You can be terrified and also release the song. You can be shaking and also post the poem. You can be nauseous and also hit publish. Do it shaking. Do it sick. Do it apologetically if that is the only way you can do it for now. Just do it. The work needs to exist in the world more than you need to feel composed while you release it.

One day you will look back at this period of fear and it will feel small. Not because you became braver in some heroic sense, but because you accumulated enough releases that the act of letting work leave your hands stopped being the occasion it feels like now. Every release makes the next release easier. Not by much. But by enough. The compounding over years is what produces artists who seem, from the outside, to trust themselves. They are not born trusting themselves. They have released enough work in the presence of fear to know that the fear was never going to stop them, and neither was the reception. They are still afraid. They are just no longer obedient to the fear.

You can become one of them. Starting now. With the piece currently sitting in your drafts.

Release it.

I love you for what you are making. I love you more for what you are about to release. The underground is waiting for you. We have been waiting for a long time. Come home.

The fear does not go away. You just stop letting it vote.

The rest of these letters live inside the Covenant — addressed to the music, to the lineage, to the ones who gave up, to the culture. If the underground is where you live, the door is open.

Enter the Covenant