listen to my

I’ve never been particularly afraid to submit writing to professors.

I think whether it’s an analytical essay or something deeply personal, it almost feels like handing the work to a scantron.

That’s not to say I haven’t had wonderful writing professors who’ve given me thoughtful feedback, and responded emotionally to my work, and genuinely encouraged me as a writer.

But it still doesn’t feel especially vulnerable. Maybe it’s because they only know me through the writing.

If they dislike an essay, they dislike an essay, you know?

It never feels like they’re rejecting me, because they don’t know enough about me to do that.

For awhile, when I would intentionally send a piece of writing to someone I knew, I would feel kinda ill.

I didn’t treat it as an opportunity for feedback, but to prove myself, and my skills, and my intellect to my friend.

I would revise it over and over before working up the nerve to turn my laptop around.

But, last fall, I spent an entire quarter developing a television pilot.

I planned the season, built the characters, storyboarded, and eventually wrote a fifty-page screenplay.

It was one of the longest creative projects I had ever completed, and while I knew it wasn’t perfect, I was genuinely super proud of it.

Technically, it had started as a class assignment. But by the end of the quarter, it felt like so much more than that.

I had spent months living inside that screenplay. It was like my world.

And I wanted so badly to know what it looked like from the outside.

Throughout the quarter, I repeatedly asked my instructor for feedback, and she always promised she would get to it eventually, but she never did.

So when grades were finally released, I was super excited to open mine.

That wasn’t because I cared about the number, but because I was excited about the notes. The feedback. I just wanted someone other than me to care, to think about the work I’d done in some way.

Instead, I discovered I had been given someone else’s feedback.

So, I emailed the professor, and she apologized and promised to send mine.

And, a week passed.

I got nothing.

I emailed again.

Nothing.

So I asked in person.

Nothing.

I asked again.

Finally, I got my feedback. And it was valuable advice that genuinely improved the screenplay.

But the experience made me realize how badly I had wanted a response. Just from anyone.

It made me realize how important it is to share my writing with the people around me who actually want to read it.

Throughout the quarter, I had talked about this project constantly.

My housemates heard about every breakthrough, every plot problem, every new idea I became quite temporarily obsessed with. Naturally, they wanted to read it.

And this should have been super exciting, but it made me so nervous.

A friend of mine came over that night and, upon learning we were about to perform a table read of a fifty-page screenplay, he nearly turned around and left.

Honestly, fair enough.

But once we started, he was hooked. He stayed until the end, laughed in the right places, read for some of my characters, and immediately started asking questions afterward.

That was some of the most meaningful feedback I received on the project, or ever, honestly, and it was all the more meaningful coming from a best friend.

To this day, he regularly asks me if I’ve written the next episode yet.

And that’s when I noticed something kind of ridiculous.

I was spending weeks trying to get a response from someone whose job required them to read my screenplay while avoiding the people who were volunteering to read it for fun.

And it was because I was scared.

When a professor reads something I’ve written, they’re evaluating the work. They don’t really have the context to do much else.

Friends are different. A friend doesn’t just learn whether I can structure a scene or write dialogue.

And they probably don’t really care about that, honestly.

I figured they’d learn what I find funny. What I obsess over. Which themes kept appearing whether I intended them to or not. And they’d have a better ability to discern something about the person who wrote it.

A screenplay is a particularly bad place to hide from this. You can disguise things as much as you want. You can invent characters. You can change every detail. And somehow, you’re still gonna end up all over that page anyways.

And that’s what was so scary.

But what surprised me was that this turned out to be the best part.

Instead of sharing the work making me feel exposed, it made it feel really understood.

My friends were excited to recognize pieces of me in the story, and they were excited to see pieces of themselves in it, too.

The screenplay had actually sort of become a strange collection of shared experiences, and inside jokes, and observations, and conversations that had accumulated over just years of friendship—and I hadn’t even realized the extent of it.

For the first time, I felt like I had a real audience rather than a captive one.

And my writing gave voice to experiences we had actually shared. My friends connected with it for many of the same reasons that they connect with me.

I spent years worrying that people would see too much of me in my writing, but honestly, it’s the most rewarding things to have someone connect with you through your words and your stories and your expression.

Even if it’s vulnerable, I’m so glad I finally stopped writing alone.