A WORTHY CREATURE by Gaby Montiel

When the sight of the bruised creature I called my novel finally emerged before my clouded eyes, I realized my insatiable thirst for validation had failed us both. At this moment, I knew I had desperately beaten out all of the life from my fantasy project. It stared at me blankly, the blinking cursor hammering the weary ache of failure into me. I had started and restarted and disemboweled and reorganized the book relentlessly, obsessively, as though something in me refused to complete the persistent creature. I sabotaged my own efforts with the pursuit, not of perfection, but of admiration, for proof that I was a storyteller, a title I had carved into my identity.

The novel was a suggestion from my dad, who had noticed my interest in writing I expressed as a young child. Books, movies, television, and music were very important to me growing up, and I had started writing down the scenes within my vivid imagination when my dad asked me to provide something with “more action”. I misinterpreted my excitement to meet his request as resolve, and quickly began on the project. Considering the young child I was, lost in the weeds of existing as an artist, this step was pivotal to shaping who I grew to become. However, my yearning for validation resulted from the heart of my project pumping doubts and fears about whether I could meet my dad’s expectations instead of passion. He had simply requested a short story he believed would be a month-long project, but I had taken his suggestion and plummeted into a war between the necessity for my soul to express itself through art and the incessant desire to prove myself worthy of the prestige I held over the identity of a storyteller.

Every time I would reach a point in my novel where the writing would feel beneath the level I held myself to, I would immediately restart, as I could not let unimpressive writing taint the perception of my skill. The result of this cyclical progress and recession was the lifeless pile of sterile words on my computer, refusing to fit together into a coherent representation of my characters, my world, and my voice.  The issue was not writers’ block, nor perfectionism, as I had lazily assigned to my struggle. It was the fact that the novel had nothing to say about myself. My characters, supposed extensions of my personality, were locked in a cage of tropes, an ironic attempt to appeal to future audiences. If I was not a worthy storyteller, I would kill the story and bury that title with the project. I needed my work to paint me as a master of human expression. However, this was my desperate cry for others to see me, not my own ambitions. Thus, my skills within writing a manuscript about young outcasts became the basis for my worth. If I could not perform at the level everyone wished to see, I was not a worthy person. I would not know who I am.

Only when I allowed my creation to be selfish was I able to break this dependance on being worthy. The prioritization of the self, not the superiority of it, was what revived my novel. When I accepted that I had a purpose outside of conveying stories for others’ desires, I was able to feel my skills develop and began to show proficiency in the art of storytelling, not the identity of it. Art does not connect people because everyone agrees on one representation of the truth. In fact, it is the beautiful collage of individuality from many selfish people courageous enough to unearth their insides and display them. As an artist, as a writer, I am not a storyteller, I am a display of human existence. Inherently, I am proof that humanity is not transactional, but something to be witnessed, not weighed for worth. ∎