When I decided that what I wanted to do with my life was fiction writing, it felt like something had finally clicked into place. I loved writing, but I hadn’t realized that I could make a career out of doing it. When I did come to that realization, it just felt right.
Going into my sophomore year (the 2024-2025 school year), I started taking my specific Fiction Writing classes. Initially, it felt great. I loved being able to write and call it homework, and I loved being able to show off a style of writing that I hadn’t been able to use in years. But then, as I got into the more intense writing projects, I started to doubt myself. I wondered if I could really do this. Every word I wrote seemed trivial, to the point where I would open a Word document to complete an assignment and just feel like crying. It felt like all the words had left me. I was left staring at the page, fearing that I had burned out every good idea I once had and wasn’t meant to do this after all.
I was so deep in this spiral that I am now able to recognize as a bad case of imposter syndrome. According to The National Library of Medicine, imposter syndrome or (imposter phenomenon) is a “behavioral health phenomenon described as self-doubt of intellect, skills, or accomplishments among high-achieving individuals” in which those who are experiencing said syndrome “cannot internalize their success and subsequently experience pervasive feelings of self-doubt, anxiety, depression, and/or apprehension of being exposed as a fraud in their work, despite verifiable and objective evidence of their successfulness.” This, clearly, made writing exponentially harder. There were some days where I knew that to stay on top of deadlines I had to write, but I physically couldn’t bring myself to open my laptop and get started.
What helped me through this block was, surprisingly, the book Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell. I had read Fangirl back when I was in middle school and still return to it frequently as a comfort read. The book focuses on Cath, a college freshman, who writes fanfiction while pursuing a writing degree. I hadn’t thought of this book in months, until I received a notification from the e-library that a hold on a volume of the illustrated version of Fangirl was ready for me to collect. I remembered how much I loved the book and eagerly dove into the illustrated volume.
I found out that Cath and I were facing the same struggles, which quickly prompted me to text my mom begging her to send me my physical copy of the book. Cath expressed what I was feeling perfectly, and it made me feel less alone in how I was feeling. Cath expresses that she felt like she was, “…swimming in words. Drowning in them, sometimes.” For the first time when reading this book, a book that I had read several times over the years, I understood what she meant. I also felt like I was drowning in words; the words my imposter syndrome was feeding me, the words people were trying to tell me to reassure me about my fears, and even just the state of existing in a world where words are inescapable. When I needed the words most, though, they simply left or swallowed me whole.
Cath also articulates this feeling beautifully when she confides in her writing partner, Nick, about how sometimes she feels like a “reverse black hole.” She confesses that this feeling is like the world is close to sucking her dry of language, and that the words are leaving her faster than she can process them. While it is odd to try to wrap your head around the idea of a black hole that, as Cath and Nick phrase it, “sucks out instead of blows”, it unlocked a sense of familiarity in me. Seeing those words printed in black and white made me see what had been echoing (loudly) inside my head for the past few weeks before picking the book up. I hadn’t been able to correctly articulate this feeling to anyone I knew, further contributing to my struggle with imposter syndrome. But now, these feelings were laid out plainly through a character that I related to in every sense of the word.
Reading through this book, all 434 pages of it, helped pull me out of a truly negative headspace and allowed me to escape into someone else’s. Admittedly, Cath was in just as bad of a headspace as I was, but I got to see her work through it. I got to watch, through Cath, as she questioned if she should be spending her life writing and if she was even a good writer to begin with. Seeing her eventually push through this block and prove to herself more than anyone that she was truly able to do this was inspiring.
Reading and rereading Fangirl helped show me that there is, in fact, a light at the end of the tunnel. My imposter syndrome built itself like an echo chamber around me, amplifying my worst thoughts to the point where I nearly gave up the things I truly loved: storytelling and writing. Fangirl helped show me how fragile that echo chamber was, and with a little grace and time I was able to break out of it and continue writing work I was proud of. Was it my best writing ever? I’m unsure, as I try not to pit my works against each other because there’s always something to learn from writing a draft and moving on to the next one. But I was still proud of these works because they were products of the incredibly difficult relationship I had with writing and they exist solely because I won the fight against my imposter syndrome.
Without Fangirl, I don’t know if I would be writing this article today, or feel proud of everything I write no matter the quality. That girl from a few months ago who was so distraught about her writing would be proud to know that she eventually does write again.