Please Stop Believing in Yourself

Believe in what lives through you

Greetings, good human,
I hope this story-letter finds you in a moment when you can receive a gift from a tree.

I was walking through the jungle,
reflecting on the experience of selling stories
and the hilarity of the bizarre things agents, marketers, and publishers will tell you in the name of profiting from what you’ve created.

I got to thinking:
“Man oh man, you really have to believe in yourself to stay sane in this biz...”

And that’s when a tree spoke up. (I kid you not.)

---

Don’t believe in YOURSELF.

That’s a broken myth
born from a self-help movement,
woven together from the shattered threads
of a country pieced together by people whose lines of lineage were broken,
forgotten.
Connection with the land,
animals, plants, gods, and the deities from which they emerged—lost.

---

"Believing in yourself"
comes from people who lost the voices of the Menehune, the Lilliputians, and the gnome folk.

“Believe in yourself” comes from forgetting what lives inside the voice of the owl,
ignoring the resonance of wisdom in the whales,
and not learning the language living in the whisper and wave of the leaves.

---

I don’t know if Einstein believed in himself.
I’ll bet my life he believed in his genius—
the form of the unseen world that was living through him.

So it’s okay if you don’t believe in yourself.
Now you get to check the box that says you probably aren’t a narcissistic megalomaniac,
and pat yourself on the back.

---

What’s worth the gnarly struggle to believe...
What’s worth developing the discipline,
and the skill,
staying up long hours,
waking early,
and learning all the fancy moves,
so you can win the sword fights
with the critic,
with doubt,
and with the comparing mind...

---

Is believing that you have what it takes
to be in touch with your ancestors.
That you have what it takes
to listen to the land,
the rock beings,
and the feathered folk.

---

Because you made your offerings.
And devoted yourself to the divine.
You have walked with the forest, a mind open to receiving,
and swam through the songs of whales, willing to engage their love.

---

Because you have opened yourself
to be danced by the spirits
of creation.

So that they might live through you.

---

Now that you can believe in,
because you know you are not doing it alone—

—this creation thing.

That kind of belief rattles the windows,
shakes the floorboards,
and holds you strong and stable.

---

So when THEY question your offerings,
your gifts,
your talent...

And they will,
(because that’s what they do).

---

If all you have in that back pocket of yours is some loose change and a piece of tattered paper that says “believe in yourself,”
the wind may blow you over,
bow you down.

---

But if you have fed your ancestors,
and they are standing behind you,
if you have sung to and prayed to the elements and the land you stand on,
and they are holding you...

---

Then they can say what they want,
and you can lean into wind like tree,

and rustle off the noise as it blows by,
because you are rooted, strong in your knowing,

because you believe

in what lives through you.