When the Praise Doesn't Land
On survival, permission, and how long it takes belief to arrive
This has been a strange year.
Not because anything spectacular happened all at once — no single arrival, no cinematic moment where the room went quiet and everyone finally understood. But because something shifted quietly inside the work. And the work noticed before I did.
People have said kind, generous things about my writing this year.
Words like:
Extraordinary.
Rare.
Important.
They say it with certainty, as if it’s settled.
And still, it hasn’t sunk in.
I’ve wondered why. Not in a self-deprecating way — I don’t doubt the work — but in a puzzled way. As if praise arrives in a language my body hasn’t learned yet.
I think it’s because I didn’t learn to write through permission.
I learned to write the way some people learn to hold their breath.
Because language was how I stayed alive in rooms that didn’t listen. Because precision was safer than noise. Because saying things exactly right mattered more than saying them confidently.
When writing begins as survival, you don’t grow up imagining yourself as a “writer”. You grow up imagining yourself as careful.
Careful with tone.
Careful with truth.
Careful with how much space you take.
So when praise comes later, it doesn’t feel like reward. It feels like exposure.
What’s surprised me most about 2025 is not the praise itself, but how quickly life seemed to turn once it did.
I didn’t expect my memoir to be published.
I didn’t expect to be published in journals.
I didn’t expect Arts Council funding to co-author a second book.
I didn’t expect to be accepted for a PhD.
I didn’t expect to begin the journey toward becoming a foster parent.
None of that was part of a five-year plan.
There was no neat ladder.
No moment where I decided, now things change.
And yet they did.
What this year has taught me is that while the build-up can take a lifetime, the rewrite can happen quickly. That the ground shifts not when you’re ready for it, but when the work is.
From the inside, it still feels slow.
Careful.
Incremental.
From the outside, it can look sudden. But suddenness is often just the moment when accumulated labour is finally allowed to move.
What’s changed this year isn’t that I suddenly became good.
It’s that the work stopped asking permission.
I can feel it now when I write. The steadiness. The lack of apology. The way form arrives without negotiation. The way I no longer imagine an examiner, a reader, a gatekeeper hovering over my shoulder.
The work knows where it stands, even if I’m still catching up.
If this resonates with you — if you are someone whose skill grew out of necessity rather than encouragement — I want to say this gently:
There may come a moment when people recognise what you’ve been doing all along. And when it happens, you might not feel elation.
You might feel oddly neutral.
Or tired.
Or exposed.
Or simply quiet.
That doesn’t mean the recognition is wrong.
It means your nervous system learned excellence before it learned safety.
Belief doesn’t always arrive as confidence. Sometimes it arrives as no longer arguing with the evidence.
I’m still learning how to let that be enough.
And if you are too — if you are writing without applause, without certainty, without permission — I hope this year brings you one small shift:
Not proof.
Not validation.
But the subtle sense that your story is not fixed.
That even if it took a long time to get here, it does not have to take a long time to change.
You don’t have to feel extraordinary to be doing extraordinary work.
Sometimes it’s enough to keep going — and let the work speak first.