The Artist Must Persevere

Photo by Joseph Corl on Unsplash

By Aamna Rehman

"Unfortunately, due to… "

"We regret to inform you… ".

I have a special folder for these rejections in my inbox, if you can believe it. I have received so many of these during the last two years that the sting has worn off (not really).

As any kind of artist, you can never completely numb yourself to rejection. You also can't avoid it. When you put your art out in the world, you have to be prepared for criticism. And it’s never not hard, but you have to move past it anyway. One of the most important things an artist can learn is that criticism never invalidates art.

No matter what, the artist must persevere. The pen, the brush, the strings, the keys, the wheel, the mind- they are tools, they are miracles and they are magic.

They aren't meant to stop.

I did, for a while.

It wasn’t because of rejection, per say. But maybe because the words that I had poured out had nowhere to go.

Imposter syndrome is a pesky weed. It’s almost too easy to fall into thinking that your art is not good enough, or unnecessary, or too self-indulgent to ever carry any weight to others- the outside of your notebook. That this art, this idea, is just not yours to claim.

I tried everything and anything I wanted during those two years of lockdown, from short stories to reviews to a few chapters of an unfinished novel. Some of them went to a couple online magazines, and a lot of them never went anywhere. And yet every word I hammered out was leading me somewhere better.

I needed the reminder again and again, that Art isn't pointless. (Is breathing pointless? Do you count every breath you take and ask yourself “do i really need to breathe this much? Do I really need to breathe all the time?)

No matter how good or bad, it is a piece of you. It is an alloy of the human mind and the heart- a sound, a texture, a rhythm- instead of just flesh and blood.

Yet you can’t deny the need for validation for an artist, the scramble of a newborn looking for someone to acknowledge what new thing they’ve just learned to hold.

So when something means so much, a few emails can never make it mean any less.

The artist must persevere, because nobody can write that story the way you can.

As time went on, the emails changed their tune a little bit. Many times it wasn’t a direct 'no’, but a “we see great potential in your work” or a tiny piece of genuine feedback from an editor that stuck a beaming smile on my face for the next day.

Just the right nudge to make me keep picking up the pen or hitting the keyboard every time the lightning strikes my mind.