‘How Do You Judge Your Own Talent?’

yanyi, excited to hear you’re back. i’ve missed your missives to us. i’m wondering how you modulate your impressions of your own talent. i vacillate between thinking i suck (not helpful) to feeling really good about my writing, which then can sometimes turn into a high standard and make me nervous and fear falling short of that. what’s your relationship to confidence? what kind of relationship to confidence would you counsel?

Dear ____,

I’m writing to you from the village library today, where orange leaves are beginning to scatter across the cooling asphalt and rays of sun are coming to spotlight the gold-touched maples. The shops are shuttered or shudder now, open for customers but closed to the wind.

When I picked up your letter, what most struck me was the turn in the word you chose for your topic–you went from “talent” to “confidence.” While I’ve written about talent before in ‘What If I’m Just Missing…Talent?’, where I spoke to care and the need to be seen as talented, and ‘When Will I Know That I’m Good Enough?’, where I talked about the pyramid scheme of “goodness,” I have not yet written about what comes after—that is, confidence, and how to have it (or not).

But first: why the switch between “talent” and “confidence” in your letter? If this was an unconscious gesture, then perhaps a part of you does relate talent to confidence and sees having talent as permission to be confident. You say in your letter that you “vacillate” between the extremes of “I suck” and feeling “really good” about your writing, but the good feelings don’t seem to fix in place. Instead, your newfound confidence sours quickly into anxiety and fear, fueled, probably, by the same inner voice telling you that you suck.

As you state in your letter, you know that this voice isn’t helpful, and it seems that you also understand you’re stuck in a cycle. No matter how high you go in one moment, you won’t have peace until that inner voice gets its job done, which is to cut you down until it gets what it sees as equilibrium: that you suck and will always suck, no matter how much evidence you get to the contrary.

While this loop you’ve been in must feel destabilizing, it signals to me something very good: this belief that you’ve long held about your worth is beginning to break, and you’re on the cusp of a new relationship with confidence. For many years, you may have lived your life well within the lines of these beliefs: you suck, and therefore you can’t be a writer; you suck, and therefore you should listen to others who know better; you suck, and so you’d better study up and get better, even though you’ll never actually be good enough. Things were not so topsy-turvy when you passively accepted these pronouncements, limiting your life and its lanes to someone else’s well-controlled possibilities. It was not so necessary for the inner critic to beat you down or scare you when you just went along with the system.

Yet, somehow, you found writing, or writing found you. Evidence is becoming a problem. Now, you didn’t mention where your bursts of confidence have come from. Perhaps one day, a friend read your work and called it good; perhaps at some sun-drenched table, a mentor looked up from your pages and said they were wonderful. Or perhaps you’re even further along in public: you’ve won a prize or gotten into a selective residency; you’ve touched someone with your work at a reading. The world is telling you that this belief which haunts your life may not be true after all.

For me, I want to say that the difference has been all these imagined examples of confidence I give you—examples from my own life. In each of those instances, there was a friend or teacher across from me at the table. On those days when I was recognized for something big, it was the people who already celebrated my work who surprised me with flowers. Confidence is something you share with others; self-appreciation comes first reflected in the eyes of another. Public achievements, when they come, are the mycelium fruit of love and community.

But as I thought more about this, this was only half of what was necessary. After these beautiful moments of affirmation, I would hum away with confidence for a few hours or weeks, if I was lucky, and then I would forget. The next set of nominations and awards would come out, and I would wonder, again, if I had missed something, or worse, if I was missing something. Even after so many years of writing in public, there are still days when small offhand remarks can bite and dig into me, and I’m just a bright-eyed eighteen-year-old again, worried out of my mind that I’ll do (yet another) thing wrong.

There were and are so many ways I do let these old habits get in the way: keeping new work stowed away in a proverbial drawer for years, staying away from doing public readings, or even the most basic disservice, which was to find every way to avoid talking about my work, even with people who genuinely wanted to know about it. The confidence I want as an writer is the kind that would allow me to be an advocate of my own work. In order to do this, I have to be able to judge it fairly. How would I do that, if I am still changing my mind from revision to revision?

My relationship with confidence changed when I realized that my confidence had to be pegged to something I too actually valued, not just what I believed others would value me for. That is, I began to accept the overwhelming evidence of how my work impacted others, not just how I wanted it to be received.

At the beginning of the month, I was one of the panelists for the James Merrill Centennial at the Stonington Literary Festival. I had forgotten, actually, what it is like to be known as a writer. I spend most of my days as that guy walking his dog down the street, trying to avoid ticks, or just another passenger in the bridge-and-tunnel commute to the city. It was startling to be reminded that my work exists beyond me. As I spend my days typing away on the computer, I find much of my work lackluster. It is in these moments, when people whose names I’ve long read on the page suddenly have a seat in front of me, as I watch them on panels very similar to ones I’ve seen on archival footage, that I remember I too am part of the archive, to be seen one day in fuzzy 4:3. To others, I am also a name who leaps out of the page. One day, that name will be the only thing left.

I have said in the past that there are at least two lives of art: its public and private lives. I think now that there is a middle ground, too. It is the estuary between public and private, where chance encounters are captured from the stream of plenty and fitted into readers’ lives beyond what any system or industry can control. They are the lines we read to each other, hushed over the phone. They are the words we build into our bodies as cornerstones of new lives. My confidence now comes from when I learn that my book was passed on to a reader from a librarian’s recommendation, or a friend to a friend. My confidence comes not from being seen but from knowing that someone in their community, someone they loved, thought my work would help them feel seen.

I was last in Stonington in June 2019, when I was the Yale Younger Writer-in-Residence at James Merrill House. I learned last weekend from a Centennial organizer that she had bought my first book for a friend back then, only for the friend’s trans son to key in on it and take it immediately. What is gratifying about being a writer is not being read but being resonant. Confidence comes from these stories I only sometimes hear, and that, I think, is what makes them enduring.

I fall back easily into self-effacing beliefs when I conflate “good works” with work judged to be good by too few people. In those moments, literature’s purpose seems to be a virtuoso’s game, built to be legible for dissection, rather than a portable offering of beauty, a bricolage of experience, a glittering suit of stars to wear. I forget that writing is a retreat from time into reflection, netting we built behind the miraculous chance that we are alive: memory and the pleasures it’s created, the careening music of the body, the sweet saved from the tip of the tongue.

Books are supposed to be “worth the time,” but what does that even mean? My confidence is that my words will reach the readers for whom this matters: that is, for whom this will be life-giving, not life-taking, no matter who brought the message to them. When I first finish a poem, it gives me my experience back. Then I hope that it gives the same to some reader, some day in the future. I like to think that a good book gives back double; it holds fast in the stream of living, a branch to grasp for a moment as one rushes downriver.

Would you write if, for the rest of your life, no one ever told you that you were good at it? If you never got recognition for it? What would they say instead? Instead of being merely good, can you confidently be riotous or rigorous? Reflective? Delicious? Brave? There has to be a reason beyond praise or power, or you won’t stop looking for either, ever.

If you know why you write then there is nothing that can deter you. Judgement does not matter in the face of purpose. Who cares what the bully thinks if you help their victim escape? What, for you, has so much value that nothing can sway you if you know it’s true?

Literature needs a lot of people—so do we. Sometimes you will find a new writer from an ad or a prize. But just as often, maybe more, we discover work when it’s handed to us by someone in our lives or by some trick of right place, right time. I needed to hear these stories of how my work travels. They never would have reached me if I didn’t take the leap to share my work. For me, these are not empty plaudits but evidence I am fulfilling my purpose. Showing up in public is part of my service. I owe it to others as part of my work. I owe it to myself.

Perhaps confidence is what we have when our aims are aligned with our impacts. When who we are is exactly what someone else needed. Confidence comes as a byproduct of connection. What, for you, would tell you not that your writing is good but that it matters? It’s not enough to be excellent. It is far better to grow, to alchemize, and to matter in context.

My confidence has been built by this: that I am not alone in what I make for myself. That to work on the inner knots of my own humanity is to connect, at once, with someone I may never see, but for whom my words will matter just as much. When one needs clarity, or beauty. When one needs to hear the truth. To write as I am, to give the best of what I can do, is a practice of faith in what literature can do. That is, what I write is a promise. It is fulfilled by you.