What happens when you spend a decade championing the creative endeavours of others while your own art waits in the wings.

I knew I wanted to be a writer after finishing my first story at primary school. Pouring the stories that visited my mind onto a piece of lined paper, reading it to my friends and seeing the excitement on their faces seemed like a pretty awesome way to spend the rest of your life. 

Even when I worked for years in jobs where the most creative writing I did was an email to a disgruntled customer, in the back of my mind, the ultimate goal was writing. But the years went by and the letters I wrote turned into emails, then text messages, and eventually, I wasn’t writing much at all. 

Then I became a mother. Somehow, the world had promoted me to this supposedly responsible adult who didn’t just have to keep a little human alive – I was also meant to set a good example and be a role model for my child. Yet, being at home with a baby who never stopped screaming,  had lost its appeal of “having time off” during maternity leave as quickly as my daughter woke from every nap if she wasn’t  lying in my arms or on my chest.

I was constantly tired, my mind frazzled, and my resolve to stop eating rich and doughy brioche bread had gone right out the window. One day, around three months after giving birth, I sat at the dining table, staring at the chubby-cheeked face of my daughter, who had fallen into a breast-milk-induced “coma”, giving me a few moments of quiet. And suddenly, in a haze of all-over-the-place hormones, caffeine and sleep-deprivation, I promised her, a bit like the fairy godmother in Sleeping Beauty, that I would always support her dreams and make sure she would be leading a life doing what truly made her happy. 

Once I’d digested that fuzzy and proud feeling that you only get when you know you’ve made a good parenting choice, I turned attention to myself. And quickly, that warm feeling faded. Because I’d realised that, if I was to carry on living my life the way I was at that point, I’d be failing as a role model. I’d be telling my child to do what makes her heart sing, and she’d watch me come home from work, day in and day out, dissatisfied, uninspired, and annoyed with myself and the world.

My dream of becoming a writer, in the mess of muddling through adult life, had become first side-lined, and then shoved to the back of my mind where it was collecting dust (or grey matter). As I slowly unearthed it and turned it over and over in my thoughts, I found my love and passion for words and stories again. And from that day onwards, every time my daughter slept on that donut-shaped breastfeeding pillow, I sat at my laptop, and wrote. A year later, I had a rough draft for my first book. I’ve told a lot of people about it, I talked about it in job interviews, and I’ve been set on its title since day one.

You’re probably thinking that, surely by now, nearly 11 years after writing the last sentence of my first draft, my novel would be available in your local bookstore, or at least self-published on Amazon. Unfortunately, nearly 200.000 words are still sitting safely stored away like precious cargo on a memory stick and the hard drive of my old laptop. I’ve made numerous attempts at starting the editing process, attended a 10-week writing course to improve my novel-writing knowledge and read a book about writing a novel in a month. 

Not a day has gone by that I haven’t been thinking about my book baby, the story, its urgency and need to be released into the world. I’ve fantasized about finishing my edits, finding an agent and landing a deal with a major publishing house. I’ve dreamt of having it made into a TV series, one that would win awards and reach notoriety similar to Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City. 

Yet throughout the years, I have made little progress in cutting the crap and refining the story I, to this day, deeply believe in. I’ve paid hundreds of pounds for courses to teach me how to achieve my goals, learn to pitch, make money from writing, but haven’t opened the draft to my book. Turns out, paying others for their way to achieve their goals is not just a waste of money, but also a pointless distraction from doing your things your way. 

I started asking myself: Why is choosing yourself as an artist so difficult? I’ve been writing for and about others for over a decade. I have promoted their businesses, their products, their art. I’ve hailed, championed and supported their brilliance and dreams. Yet – it feels near impossible to do the same for myself. 

And if I’m completely honest, it’s not just having two kids, a full-time job plus multiple side-projects to build my writing portfolio, studying for a Master’s and running a volunteer-based magazine that stopped me from coming back to my book-baby. If I sit with the uncomfortable truth, I also know that the fear of failure, the danger of pouring my heart and soul into my writing (as I always do), only for it to go nowhere, stops me from opening the laptop and face my words on the page. 

Maybe it’s the fear of ridicule. The possibility that my own art will suck. The chance people will laugh at me and doubt my sanity. The nightmare of every agent and publishing house rejecting my unwritten book is so much more difficult to digest than not sending the finished book out at all. The effort of self-publishing, losing a ton of money in the process, only to sell a handful of copies to family and friends, is so cringey, that falling asleep while imagining myself at a book-signing feels a lot safer. 

As time passes, and nothing happens to my draft, I naturally get older –  and perhaps a little bit wiser. There is a quiet but fierce determination growing that nudges me to start doing for myself what I have been doing for others since kindergarten: cared for them, looked after them, cheered them on and lifted them up. 

So I made a deal with myself: This year, my own creative practice, my own writing and my place as a writer in this world has priority. Before I write another essay supporting the dreams of another creative, I have to work on my own dream. Before I invest in the dreams of others, I have to feed my own dream and nurture my own success story. Before I help propel anyone’s creative career forward, I must leap ahead in my own. 

Putting your own projects first may appear selfish in the moment. If you’re like me, desperately trying to make a difference in the creative industry, it may even feel counter-intuitive. However, a decade’s worth of blood, sweat and tears, helping others thrive while I neglect myself, is lying heavy in my stomach – and gnawing my insides away in frustration. 

For everyone else struggling to follow through with their creative dreams, I urge you to put yourself first. Carve out time each day to tend to your project, be protective of this time and come back to it consistently. Your practice doesn’t have to be perfect. Rest, indulge in other artistic ventures, but keep your eyes focused on your own dream. Whether it’ll publish, sell, make it to exhibitions or on stage – it deserves to be loved, nurtured and brought to its finished form. You’ll thank yourself and your art will flourish out in the open.