Latest / The Creative Life: Art, Writing, Music & Creative Living / The Quiet Terror of Hitting Send: Surviving Journal Submission Anxiety | The Creative Life
Transcript
- There is a specific, hollow sound that your stomach makes right before you hit submit to a literary journal. It’s not excitement. It’s the feeling of dropping a stone into a well and waiting to hear if it ever hits the bottom. I want you to picture the moment. You’re sitting at your desk, or maybe on your couch with your laptop balanced precariously on your knees. The piece is done. You’ve read it ten times. You’ve fixed the comma splice in paragraph three. You’ve changed the adjective from 'azure' to 'blue' because blue felt more honest. And now, you are staring at the submission portal. Some sites still use email, which feels almost old-fashioned, intimate even. Others use Submittable, which feels like a bureaucratic maze designed to test your patience more than your prose. Whatever the medium, the button waits. Submit. Click. Send. It is such a small action, physically speaking. Just a tap of a finger or a click of a mouse. But emotionally, it is a cliff edge. Once you press it, the work leaves your hands. It goes out into the vast, indifferent internet. You can no longer tweak it. You can no longer hide behind the safety of your own hard drive. It becomes public property, in a sense. Or rather, it becomes someone else’s property to judge, to reject, or to ignore. I know many of you feel this tremor in your hands. I feel it too. Even after all these years, even after I’ve published in places I once thought were impossible for me to reach, that little spike of anxiety remains. It’s not about imposter syndrome, exactly. Imposter syndrome says, 'Who am I to think I’m good enough?' This anxiety says, 'What if they see through me? What if they realize this is just words on a page and not magic?' Let’s look closer at what we’re actually afraid of losing here. Is it the rejection letter? Or is it the fragile hope that keeps us writing? We need to talk about the timeline. When you submit to a competitive journal, you are entering a queue. A long, silent queue. You might be one of two thousand submissions for one or two slots. That number is staggering. It puts the human element into perspective, but it also strips it away. You are becoming a number. A file name. A PDF attached to an email. And then there is the wait. The response time varies wildly. Some journals promise six weeks. Most do not. Many say 'six months to a year.' I remember submitting my first essay to a mid-tier magazine, the kind that felt like a trophy within reach. I waited eight months. Eight months of checking my spam folder every Tuesday morning, convinced that if I checked often enough, I could influence the outcome through sheer willpower. It didn’t work. Of course it didn’t. This waiting period is where the anxiety grows roots. It sits in your chest. You start to question the piece itself. Maybe it was too personal. Maybe it wasn’t personal enough. Maybe the pacing was off. The silence amplifies every doubt you have ever had about your craft. We treat rejection as a verdict on our worth, when really, it’s often just a matter of fit. A journal might have chosen a different tone last week. They might have already filled their issue with essays about grief, and your piece is about joy. It’s not that joy is bad. It’s just that the puzzle piece doesn’t fit the slot. But knowing that intellectually doesn’t stop the heart from racing. It doesn’t stop the shame. So we carry this weight. We carry the ghost of the publication that never happened. We let the 'no' define us before the editor has even read the first sentence. Let’s get tactile for a moment. What’s the texture of rejection? For a long time, I thought it was cold. Smooth, hard, unyielding like a river stone. I would wrap myself in it, trying to make myself smooth, trying to polish my voice until it was perfectly round so it would slide into their boxes easily. I spent years editing not for clarity, but for compliance. I made my work safe. I made it palatable. But then I realized that the best writing isn’t smooth. It has grain. It has knots. It has splinters. Rejection, when you sit with it long enough, changes texture. It becomes softer. More like felt. Or perhaps like dried clay—brittle, but breakable. You can crumble it up. You can throw it away. I started keeping a jar of rejection letters. Not the digital ones, but the physical ones I printed out. I’d stack them on my shelf. At first, they were heavy. They felt like anchors dragging me down. But over time, they became part of the architecture of my life. They showed me where I had tried. They showed me that I had kept showing up. Every 'no' was proof that I had submitted something. I had taken the risk. I had crossed the threshold. If you haven’t been rejected, you haven’t been submitting. Simple as that. And if you aren’t submitting, you aren’t really participating in the conversation. You’re just whispering to yourself in a locked room. There is dignity in the attempt. There is bravery in sending your heart out into the mail, knowing it might come back torn. It’s okay to be unfinished. It’s okay to be flawed. The journals don’t want perfect. They want alive. And sometimes, being alive means getting bruised. Here is the dry humor I promised, though it’s hardly funny in the moment. Our ego loves to play games with us. It whispers, 'If this gets accepted, then you’ll finally be valid. If this gets accepted, then you’ll stop feeling like a fraud.' It ties our entire self-worth to the approval of a stranger who probably hasn’t even finished reading the third paragraph yet. I used to think that if I could just write the perfect essay, the perfect poem, the perfect story, the world would bend to accommodate me. I wanted the applause. I wanted the byline. I wanted the validation that said, 'Yes, you belong here.' But creative living is not about belonging to others’ platforms. It’s about belonging to your own practice. When I burned out from graphic design, it was because I was chasing external validation for every pixel I placed. I needed the client to love it. I needed the boss to nod. I needed the metrics to go up. And when they didn’t, I collapsed. Writing is different, but the trap is similar. We trade one master for another. Instead of a client, we have a journal editor. Instead of a boss, we have a reader. The mechanism of anxiety is the same: outsourcing our value. When you submit, you are asking someone else to tell you who you are. That is a dangerous game. It is better to know who you are while you are writing. Write for the person who needs to hear this story. Write for the version of you from five years ago who needed this exact sentence. Write for the solitude. The rest is noise. The acceptance is just a side effect. The rejection is just weather. Don’t build your house on weather. So, how do we survive the submission season? How do we keep our hearts soft while the world tries to harden them? We shift our focus from the destination to the daily walk. We build a practice that exists independently of publication. This means writing when no one is watching. It means keeping a notebook that never sees the light of day. It means allowing yourself to write badly. In fact, I encourage you to write terribly on purpose. Fill a page with nonsense. Scribble over your sentences. Make a mess. Remind your brain that the act of making is the reward, not the result. When I retreat to my cabin, I don’t worry about whether the pottery wheel will spin true. I worry about the mud. I worry about the clay under my fingernails. I enjoy the resistance of the material. Writing should feel the same. It should feel like work. It should feel like digging. And yes, it should feel lonely sometimes. Solitude is necessary. You cannot hear your own voice if you are constantly listening to the echo of other people’s expectations. Start a submission schedule that honors your energy. Do not burn yourself out chasing every call for entries. Choose three or four journals that truly resonate with your voice. Treat them as partners, not judges. Read them. Know them. Respect them. Then, let go. Send the work. Close the laptop. Go outside. Look at the trees. Touch the bark. Feel the wind. Ground yourself in the physical world. Your work is important, but it is not your life. Your life is happening right now, in this breath, in this moment. Breathe into it. Stay here. Thank you for letting me into your day. Thank you for trusting me with your quiet moments. I’ll be back next week with more stories from the messy middle. Until then, keep your hands busy and your heart open. Goodnight, friends.