A lot of you will have heard of N.K. Jemisin and her phenomenal and award-winning Broken Earth trilogy. Or her beautiful short story collection, How Long ‘til Black Future Month? If you haven’t, I recommend you go out right now and read something of hers.

This blog post is specifically a response to the short story collection. I just finished listening to How Long ‘til Black Future Month? on Libby. I started out wanting to write a gushingly positive review of this astonishing collection of short stories. But today I am struggling.

N.K. Jemisin inspires me. I read her work and hope that someday my writing will be somewhere in the realm of nearly that good. Her worldbuilding and her insight into the human psyche combine to create stories that are profound, thought-provoking, and devastating. Stories like the chillingly-believable The Brides of Heaven, or stories of whimsy and understated insight, like On the Banks of the River Lex. Or the surprising and unconventional perspectives on the human capacity for love and sacrifice, like The Narcomancer, or Sinners, Saints, Dragon, and Haints, in the City Beneath the Still Waters. They are the sort of stories that make my heart bleed a little bit. The kinds of stories that made me pause the audio stream after each one, so I could savor it for just a few minutes more.

When I’m writing, I don’t feel like I’m just making stuff up. I feel like I’m touching other worlds, other lives. And I know when I’ve read a really great story because I’m always left breathless with that feeling of insight into the minds and lives of other people. I think the thing I find so utterly heartbreaking about these stories is that they exist. She did it. This woman who I’ve never met is out there right now, making a living and writing stories that touch people’s lives. Stories that show us new ways of looking at the world and each other. It’s possible. And that sense of hope is so hard to bear.

I am fighting so hard right now against the belief that I will never make it. That this dream is unattainable. I’ve come to a point in my writing process where I don’t doubt my skills anymore. But I still doubt whether they will ever amount to anything. I doubt whether I can change my own life, much less help anybody else change theirs.

It feels like we’re all living in a corporate dystopia, and the closest thing to freedom that I’ve ever found is through self-employment as a house cleaner. Not exactly the most glamorous of jobs. But it gave me control over my time and my schedule, at least up to a point. Now that I’m struggling on multiple fronts to try and prioritize my health in the face of a chronic condition, this job is becoming less and less of a solution. Instead, it is still putting a price tag on my time. Which translates to me trading in hours of my life for some shaky financial stability at best, while being denied access to healthcare or understanding. Originally, this job was supposed to sustain me while I got through school. But once again I’m left with no time and no energy to invest in myself and my writing.

I specifically chose to listen to N.K. Jemisin’s How Long ‘til Black Future Month? because I’m trying to up my short story game. And as with any style of writing, reading—or listening, in this case—can also help us learn and improve. Reading opens us up to ideas and possibilities we may never have considered otherwise. Ultimately, the point of a story is to see the world through someone else’s eyes. And N.K. Jemisin delivers that and then some. I didn’t just see the world through others’ eyes, I saw whole other worlds.

That’s the dream, isn’t it? To write stories that touch people in some profound way. Stories that show us our differences while simultaneously reminding us how much we are all alike. Stories that can hold a mirror up to human society and show it for what it is, with all of its beauty and all of its brokenness. Stories that make us uncomfortable, that push us to think about things in a new way.

When I write, it feels like I don’t exist in the real world anymore. But I never feel like I am so in touch with the world as I do when I am writing. Maybe that’s the blessing and the curse of being a writer. We can’t help but see the miraculous and beautiful, even in the mundane and the imperfection. I don’t think that compulsion to try to show others the things we see will ever go away. I don’t think I would want it to.