I used to be a wannabe writer. A copycat. And because of that, I spent years trapped in an infinite loop of starting and quitting.
I’d start writing, decide my writing was crap, quit, get inspired again, start over, then quit again.
The thing is, I didn’t need readers to tell me my writing was crap. I already knew.
But the problem wasn’t that I couldn’t string sentences together. I had absolutely no confidence in the person writing them.
I hadn’t found my voice.
So I borrowed somebody else’s.
I Wanted to Become My Mentors
I desperately wanted the success I saw my heroes and mentors having, so I did what seemed logical at the time: I copied them.
I copied what they said, how they acted, and eventually, how they wrote.
The problem was that some of my biggest mentors communicated like drill sergeants. Picture one for a second: big, scary, physically intimidating, with a voice loud enough to rattle the walls and a demeanor that makes you want to apologize for something you haven’t even done yet.
My number-one mentor was practically a drill sergeant reincarnated. Over six feet tall. Deep, commanding voice. Mean as a black mamba.
When that guy said JUMP, I asked how high.
But eventually I got tired of jumping. I wanted to be the guy telling people to jump.
So I tried to become him.
There was just one problem:
I’m nothing like him.
I’m about 5’8″ and 154 pounds. I have a kind face, bedroom eyes (the ladies’ words, not mine), and a soothing voice. Nothing about me naturally communicates big, tough, mean, or scary.
Yet there I was, trying to write like some 250-pound drill sergeant who was about to make you drop and give him fifty.
No wonder my writing sucked.
Somewhere inside me, I knew I was playing a character, and I was constantly afraid everyone else would figure it out too.
I was terrified of being exposed as a fraud because, in a way, I was one.
Not because I was deliberately deceiving anyone. Because the guy on the page wasn’t actually me.
I was LARPing.
And eventually, I realized I wasn’t only doing it in my writing.
I Was LARPing in Real Life Too
There was a period when I liked pretending I was a tough guy. I’d tell stories about fights I’d gotten into when I was younger and conveniently emphasize whatever made me sound tougher and meaner than I really was.
Want to know the truth?
I’ve been in fights. But I’ve been wayyy more effective as a talker than a fighter.
I’ve been seconds away from physical altercations and managed to talk the other guy down—not because I was scared, but because that’s how I’m built.
My brain immediately starts calculating everything that could go wrong. Maybe I win. Maybe he wins. Maybe somebody gets seriously hurt. Maybe the police show up. Maybe I end up in prison—and I have enough self-awareness to know I am DEFINITELY not built for prison.
I’d much rather talk everybody down and go home.
For years, I mistook that for weakness because it didn’t match the men I admired.
That was the mistake.
I had confused the qualities I admired in other men with the qualities I was supposed to possess myself.
They aren’t necessarily the same thing.
I Finally Figured Out What I’m Built For
I’m not a drill sergeant.
I’m closer to the counselor who sits down with the recruit when he’s ready to quit boot camp and go home.
I’m built to serve, teach, listen, and bring some comfort to people who need it. I’m good at understanding where somebody is coming from, withholding judgment long enough to actually hear them, and occasionally saying something that makes their burden a little easier to carry.
That doesn’t make me weak or mean I’ll tell everybody what they want to hear.
It means I finally understand the role that fits me naturally.
And once I stopped fighting that, everything started coming together.
My writing became confident. Not because I became a better actor. Because I stopped acting altogether.
There was nothing left to expose. I wasn’t pretending to be the biggest guy in the room, mimicking my mentors, or forcing somebody else’s personality through my keyboard.
I was just writing as myself.
For the first time, it felt natural.
I had found my voice.
Stop Pretending. Just Be.
If you’re still trying to figure out your place in the world, this is some of the best advice I can give you:
Be brutally honest about who you are.
Not who you wish you were. Not who your heroes are. Not who Instagram convinced you successful people are supposed to be.
You.
Pay attention to what comes naturally to you. What do people consistently come to you for? What role do you fall into when you’re not trying to impress anybody?
Start there.
Trying to become something fundamentally incompatible with who you are is like swimming upstream your entire life. You might get somewhere, but you’re going to exhaust yourself doing it.
Imagine if Shaquille O’Neal had decided he was meant to become a figure skater or horse jockey instead of a basketball player.
Could he have trained obsessively and gotten better? Probably.
But the man was built to play basketball.
That’s what we’re all trying to figure out in one way or another: What actually fits? What doesn’t? What parts of ourselves have we been fighting because they don’t resemble the people we admire?
You can spend years forcing yourself into somebody else’s mold because you admire the person inside it.
Or you can figure out what your mold actually looks like.
That’s what finally changed my writing.
I stopped trying to become the writer I thought I was supposed to be. I stopped playing the tough guy. I stopped borrowing somebody else’s voice.
And once there was nothing left to expose, there was nothing left to be afraid of.
I wasn’t a fraud anymore. I was just me.
Stop pretending.
Just be.
— Uncle Blayde