Writers Worth: When Fear Has Many Faces

Jenn Mattern is one of the most fearless people I know. She’s an aggressive marketer, planner, and writer. I don’t know a time since I’ve known her that Jenn hasn’t had several projects going on at once. Her whiteboards in her office (she has a few) scare the hell out of me. They’re loaded with to-do items, and they seem to trail on beyond the whiteboards and into her conversation.

So when Jenn said this post topic kicked her ass, I was shocked.

When she said writing it brought her to tears a few times, you could have knocked me over with a feather.

But that’s how I know Jenn’s left nothing out. It’s exactly what I expected, and what anyone who knows her has come to expect — Jenn glosses over nothing. She goes balls out (impressive, considering she’s female) and leaves a little of herself on the page.

This post is different. This is Jenn exposed to her most vulnerable core. It took a ton of effort on her part to get this out, and I feel a bit shitty for giving her such a rough topic not realizing how it would affect her. But somehow I think what you’re about to read was something that had to come out so that she could begin to see daylight.

There’s no way to properly thank someone for the beautiful agony they produce on your behalf. I can only say thank you for feeling safe enough in this space and brave enough in your life to go there, Jenn.

The Many Faces of Fear

by Jenn Mattern

Fear…

When Lori asked me to talk to you about the role fear has played in my freelance writing career, I thought “Oh, that’ll be easy!”

I was wrong.

Fear can be a funny thing. We all face it. But we all face it in our own ways – fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of asking for what we want, or whatever your own fears might be.

For me, fear has sort of gone full-circle lately – the very things I had to overcome in the beginning of my career have left me wondering if it’s soon time to throw in the towel.

Let me take you on a little journey through the impact fear has had on my freelance writing career, and how it’s led me to where I am now.

Pre-Freelancing Fears & Confidence

There’s no escaping it – fear and confidence are often intertwined.

Confidence has been a weird thing for me most of my life. I had very little early on. I spent most of my life being told I wasn’t good enough in one way or another. I still often am.

I wasn’t pretty enough. I wasn’t “girly” enough. I wasn’t quiet enough. I wasn’t “agreeable” enough. I wasn’t exotic enough. Or fun enough. Or social enough. Or athletic enough. Or talented enough…

And if I wasn’t “not enough,” I was “too much.”

I was too outspoken. Too principled. Too fast. Too tall. Too independent. Too smart. (That last one always seems to come from men.)

Not enough. Or too much. Inadequate. Or intimidating.

That’s the story of my life.

It’s difficult to find confidence when you hear these things, especially from the people you’re supposed to be able to trust the most.

And that can leave you feeling afraid – afraid to be heard, afraid to be seen, afraid to put yourself out there, afraid to say what you want, afraid to exist — because you always worry you’ll be judged in the same way. It doesn’t help that you often are.

It makes the thought of taking chances terrifying.

But taking chances is essential to freelancing.

Going into business is a risk of its own. So is every pitch, every new client you take on, every rate change, every service change…

If you stop taking chances in freelancing, you’ll never get anywhere.

In hindsight, it’s a small miracle I ever got into business for myself with those kinds of fears and doubts early on in my personal life. I wanted to. I had good reason to. But I didn’t actually plan to at the time. And no one in my life was supportive of the idea.

I wasn’t just afraid though. I felt utterly worthless at times. When you’re constantly told you’re “not enough,” you start to believe it. After all, you don’t deserve for good things to work out for you. You’re not even ordinary – you’re less-than. So with many small business owners failing after a few years, why on earth would you be one of the ones to succeed?

When a lack of confidence leads to these kinds of fears, it can prevent you from ever taking the huge risk that striking out on your own can be.

But I was lucky.

I worked under some amazing bosses early on. And because of them, the fears that held me back in other ways never affected my work. If anything, they helped me build confidence on the professional front.

I learned to be assertive. Firm. Unafraid to speak my mind. Unafraid to ask for what I wanted (no… insist on what I deserved). And I almost always got it – job offers, raises, promotions, project leads.

That made freelancing easier for me than it otherwise might have been.

That confidence and assertiveness fit naturally into freelance writing.

For example, I met a fellow writer early on who suggested I start pitching business publications – one in particular she’d been writing for.

I asked her what they were paying just to get a rough idea of whether or not they’d be worth my time to pitch. She said $.25 per word. That was pretty good in the early days of online-only content.

I asked for $.35 per word.

Never thought twice about it.

I figured I’d leave some negotiating room. But they accepted it outright.

That first “yes” was a bonus confidence boost of sorts.

And this is something I try to teach newer freelancers…

Every “yes” makes the next ask a little easier.

That’s true whether it’s a pitch or increasing your rates, or anything else for that matter.

Each “yes” was important to me not so much because I lacked professional confidence, but because I was frequently told I should.

A Different Kind of Fear in Pitching

Don’t get me wrong. I still have plenty of fear when it comes to pitching prospects or quoting projects. And I’m all too familiar with impostor syndrome.

“I’m not good enough.”

“Why would someone ever pay me that much?”

“There are far better writers out there.”

What’s different for me is I’m not bright enough to try to protect myself up front.

I tend to go with my gut.

I make the pitch. I ask for what I want. I send a quote I think a prospect will never agree to…

Then the fear kicks in.

I doubt myself. I second-guess a quote. I slip into worry-mode after delivering something, especially if I don’t hear back from the client quickly. I assume I’ll never hear from them again.

This happened just recently.

A long-time client found out I offer a certain kind of consulting and asked for a quote. I sent one. A big one – much bigger than any of our past contracts. I didn’t hear back for a while (I think it was over a month). So that fear set in, wondering if they’d been so put off I wouldn’t hear from them at all. It was silly. They’ve known me over a decade. But the fear and doubt still weighed on me.

Ultimately they did get in touch to get on my schedule – no questions or arguments about price. I’m finishing up their project next week.

That post-pitch or post-quote phase is pure agony.

Half-assed backwards, right?

Thankfully it usually works out.

But that doesn’t make it any easier when the anxiety kicks in.

No Writer is Immune from Fear (and Yes, We Remember it Well)

It’s easy for people to look at you when you have more experience under your belt and assume you don’t know what these fears feel like. I see it often from new writers:

“You don’t understand what I’m going through.”

But I do.

For example, I’m well aware of what financial struggles feel like.

My ex-fiancé and I split up shortly after I started my business. He bailed on our lease, and I went from two incomes to one to pay all the bills very suddenly. It was “sink or swim.” Either I quit and take a full-time job for stability. Or I had to make a success of things – fast.

I remember the fear that I might not be able to make rent and keep a roof over my head. A few months I almost couldn’t.

I remember wondering how I’d keep food on the table and, more importantly, support my little fur-brats.

Heaven forbid I get sick, or something go wrong with the car, or anything else happen that would result in unexpected expenses.

I worked 60-80 hours per week trying to get the business off the ground.

It was hard. It was scary. And I learned a lot about pushing past fear then – not because I wanted to, but because I didn’t have a choice.

But as scary as that was, it was nothing compared to the fear of mediocrity and being stuck in some traditional job the rest of my life, working my tail off for someone else’s benefit.

And that’s the thing…

[bctt tweet=”Fear can cripple you, or it can motivate you. ” username=”LoriWidmer”]

In most cases, I let it motivate me. I’d tell you to do the same, but like most sappy-crappy advice, that would be over-simplifying reality.

I’m driven to face the challenge… to prove something, if only to myself. And I constantly feel like I have something to prove to myself.

I can do this thing no one thinks I can do. I am enough.

And until recently I’d gotten pretty good at convincing myself that was true.

I think the resulting panic that comes after asking for what I want is more a fear of failure than anything else. Maybe not so much “failure” as irrelevance.

What if this time is different? What if I just don’t have “it” anymore?

Maybe I don’t.

I wonder that almost every day now.

Is it time to leave? Is it time to walk away? Why do I even bother anymore?

There are a couple of reasons for that.

One reason – the lesser of the two – is the rise of insta-experts in the freelance writing community in recent years.

These are the frauds who pretend to have expertise they’ve never actually put the work into building.

They’re the ones who care less about earning a freelance income than making an easy buck off the backs of newbies they can con into believing they have.

They’re the ones building their names largely by lying, stealing, and exploiting colleagues, and who worry more about building the image of expertise than the real thing.

I’ve watched far too many experienced pros go dark because they got tired of competing with people who aren’t bound by honesty and ethics.

And I don’t blame them.

The insta-expert crowd has made me consider walking away for years too. But I’m too afraid of what happens to new writers when those are the only influences they can find anymore.

So unfortunately for the con-artist types, no matter how hard things get and no matter how much I want to quit sometimes, I’ll probably stick around solely to make their lives as miserable as possible. (It’s sport really.)

The fear I struggle with the most now though – and the one that’s all but devoured my love of what I do — has nothing to do with impostor syndrome or being afraid of rejection by clients.

It’s not so much about the phony insta-experts and the damage they have the propensity to do. I’ve always been able to deal with them.

My biggest professional fear these days is that I might never find passion or purpose again.

It’s also my biggest personal fear.

I’m not going to go into too many specifics of why. I tried in the dozen or so other drafts of this post. But it never comes out quite right. I’m too torn between pain and anger from one day to the next to say much without regretting it later. But I can give you some background.

What matters is what started when I went through three years of hell… lucky to live through something doctors said I probably shouldn’t have… something that led to severe depression after multiple pregnancy losses… something that damaged relationships… something that nearly cost me my business because there were months at a time when I could barely even get out of bed.

After all of that I nearly gave up, on just about everything. I felt so depleted.

But a little over two years ago I reconnected with someone from my past – a force of nature who tends to swoop in, up-end everything in my life, and then blow on out again before I know what hit me.

They reminded me of some things – who I am, what I’ve done, why I’ve been where I’ve been, what I wanted, why I wanted it, and what I was capable of.

They left me with something I was lacking. They left me with hope.

So I started to rebuild.

I started to feel passionate about my work again.

More important, I rediscovered my purpose – what I was working towards (professionally), the difference I wanted to make and the unique position I was in to make it, and why I got into business for myself in the first place (on the personal side). I finally remembered what was supposed to come next – what was missing in my life.

Things started to feel better. I was recovering physically, emotionally, and professionally.

Then, about six months later, I realized something.

What I’d been looking for, and waiting for, and working so damn hard for most of my life – it was right in front of me, and it had been for a while.

Suddenly, the hell I’d walked through for years … it finally felt okay.

The years-long fight to get through it was worth it. I knew if I hadn’t gone through all of that, I never would have found my way to where I was supposed to be… to find those things I’d almost given up on.

But I did find those things.

And I wish I hadn’t.

I stupidly dared to be happy… truly happy. I don’t think I’d ever smiled so much in my life.

But almost as quickly as I found those things I spent my life working toward – the very things that gave me hope and a reason to keep going every day – they were taken away.

Worse, they were stolen, and by someone I cared about and would have trusted with my life. Trust comes hard for me to begin with – even more now.

There is so much I could say about what happened. And part of me wants to. But none of it really matters.

What matters is the very things that gave me purpose are gone now. And they’re gone because someone who meant the world to me felt entitled to take, and take, and take with no regard for what they were leaving behind for anyone else.

I don’t know how to explain what it feels like to have someone take everything, then tell you they “can’t cope” with seeing the pain they caused, making even their own bad behavior all about them and how it makes them feel – like everything else.

I don’t know how to explain what it feels like to have someone you care about tell you they’re struggling, and they know they’ve behaved badly – to ask you to help them over that hurdle, promising that once they aren’t preoccupied with simple survival (something you could empathize with) that things would be better, and they’d finally act like an equal rather than taking all the damn time.

I don’t know how to explain what it feels like to have someone all but beg you to stay for their benefit over and over again, only to use what you helped them build to stab you in the back for the benefit of the very kind of phony, thieving, manipulative filth you’ve spent a career fighting against.

I don’t know how to explain what it feels like to be told you are the one thing in this world someone can turn their back on (after they got what they wanted), when you were the one person in this world who cared enough to lift them up when they were in an extremely low place and about to throw everything away.

I don’t know how to explain what it feels like watching the good in someone deteriorate, knowing you were just collateral damage in their perpetual campaign of self-sabotage… and there wasn’t a damn thing you could do about it. The hopelessness is nothing compared to the feeling of helplessness because you’re stupid enough to still care.

There’s a lot of anger. And I break down in tears multiple times a day. But there are no words to explain any of it. Every day feels like a bad dream I just can’t wake up from.

Part of it is losing that person who meant a lot.

But it’s more than that. It’s everything they happily and knowingly took because using me could benefit them – things the loss of which will affect every day of the rest of my life.

It’s every reminder that yet again, full circle, I was not enough.

Not enough for effort. Or respect. Or basic decency. Or honesty.

It’s every reminder that my value was only ever in my usefulness.

And everything is a reminder.

This person became so ingrained in pretty much every area of my life that the things that used to bring me joy feel agonizing now.

This person was a friend before we started working together, and the latter was a mistake. Because where early in my career work was my refuge from the people who made me feel like nothing… now work is another constant reminder.

So now nearly every aspect of my work is just another reminder of everything I’ve done and gone through – every struggle, every hurdle, from Day One until today –what it was all for, and knowing that now it was all for nothing.

So yeah, my biggest fear these days is that I’ll never find passion or purpose again.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not going anywhere, no matter how often I think about disappearing and putting all of this behind.

Like I said earlier, I wouldn’t give certain insta-expert bullshit artists the satisfaction.

I’ll still do the work. I’ll continue creating things even if there’s no good reason to. I’ll still make money – I tend to make more when work becomes a necessary distraction, and this will be no different. Money’s just never been a big motivator for me. It’s never felt rewarding. It was just a means to an end to do something that actually mattered.

But I’ll keep building because I have no choice – I’m a builder, a designer, a fixer, and if I’m not doing those things, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.

So that’s good news for others I guess – it means more for them as I become an even bigger tool for everyone else. Right now, for me, that beats the alternative.

But look. I don’t want anyone’s sympathy. And I feel bad that I can’t fully explain the root of this – I know it’s not easy to understand. But it’s still much too painful. This year’s topic and timing weren’t exactly ideal.

I know people like to vomit lines about how everything works out, or it’ll all be okay, or time heals all wounds, or the best thing to do is forget about it, or I’ll find some other passion or purpose, or internalized lies about how no one really controls things in our lives but us, or some other positivity-police bullshit… but please spare me the good intentions when you have no idea what was lost.

It does not help. And there’s a 99.3% chance it will really piss me off.

The reality is some things aren’t replaceable. Some things have no substitute. Some dreams come with expiration dates. Sometimes every option left is settling. And some people aren’t cut out to settle.

I’m one of those people.

I’m guessing my fears don’t look all that much like yours, eh?

That’s the nature of it I guess. There will always be something standing in our way. You climb those walls, or you knock them down.

I’ve had a career of that. I guess I just never thought about what I’d do if I got where I was trying to go only to watch someone burn it all down.

What I build in its place will never make up for what was lost. But it’ll have to do.

Sometimes that’s life. And sometimes that’s business.

You keep going because you have to for one reason or another. And I have to because, like usual, I have something to prove – though, for the first time, I don’t really know what that is.

So what that means for now is more improvements to current sites. It means building new ones.

It means continuing to freelance (because unlike some folks, I won’t teach others things I don’t actively do).

It probably also means spending more time on my fiction even if only for an escape.

I’m certainly not short on things to do.

And that will mean more working hours than usual because work is what I do when I don’t feel much like doing anything.

And that will mean pushing through from one day to the next, over and over, because that’s what I have right now. I don’t know what comes next.

This might be my new normal.

Maybe by some miracle I’ll find out one of those things I lost isn’t entirely gone and I’ll have something to fight for again.

Or maybe I’ll eventually shut everything down and quietly walk away. But that’s not today.

I don’t know.

What I do know is that I’ll always write, whether that’s freelancing or blogging or books, and whether that’s under my own name or a pen name I keep quiet to “disappear.”

Writing is a compulsion. It’s not just something I want to do. It’s something I have to do. It’s breathing.

And I’ll continue working for myself in some way because there is no way in hell I’m going to let someone else dictate what I do with my life and time, even if I’m not sure what I want to do with it myself.

And I’ll continue helping new writers for the foreseeable future, because I still remember the people who cared enough to help me.

And that’s that.

I don’t have any big lessons on fear for you.

We all go through it. Sometimes those fears are shallow – surface-level things most of us face at one time or another. And sometimes they’re very different. All I can say right now is this:

I hope you let your fears motivate you rather than break you.

I hope you jump those hurdles and break down those walls.

I hope your fears make you stronger to deal with whatever comes next.

I hope you let your fears drive you forward rather than having your eyes pinned to the rear-view mirror.

And I hope you let your fears, and overcoming them, bring out the best in you rather than letting the desperation that often comes with those fears bring out the worst.

I’ll share another post with Lori soon where we’ll get a bit more practical – looking at fears that stem from comparing yourself to others.

But for now, no lessons. Just hopes.
—
Jenn Mattern is a freelance writer, blogger, and PR consultant. She runs All Freelance Writing, where she’s helped new freelance writers launch and grow successful businesses since 2006.