The journey there was inauspicious. In the basement of Port Authority I was told that the bus route I was holding a paper ticket for had been permanently canceled, so I had to race across Manhattan to catch a train to New Haven. In New Haven I would need to get a taxi for the thirty-mile ride to Middletown, an extravagance I hadn’t budgeted for, so outside the station I haggled with a few drivers over the fare. I ended up in the backseat of a cab driven by a man who wanted to know if I had a boyfriend and then, encouraged by my honest response, told me he loved me and asked me to “take a break” with him. “Take a break with me, Helen,” he persisted, long after I said no. “Take a break with me.” By the time he pulled up at the writers’ conference I was so relieved my legs were trembling. “Kiss me,” he demanded. I did, then paid the agreed-upon fare. Later I’d write an essay about that kiss, which would become one of my first published pieces, but this was before we talked about harassment in the way we do now, and it was just meant as a funny story.
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I don’t remember any of the lectures at that conference, but I remember the auditorium where I sat among a couple hundred people—mostly white women, mostly a few decades older than me—taking notes on whatever the speaker was saying, or scribbling away for ten minutes on a given prompt. I was twenty-five, caught between the first and second years of my fiction MFA, the beginning and the end of “becoming a writer,” and it seemed to me that the room was crowded with a kind of desperation. Something like a shimmer of heat arose from every last aching wannabe, each of us terrified of our impending irrelevance, such that the space burned with the dry fever of ambition. I wanted to write a book, a book that people—many people—would want to read. The content of the book was hazy, but the outcome was clear: I wanted to be the person at the podium, the one talking right now about his journey from hard work to critical acclaim. I wanted to be the one whose words were being scribbled down, the one whose advice we’d paid for, who everyone was craning to hear.
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I am talking here about an uneasy, narrow, claustrophobic topic: the self.
Specifically, the self as it materializes in the realm of writing.
Three examples:
It’s 2017 and I’m reading applications for a two-year fellowship at a small college in the Midwest, where an emerging writer will be paid $25,000 a year to teach two courses, advise two student groups, and sit on a couple of committees. There are over a hundred applicants, some with a book or chapbook and many with no books, and their CVs list every poem they’ve published, every story, every essay in every online journal, every prize they’ve won and every contest in which they’ve been a runner-up or finalist. The more CVs I read, the more each accomplishment seems a grain of sand, a crumb: “I persuaded Unknown Journal to publish my seven-line poem, which a dozen people have skimmed,” or “My five hundred-word flash fiction was a finalist in four contests I paid fifteen or twenty dollars each to enter, possibly for the very privilege of listing these half-baked laurels on my CV.” I empathize with the gulf of longing underneath these catalogs, the longing any one of us might feel for the crumbs together to coalesce into—what? At the same time, I begin to sense I am reading accounts of where a writer has left behind a flake of dry skin, a scant set of words upon which a few other starved writers have cast a glance.
To be concerned with self-image is to be frozen in a kind of rigor mortis at the shore of the pond where you’ve glimpsed your own reflection.
It’s 2012 and I’m at an artist residency. Every evening, twenty-five artists come together for dinner after a day of solitary work. Someone has spent the afternoon acting out the six distinct voices in their play. Someone else has figured out a new melodic line in their opera, or put on heavy-duty goggles to solder together two pieces of a sculpture, or gotten their hands mucky plastering three new puppet creatures. They are energized, or they are spent. Yes, some have gotten tangled in a problem, or spent too many hours afflicted by doubt about yesterday’s decisions. But only the writers come to dinner emanating a kind of dreary stagnation. Their day? “Oof,” they say, wondering: what the hell did happen? They deleted four thousand words, or wrote a few sloppy pages they’ll throw out in the morning. A diamond of sun crept across the floor until the room they sat in grew dim. The work felt difficult, heavy, dull, anxiety-provoking, but there was no tangible labor. From morning until night, they sat unmoving, trapped with themselves.
It’s 2021 and the online literary journal 3:AM Magazine is briefly infamous for publishing a creepy poem by a white man about a popular woman writer of color. The traffic to their website is unprecedented: like most literary magazines, they are used to being visited primarily by writers who want to submit their own work, who “read” the magazine only to suss out the degree to which they should aspire for inclusion. When I visit, what stands out is this: Next to each five-line or twenty-line poem the magazine publishes is a very large headshot and bio. Such that the headshot tends to occupy more space than the poem; such that each “page” of the literary magazine—each poem, that is—is primarily a photo of its author.
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Often, in my coaching practice, I meet writers who confess their sense of self-worth is bound up in their writing. They have talked to a therapist, and the therapist has recommended they repeat “My writing is not a reflection of my worth” each morning before sitting down at the computer, or that they list all the things in their own work they appreciate: I write a beautiful sentence, I make a clear argument, My ideas are unique. “I am working on my low self-esteem,” this writer might declare. “I know I need to figure out how not to feel like my worth lies in my writing.”
Probably every writer who wants to be read feels this to some degree: there’s little more vulnerable than putting the contents of one’s mind outside of one’s body and hoping to be understood. Writing is such a fundamental form of expression that—like language, or the story you are telling yourself about yourself right now—it’s difficult to disentangle from the self. But just like “Don’t think about white elephants” is only an invitation to think of white elephants, so too is “My self-worth does not lie in my writing” only a suggestion that it might. Cultivating an awareness of one’s “low self-esteem”—even if the purpose of the awareness is to reverse it—traps a person in a cycle of what-am-I-worth thinking.
Writing is “suspected to be narcissistic,” and I once heard a writer say, as though to counter this suspicion, that “Most writers are not narcissists, they are wracked with self-doubt.” The latter is a confusion about the meaning of narcissism, which doesn’t describe an inflated sense of self-worth, just an outsize attention to the self. To be a narcissist is not to have a “big” ego, necessarily, but to be preoccupied with one’s ego, which is to say with one’s self-image. From psychologist Terrence Real:
Narcissus did not suffer from an overabundance of self-love, but rather from its deficiency […] Lacking the capacity for an authentic relationship, he becomes […] obsessed with his own adoration reflected back to him from without. This can never replenish him, because no amount of external validation or prestige or nurture can substitute for his own.
The culture that surrounds creative writing both attracts narcissists—people who gaze into the glass mirrors of their computer screens seeking some measure of their worth—and creates narcissists. It creates narcissists because reviews, workshops, and publisher conversations (not to mention the years of schooling that precede these) tend to be oriented around “good” and “bad,” “working” or “not.” Conversations conducted in the language of positives and negatives make the writer’s feelings the conversational subtext; the writer becomes the conversation’s implicit subject. Worse, such conversations habituate us to writing for pats on the back: for extrinsic rather than intrinsic reward. They unsettle a writer’s inherent sense of worth, and divert attention away from intrinsic reasons for making art. Even praise, like any other drug, will eventually poison art.
To be concerned with self-image is to be frozen in a kind of rigor mortis at the shore of the pond where you’ve glimpsed your own reflection. Worrying over that empty image, in turn, drains the self of its substance. There is no escape from low self-esteem other than to shift one’s focus away from the self.
This is why I encourage the writers I work with to look away from their image, turning their attention outward: What can my work do? How can it serve other people? What do I value, in a piece of literature, and how can I enact those values?
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Maybe you value surprise. Maybe you value a gorgeous turn of phrase. Maybe you value keen emotion, a light touch, a clear moral of the story, or an open ending. Maybe you value literature that offers escape. Maybe you want to offer the same to a reader.
Reminding ourselves of what we value gives us a sense of worth, because it fills us up with purpose. It reminds us of what we care about and, as a happy result, it reminds us of who we are, which is far more than flickering images of uncertain worth. To re-root in the why of our choices as readers and writers is also to reorient ourselves in a practice of care for potential readers. This reorientation, more than anything else, will develop a person’s self-worth—indirectly—because it reminds us that we are full of potential value, and not in the temporary and ill-defined sense suggested by a cheering crowd/a pile of cash/a shiny award, but in the meaningful sense of a person who has felt a desire to communicate, and who remembers that the fundamentally social act of writing is, like any act of communication, an offering for someone else.
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In the auditorium, the person who’d been assigned my conference mentor—an established writer who would read a story of mine and offer feedback in a one-on-one conference—told us about his first book’s long road to acclaim: the years of toil, the rejections from so many agents and editors, the eventual publication by a small press, and then, finally, the book’s recuperation from the oblivion of that small press in a double-book sale including republication by a major publisher. Rags to riches, groveling to glory. He can’t have been more than thirty-five, but he told the story as though he were ancient and long-suffering; he preached to that room full of women older than him as though he’d emerged bloodstained and victorious from a war.
Later, he and I sat at a picnic table in the shade to talk about my story. I remember little of his comments, but I remember he ended our half hour together by saying, “You’re a talented writer. Let me do you a favor. Don’t write this story. Write something else.”
If self-esteem arrives from outside, there will never be satisfaction; we will always fiend for another hit, because we are after a chemical we cannot produce ourselves.
The piece I’d shown him came from the book I would work on for the next seventeen years, and he may well have been right that it was too personal, seemed to be about my family even if it was then meant as fiction, would cause conflict with my parents, as it did, because it edged too close to their private lives, threatening my relationship with them in a way that would make the project at once difficult to work on and difficult to let go. But I resent him for that comment still. It was a directive not to tell the story I was telling; I heard it—correctly, I think—as a kind of repression. I stood up from the meeting shaken, angry, and determined to dig in my heels. As I continued to work on the project over the next years, his words hung over the book like a curse.
What does this have to do with self-esteem? “A talented writer.” The instructor was amping me up while simultaneously dismissing my work, making a statement about who I was while divorcing it from the story I was telling on the page. If we set aside the strong possibility that this was an attempt to manipulate me into following his advice (and then set aside the question of why he should care so much as to need to manipulate me), we notice, first, that a teacher feels he has license to make statements about a student’s character—a statement about identity, but also about worth—and, second, that he feels no responsibility to define or justify his claim. “A talented writer”: because the way I wrote dialogue was consistent with literary fashion? because I had not dropped a single comma? This is precisely the sort of dissociation from meaning that leads a workshop (or conference) to become a kind of orgy of ego, the substance of text after text disregarded in favor of attention to “craft,” which encourages us to envision the writer at her desk and ignore the interpersonal nature of the work. The result is that everyone’s esteem bounces around like a bunch of balls in a bingo machine, up for grabs. The unpredictability only increases the writer’s fixation, as when a rat is faced with inconsistent reward. No wonder there was so much entropic heat in those conference rooms, so much terror and hope generated by the buzz of the machine. Pick me! me! me!
To be called “talented” was what the most childish part of me desired, because I was socialized, as so many of us are, to use writing to seek these empty and addictive substitutes for love. To find it normal to hand over our words in exchange for a pat on the head, an A-plus, which was supposed to become publication in a literary journal, admission to an MFA program, a book advance, a starred review, a prize, and—yes, here we are in the auditorium, at the conclusion of another lecture, another reading—applause, applause, applause.
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“The dominant literary style in America is careerism,” wrote the critic Christian Lorentzen in a review of the biography of Philip Roth, a man “on a decades-long campaign of public-image control” and a writer who actually had a robust public image. But for those of us rearranging words in obscurity or near-obscurity, “public image” is often nevertheless a primary concern. Though we may preface it with “self-,” esteem means respect or admiration: like the regard of “self-regard,” it is external by definition. Writers who invoke “self-esteem” in coaching sessions are usually haunted by the creeping sense that their worth lies in their writing not because of what the writing looks like to them, but because they don’t know what it looks like to them; they are habituated to seeing their own work through the eyes of someone else.
If self-esteem arrives from outside, there will never be satisfaction; we will always fiend for another hit, because we are after a chemical we cannot produce ourselves. To fiend for this kind of esteem is to enter a vicious cycle: seeking esteem distracts us from the intrinsic pleasures of doing the work, which in turn makes the work more difficult; while the intrinsic motive for writing shrinks, the extrinsic reward of esteem can never be counted upon, so the work grows increasingly fraught. On top of that, focus on esteem saps the work of its intrinsic pleasures. Copious research demonstrates that emphasis on external reward makes people less curious, less willing to take risks, less “creative.”
“Image management,” writes Lorentzen, “seeps into the writing of fiction itself ”: characters are simplified, “flattened” to ensure readers’ approval. Concern with image makes our writing small, a shrinky-dink of what we might once have dreamed. It harms writers and harms their work, such that a narrative of self-deficiency might actually be more harmful than the supposed deficiency itself.
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From Feels Like Trouble: Provocations on Writing, Teaching & Power by Helen Betya Rubinstein. Copyright © 2026. Available from University of New Orleans Press.
