“Just keep writing,” he tells me, every time I ask him what I’m doing with my life, which is on a near-daily basis. “Good things happen when you write.” But I have yet to see any evidence of this. I vacillate between thinking I’m an absolute genius and a worthless pile of trash; between being hell-bent on making it and knowing that I will fail, utterly. It is self-indulgent and torturous. In the years to come, it will hit me: This is just what it means to be an artist.
