When I read that quote, I felt not only ‘confirmed’, I felt encouraged. What a writer Junot Diaz has to be, to say so little and still manage to help a fellow writer who is losing hope sometimes and suffers from self-doubts more often than it’s good for her?
With these few words, Junot Diaz has empowered me, strengthened my will to write, my need to ban my stories on paper, and boosted my self-confidence.
I would say that is a gift on its own… no wonder the man got a Pulitzer prize for his work!
I wish, sometimes, I would be more robust, not tearing myself apart over things… writing is only one of them. I let the words of others still hurt me. Sometimes a simple phone call is discouraging me so much, that I completely lose the ability to encourage myself!
I wonder if that’s another side of the same ability: to empower with words, but also to destroy someone’s self-esteem with words?
I have been down for two days now, brooding over something I was told on the phone, and I’m internally bleeding, so to speak. My way of dealing with that would have been writing, under normal circumstances. But currently, I’m busy with a few other things, and writing is, unfortunately, not on the top of my list.
This resulted in a depressed low I was sitting in for nearly two days now… add the next friend who tells me bluntly that I’m ‘expecting too much’… and I was barely sleeping anymore. This quote here, helped me a great deal!
I wish sometimes, loneliness wasn’t part of my life…
But now, read the quote, internalize it, and understand, what it really means, not only for your writing but for who you are! You are a writer, a STRONG writer! Stay one, live your life to be that writer… no matter what will happen, you are a writer! Be proud of it!
Thank you, Junot Diaz!
Who is Junot Diaz?
Junot Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Drown; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and This Is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/O. Henry Award. A graduate of Rutgers College, Díaz is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review and the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He is the cofounder of Voices of Our Nation Workshop.
(Source: http://www.junotdiaz.com/)
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