I. You are different
By the time I reached my tenth birthday, I had lived on three continents. The Gulf War, my parents’ graduate studies, and financial necessity shuttled my family across the world into the Midwest. I was Arab, bookish, and perpetually mortified. All this to say—I wanted nothing more than to fit in. Over the next decade or so, that remained my feverish goal. Anyone who wants to see evidence of this yearning need only flip through my middle and high school yearbooks.
I straightened my hair. I cut my hair. I dyed my hair blonde. I gained weight. I lost weight. I asked everybody to call me Holly. I pretended I never read Anna Karenina. (I read it four times.) I pretended I watched Dawson’s Creek and Gilmore Girls. (I’ve literally never seen an episode.)
It took me a long time to stop pretending and, looking back, I realize it might have been out of sheer exhaustion rather than any particular epiphany. But once I did, I sought refuge in the intersection of difference and writing. This is the blessing and curse of difference; in day-to-day life, it can be sapping, but in art, it becomes its own currency. For many of us, hearing from those that history has silenced (and often tried to erase) is nothing short of sustaining.
So, little Hala: take what makes you different and tell that story. The people who need to read it will resonate and those that don’t, well, they weren’t going to sit next to you in the cafeteria anyway.
II. Community helps.
When I was 24, I lost someone I loved who died way too young. He died on a Monday. That Friday, I was wandering the streets of the Village, completely at a loss for what to do with myself, when I found an open mic at Cornelia Street Café. I went in. I scribbled a short, terrible poem on a napkin and, on pure adrenaline, signed myself up and performed it.
That was probably one of the most important moments of my life. I went back every week. I wrote less terrible poems. As the months went on, I met some of the most kind, brilliant, big-hearted people through those open mics. I met the future publishers of my first poetry collection.
Most importantly, I discovered a sense of community. I had moved to New York a couple of years earlier, and still ached for Beirut like a lover. I missed my family, my favorite pubs, my old campus. But I fell in love with that dim, candlelit basement, found myself returning to that room of storytelling and applause with worshipper-like devotion.
III. Writing is work.
It took me a long time to understand this, because writing is also a magical, fickle, infuriating creature that rarely seems to belong to me. And, yes, it is perhaps, for many of us, the most pure, simple alchemy we will ever come across.
But it is also work. It needs to be treated with respect. An idea isn’t a book. The distance between the two can be a long, solitary tundra that is only crossed by actual writing.
Everyone has their routine. For me, it’s 30 minutes a day, no more, no less. Sometimes I write those 30 minutes on the subway, sometimes at my desk, sometimes on my phone, but it’s always 30 minutes. If I miss a day, I forgive myself, but I make it up the next day. I’ve learned that writing is like going to the gym, like building any muscle. It needs consistency and, for many of us, ritual.
IV. You are going to hear NO a lot
Like — a lot. Like — there will be weeks and months where all you hear is no. I get emails on a pretty regular basis lamenting that my work isn’t quite what they’re looking for.
The first time I got a letter like this, I was gutted. My young ego had been so certain that, not only was the journal going to love my work, they would be so taken by my nuanced grasp of the human condition, my mastery of language and imagery, that they’d obviously ask for more pieces.
They rejected my work. And my ego got some much-needed bruising that day. And then even more bruising, and then a little more, until I started to understand: if you’re going to write, you’re going to have to find a reason to do it that has nothing to do with money or recognition or awards.
I recognize that I say that from a place of luck and privilege, having been published. But that doesn’t change the fact doing this work must come from a love of the act itself, of creating worlds and lives that didn’t exist before, a keenness to lose yourself in the desire to tell a certain story, that satisfaction in the a-ha moment, when everything snaps into place, and all those dead ends and rough drafts are suddenly worth it.
