A Note To Self

A letter that I wrote to myself in December 2022 on literary integrity, true passion, and spiritual realignment. Photo of First Quarter Moon by Feifei Z.

Dec 16, 2022

Dear Feifei,

As a kid, you soared with fairies and swam with mermaids in fantastical landscapes that served as your haven. Stories were your only light in the shadows of the torture chamber that was your childhood home.

At eleven, you learned from a classmate that you could breathe life into the phantasmagoric images playing in the theater of your mind by inking them onto paper. Thus, you penned a fanfiction volume of Teen Titans that you printed off in 9-point font. It was twenty-three pages.

At twelve, your notebook was passed around the class. Everyone had asked you to put them in your story. It was the first time you felt seen in an American middle school where whiteness was viewed as king and color was considered dirt.

At thirteen, you sped through your homework every night so you could work on your time travel book, a story you had hoped to get traditionally published ever since a classmate suggested for you to put your work out there.

At fourteen, things in real life turned sour. You learned that your family was not really family, that your friends were fond of being absent, and that you did not belong in this hellish small town. So you tuned in to the frequencies of other worlds, and the people there became your best friends. You shivered by a frozen lake in a boreal forest beside one of them, grabbed coffee and pastry with another, engaged in an intense round of bowling with your favorite girl, and meditated in a grotto with the antiheroine.

At fifteen, you had filled twelve 100-paged notebooks with their tales.

At sixteen and seventeen, the beast known as high school threatened to mangle you between its razor-sharp teeth. Every time you felt like slumbering forevermore, you would smile at the people in those other worlds, and they would grin right back.

At eighteen, you perused through twenty craft books, studied over two-hundred blog posts, and scribbled over 300,000 words. It was only when you imbibed from the chalice of storytelling that you felt so very alive.

But at nineteen, you threw that all away after joining a flock of blue birds who preached that stories were naught but products and that the market reigned supreme. It was no longer about drinking from the goblet. It was about pleasing the right patrons with the right spices, catering to the Big Five restaurants that decided which dishes were considered delicacies and which ones belonged in the dumpster. It was about filling the pockets of gatekeepers with green and being green with envy in regards to another writer’s success. It was about selling your soul and becoming another cog in an elitist system designed to exploit authors while making them beg for more. It was about speeding through manuscripts to get an agent, slaving over market-oriented edits to get a book deal, sacrificing your vision to remain in a publisher’s good graces. It was obsession over sales. It was cancel culture. It was cyber-harassment disguised as progressivity.

It was everything but the art.

You didn’t know that you had fallen into the abyss until the darkness closed in two months after you turned twenty. Writhing in the querying trenches. Checking QueryTracker fifty-three times a day. Sending out letter after letter to hypocrites who said they wanted to champion underrepresented voices but only did so when it benefited their bottom line. Despite the three full requests, you pulled your manuscript.

In the next few months, the shadows grew long and the nights chilled to subzero. You fumbled in the darkness, disoriented and disgusted, lost and lonely. You had never tasted the bitter fruits of remorse until those days. You cried on an empty bench at your university as the sun dipped below the horizon. You sobbed at four in the morning, procrastinating on every presentation yet still managing to finish the semester with all As. You couldn’t look yourself in the mirror because you couldn’t bear to see how empty your gaze was. Ghosts of nostalgia haunted your dreams. The boreal woods, the coffee shop, the bowling alley, and the grotto felt so far away. Your soul felt like it was being shredded into a thousand pieces.

Then slowly, you picked yourself up piece by piece, word by word. Day after day, you showed up for your stories. Night after night, you fought the capitalist poltergeists attempting to seduce you into giving up your rights, your creative freedom, your passion, your true calling. Your soul. Your spiritual friends. Everything that made you a writer and a human.

You defied the model of productivity, external validation, and repeat. You reconnected with your creative roots. You swore you would never be tempted by traditional publishing again. You swore you would never lose yourself again.

You learned to do interior formatting for books and taught yourself graphic design for covers. Though you sometimes worry sick over whether you will secure enough funds to support yourself, you quickly remember that you were born to create and not be enslaved by the constructs of fame or money, and that the Universe will continue to bless you with true abundance.

You no longer wonder when you will “make it” because you already have.

As long as you are making art, then you are happy.

As long as you are happy, then all is well.

Art has always been about exploring the shades of one’s own psyche and capturing the stories of diverse people. Though I create primarily for myself and my spiritual friends, I still aim to share my works and empower as many queer people of color as possible. It takes one spark to ignite a fire bright enough to illuminate the entire forest, and I do not wish to see my communities shiver any longer. I will not be able to touch every soul directly, but I know that as long as I put myself out there, then I can touch someone, and that someone can touch another, who would then touch another. And it goes on.

Keep creating.

Keep living.

You are doing great.

ㅤ

Yours Truly,

Feifei Z

Feifei Z (张飞飞) is a Chinese storyteller and the keeper of Wheel-37, which is a megaverse of twelve realms that celebrates diverse communities reclaiming their power. When not indulging in her artistic projects, she enjoys listening to music from around the world, watching C-Dramas, and appreciating nature.