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, forcing me to sprint across Manhattan to reach a train to New Haven. Once there, I would need to hire a taxi for the thirty-mile ride to Middletown, an expense I hadn’t anticipated, so outside the station I bargained with a few drivers over the fare. I ended up in the backseat of a cab driven by a man who asked about whether I had a boyfriend and then, encouraged by my honest reply, confessed his love and urged me to “take a break” with him. “Take a break with me, Helen,” he pressed, well after I declined. “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 complied, then paid the agreed-upon fare. Later I would write an essay about that kiss, which would become one of my earliest published pieces, but this was before conversations about harassment had become as common as they are now, and it was simply meant as a funny story.
I don’t remember any of the lectures at that conference, but I recall the auditorium where I sat among a couple of hundred attendees—mostly white women, several decades my senior—taking notes on whatever the speaker was saying, or scribbling for ten minutes on a given prompt. I was twenty-five, straddling the first and second years of my fiction MFA, just at the cusp of “becoming a writer,” and it felt like the room pulsed with a certain desperation. A shimmer of heat rose from every aching aspirant, each of us terrified about our looming irrelevance, so the space burned with the dry fever of ambition. I longed to finish a book, a manuscript that would draw readers—many readers—from all corners. The specifics of the project were fuzzy, but the outcome was unmistakable: I wanted to stand at the podium, speaking about a path from hard work to critical acclaim. I wanted to be the one whose words were being jotted down, the person whose advice we’d paid for, who everyone leaned in to hear.
*
I am talking here about a difficult, tight, claustrophobic subject: the self.
Specifically, the self as it reveals itself in the practice of writing.
Three examples:
It’s 2017 and I’m reading applications for a two-year fellowship at a small Midwestern college, where a rising writer would earn $25,000 a year to teach two courses, mentor two student groups, and serve on a couple of committees. More than a hundred applicants apply, some with a manuscript or chapbook, many with none at all, 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 were a runner-up or finalist. The more CVs I read, the more each achievement seems like a grain of sand, a crumb: “I persuaded Unknown Journal to publish my seven-line poem, which a handful of people have skimmed,” or “My five-hundred-word flash piece was a finalist in four contests I paid fifteen or twenty dollars to enter, perhaps for the mere privilege of listing these half-formed laurels on my CV.” I sense the gulf of longing beneath these catalogs, the longing any one of us might feel that the crumbs could collect and meet somewhere meaningful. At the same time, I begin to feel I am reading accounts of someone shedding a fragment of dry skin, a thin layer of words that a few other starved writers glance at briefly.
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 gather for dinner after a day spent in solitary work. One person has spent the afternoon performing the six distinct voices in their play. Another has discovered a fresh melodic line for their opera, or donned heavy goggles to weld two sculpture fragments, or gotten their hands messy plastering three new puppet creatures. They are energized, or they are spent. Yes, some have tangled with a problem, or spent too many hours wrestling with doubts about yesterday’s decisions. But only the writers come to dinner bearing a sense of dreary stagnation. Their day feels like a struggle, or a stumble: “What the heck happened?” They may have erased four thousand words, or added a handful of sloppy pages they’ll discard by morning. A sliver of sun crept across the floor until the room grew dim. The work felt arduous, heavy, dull, anxiety-inducing, yet there was no palpable labor to show for it. From morning through night, they sat unmoving, trapped within their own minds.
It’s 2021 and the online literary journal 3:AM Magazine is briefly infamous for publishing a troubling poem by a White man about a celebrated woman writer of color. The site’s traffic surges unusually: like most literary magazines, it’s visited mainly by writers who want to submit, who “read” the magazine mainly to gauge how much they should crave inclusion. When I visit, one thing stands out: next to each five- or twenty-line poem is a very large headshot and bio. The headshot tends to occupy more space than the poem; each “page” of the magazine—each poem, that is—is essentially a portrait of its author.
*
Often, in my coaching practice, I meet writers who confess that their sense of self-worth is tethered to their writing. They have consulted a therapist who has suggested they repeat a line like “My writing does not determine my worth” each morning before opening their laptop, or that they enumerate aspects of their own work they value: I craft a beautiful sentence, I present a clear argument, My ideas are original. “I’m working on my low self-esteem,” one might say. “I know I need to figure out a way to prevent my worth from resting on my writing.”
Probably every writer who longs to be read feels this to some degree: there’s nothing more exposing than exposing the contents of one’s mind to others 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 nearly impossible to separate from the self. But just as “Don’t think about white elephants” invites you to imagine white elephants, so too is “My self-worth does not lie in my writing” only a suggestion that it might be true. Generating awareness of one’s “low self-esteem”—even if the goal is to reverse it—can trap a person in a cycle of self-questioning about worth.
Writing is “suspected to be narcissistic,” and I once heard someone say, as if to counter that suspicion, that “Most writers aren’t narcissists; they’re ravaged by self-doubt.” The latter misreads what narcissism really means, which isn’t an inflated sense of self-worth but an undue focus on the self. To be a narcissist isn’t necessarily to have a bloated ego; it’s to be preoccupied with one’s own ego, i.e., with one’s self-image. From psychologist Terrence Real:
Narcissus did not suffer from an excess of self-love, but from its deficiency […] Lacking the capacity for an authentic relationship, he becomes […] obsessed with his own adoration reflected back to him from the outside. This cannot replenish him, because no amount of external validation or prestige or nurture can replace his own.
The culture surrounding creative writing both attracts narcissists—people who gaze into the glass mirrors of their computer screens seeking some measure of their worth—and produces new narcissists. It does so because reviews, workshops, and publishing conversations (not to mention the years of schooling that precede them) typically frame things in terms of “good” and “bad,” “working” or “not.” Conversations conducted in a language of positives and negatives turn the writer’s feelings into the subtext of the talk; the writer becomes the implicit subject of the discussion. Worse, such conversations habituate us to writing for pats on the back: for extrinsic rather than intrinsic reward. They destabilize a writer’s intrinsic sense of value, and shift attention away from the fundamental reasons for making art. Even praise, like any drug, will eventually poison the art itself.
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. Obsessing over that empty image drains the self of its substance. There is no escape from low self-esteem except by shifting focus away from the self.
This is why I urge the writers I work with to avert their gaze from their own image and look outward: What can my work do? How can it serve other people? What do I value in literature, and how can I embody those values?
*
Maybe you value surprise. Maybe you prize a gorgeous turn of phrase. Perhaps you prize a vivid emotion, a light-handed touch, a clear moral, or an open-ended finish. Maybe you seek literature that offers escape. Maybe your aim is to give readers the same relief.
Reminding ourselves of what we value gives us a sense of worth because it fills us with purpose. It helps us remember what matters and, as a pleasant consequence, reminds us of who we are—far more stable than flickering images of uncertain value. Re-rooting in the why behind our choices as readers and writers also reorients us toward a practice of care for possible readers. This reorientation, more than anything else, gently builds one’s self-worth—indirectly—by reminding us that we are capable of meaningful contribution, not in the temporary and ill-defined glow of a cheering crowd, a pile of cash, or a gleaming prize, but in the sense of being someone who desires to communicate and who understands that the act of writing, like any act of communication, is an offering to someone else.
*
In the auditorium, the person assigned to be my conference mentor—an established writer who would read a story of mine and give feedback in a one-on-one session—shared the long trek of his first book toward recognition: years of labor, countless rejections from agents and editors, a small-press publication, and eventually the book’s revival through a two-book sale that included republication by a major house. A classic rise from obscurity to prominence, a tale of humility before triumph. He couldn’t have been more than thirty-five, yet he narrated the story as if he’d endured ages of hardship; he spoke to a room full of women older than him as though he’d come through a war and emerged victorious.
Later, he and I sat at a shaded picnic table to discuss my story. I recall little of his remarks, but I remember the end: “You’re a talented writer. Let me give you a tip. 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 showed him came from the book I would devote the next seventeen years to, and perhaps he was right that it was too personal, seemed to be about my family even if intended as fiction, would risk causing friction with my parents, as it did, because it grazed too close to their private lives, threatening my relationship with them in a way that would make the project both difficult to work on and hard to abandon. Yet I still resent him for that remark. It felt like a directive to suppress the story I was telling; I understood it—perhaps correctly—as a form of repression. I stood up from the meeting shaken, angry, and resolved to stand my ground. As I kept working on the project in the years that followed, his words lingered over the manuscript like a curse.
What does this have to do with self-esteem? “A talented writer.” The instructor was boosting my confidence while dismissing my work, conferring a judgment about who I am while divorcing it from the narrative I was presenting on the page. If we set aside the possibility that his intent was to push me to follow his path (and set aside why he might have felt compelled to do so), we notice, first, that a teacher feels authorized to pronounce statements about a student’s character—a statement about identity, but also about worth—and, second, that he feels no obligation to justify or define his claim. “A talented writer”: was it about the way I shaped dialogue to fit literary fashion? was it about whether I had punctuated perfectly? This is precisely the sort of disconnect from meaning that turns a workshop (or conference) into a spectacle of ego, where the substance of the writing is sidelined in favor of talk about craft, which invites us to picture the writer at the desk and ignore the human dimension of the work. The outcome is that everyone’s sense of value bounces around like marbles in a machine, precariously up for grabs. The unpredictability only amplifies the writer’s fixation, akin to a rat faced with unpredictable rewards. No wonder those conference rooms carried so much heat, so much fear and hope stirred by the machine’s buzz. Pick me! me! me!
To be called “talented” was the most childish part of me craving approval, because I’d been socialized, as so many are, to use writing as a means of seeking hollow and addictive forms of affection. It felt normal to hand over our words in exchange for a pat on the head, an A-plus, which was supposed to lead to a publication in a literary journal, admission to an MFA program, a book advance, a starred review, a prize, and—yes, here we are at the end of another talk, another reading—applause, applause, applause.
*
“The dominant literary style in America is careerism,” wrote the critic Christian Lorentzen in a review of the Philip Roth biography, a man “on a decades-long campaign of public-image control” who nonetheless possessed a very robust public image. Yet for those of us toiling in obscurity, “public image” remains a central concern. Although we might prefix it with “self-,” esteem denotes respect or admiration: like self-regard, it is externally defined. Writers who invoke “self-esteem” in coaching sessions are often haunted by the creeping sense that their value lies in their writing not for how it looks to them, but because they don’t know what it would look like from the inside; they have grown accustomed to reading their work through others’ eyes.
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 frenetically pursue this kind of esteem is to fall into a vicious loop: chasing esteem distracts from the intrinsic pleasures of doing the work, which in turn makes the work harder; while the inner motive for writing dwindles, external rewards become unreliable, and the craft becomes ever more fraught. Moreover, focusing on esteem saps the intrinsic joy of creation. A wealth of research shows that emphasizing external rewards makes people less curious, less willing to take risks, and less creative.
“Image management,” writes Lorentzen, “creeps into fiction itself”: characters are simplified, “flattened” to secure readers’ approval. Obsession with image makes our writing small, a cramped echo of what we might once have imagined. It harms writers and harms their work, so that a narrative of self-deficiency may be more damaging than any actual shortcoming.
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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.
