I’ve known since I was young that storytelling was the one thing I actually wanted to do with my life. Film, writing, the craft of creating something out of nothing — it was never a question of whether, only of how.
But it comes with the pressure of knowing exactly what you want and having no guarantee that the world will want it back.
Deciding to build my life around it wasn’t the hard part. Living inside that decision, day after day, through the uncertainty, is where the real work happens.
Writer Mallika Chawla articulates something I’ve felt but never quite named: the difference between risk and uncertainty. Risk is something you can calculate by looking at the odds, weigh the outcomes, and make a call. Uncertainty is the fog that surrounds every decision regardless of how carefully you’ve planned.
For a long time I kept waiting for the fog to clear before I fully committed. What I eventually understood is that it never does. The fog is permanent, but it’s not a sign that you’re going the wrong way.
What changed wasn’t the conditions, but rather that I stopped waiting for them to change.
Hard lessons
No one tells you how much of a creative career is spent receiving feedback that stings. Notes on a script you spent six months writing. A client who rewrites your copy and sends it back as “inspiration.” A pitch that gets close and then rejected.
The first instinct is to take it personally.
What I’ve slowly learned is that feedback is data, not verdict. A note on your work is not a note on your worth. It’s information about what landed and what didn’t, delivered by someone who is also just trying to figure it out.
The screenwriters I’ve studied talk about character being revealed not through what someone says, but through how they act under pressure. The moments that have actually shaped who I am as a creative aren’t the ones where things went smoothly. They’re the ones where something went wrong and I had to decide what kind of person I was going to be about it.
Freelance reality
There are stretches in a freelance life that test you in ways that are hard to describe to someone who hasn’t lived it.
The economic pressure is real and relentless. It’s the kind of stress that bleeds into everything. Your sleep, confidence, and your ability to sit down and do the creative work that is supposed to be the whole point.
What I’ve come to understand is that resilience isn’t the absence of that fear. It’s the ability to feel it and keep moving anyway. As psychologist Anne Browning puts it, the goal isn’t to avoid the discomfort, but rather to stay in what she calls “approach motivation”, meaning moving toward your goals even when the outcome isn’t guaranteed, rather than away from failure.
That distinction has saved me many times.
Be kind to yourself
This is the part that took me longest to take seriously.
I grew up, as many of us, in an environment that thought self-care was weakness. Something people who were less resilient, less committed, less serious about their work did. But I after putting myself into new situations, environments, meeting new people and being open minded to find and create my own beliefs and values in life, I realize how wrong and toxic that approach is.
What I actually didn’t have time for was the alternative. The version of me that ran on empty, that skipped training because there was always something more urgent, that spoke to myself in a voice I would never use with someone I cared about.
I have always since a young age been exercising and doing strength training, but more than 3 years ago I gave myself the ultimatum to train 4 days a week and do breathwork and meditation. Moving my body consistently and noticing when the internal monologue turned cruel and choosing, actively and repeatedly, to redirect it have changed me as a person to the better. It did not feel natural at first, but because I’d finally accepted that I couldn’t do good creative work from a place of depletion it became a part of me after some time.
You can’t tell a compelling story if you’ve stopped believing you have something worth saying.
What failure teaches you
I’ve failed at things I cared deeply about. Projects that didn’t come together and opportunities I wasn’t ready for when they arrived. Periods where I questioned the entire premise of what I was trying to build.
Each time I found the lesson inside the loss. Not immediately, but it was always there. A piece of craft I hadn’t mastered yet, a boundary I hadn’t set, and a way of working that wasn’t actually working.
As researcher Aaron Davis describes it, failure is a pit stop on the road toward your goals. Sometimes you need to refill the tank before you can keep going. That reframe doesn’t make the pit stop enjoyable, but it makes it survivable.
The real risk, I’ve come to believe, isn’t trying and failing. It’s staying so afraid of failure that you never find out what you’re actually capable of in your life.
A hand in the fog
There is an enormous amount of writing about resilience, self-belief and the courage to bet on yourself. Almost none of it mentions what it means to have someone in your corner who genuinely believes in your vision. Not because they have to, but because they actually see it.
Having a partner who is curious about how your mind works. Who asks real questions about the projects you’re obsessed with. Who doesn’t just tolerate your ambition but finds it interesting, worth engaging with, worth supporting on the difficult days when you can’t quite find the argument for yourself.
The uncertainty is still there, but there is a profound difference between facing all of that alone and facing it with someone who looks at the same fog you’re standing in and says: I believe in you and I’am right beside you.
My relationship to discomfort
Taking risks doesn’t get easier. The discomfort of not knowing whether something will work is roughly the same whether it’s your first leap or your fifth. What changes is your relationship to that discomfort. The evidence you’ve accumulated that you can survive not knowing, that you can recover from failure, that the person you’re becoming through the process is someone worth becoming.
Don’t wait until it’s not scary, because it’s always going to be a little scary. That’s how you know it matters.