In thirty-five days I will lose my job.

For eight years I have held this position, managing editor who writes articles and designs pages and edits everything between the covers, and I have not interviewed or sent out resumes or seen fit to change careers in all that time.

I have known about this job disappearing for a while, but I haven’t done anything proactive about it, because the only thing I really want to do is write.

But how will you feed your family? they say.

How will you make money at something like that?

Will you be able to make it viable?

Many of us, the creatives, know the words of Stephen King as true: “Almost every writer of fiction and poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that’s all.”

It’s not always the teachers or the threatened peers or the don’t-understand adults who laugh at our talent and the dreams that follow it. It’s often the ones we love, who don’t see the value of painting all day or recording songs in those hours we should be working for “the man” or crafting stories that make people shiver in their beds and sleep with lights on.

The question, right now, today, that makes me feel lousy about choosing a writing career over a working-for-someone-else-so-I’ll-at-least-have-steady-pay is this: Yes, but what will you do?

Yes, but what will I do?

Everyone knows a writer must pursue something else, because writing is a hobby. A luxury. Flowers in a world that needs fruit.

There is this pervasive, dangerous idea about the arts, that the pursuit of an art-life is frivolous and unnecessary and optional. But we know the way that music sinks into our bones, deep, and then burns us to create our own. We know how empty our hands feel when there is no pen and paper, how empty our hearts feel when there is no time left in the margins. We know how our fingers are always tracing the keys of a piano that isn’t there.

We cannot escape an art life, hard as we try. It will eat us alive.

We cannot escape the critics, either. But we must not let them eat us alive.

In his book, On Writing, King tells the story of how, as a teenager, he wrote horror stories and copied them to sell around his high school, and one day the principal confiscated his creation and asked him why he would use his talent to create trash.

He said her voice followed him for a long time, so he’d feel ashamed every time he created another horror story.

When I was a sophomore in college, I took my first creative writing course. The professor was an arrogant man who stood at the front of the class that first day and announced that anyone who got poetry or short stories published would get an automatic A in his class.

My hands shook when I read that first poem to the class, one about an engagement gone wrong. I shook even more when my professor handed the poem back with a whole long note of discouragement.

Too dramatic, he said. Dark. Nobody wants to read love-gone-wrong trash like this.

That semester I got three poems published, including the engagement one, but that professor gave me a B anyway.

It was the first time I met someone who thought he knew best for my life and talent (not the last), and I carried his voice on my back for a while.

But if we who have cracked beneath the blow of a critic want to create, we must shake the demon from our backs.

We must.

Because what the critics don’t understand is that we have to create what lives in us.

Maybe that’s a story about a pond where bodies lie buried beneath scum and every night they come walking. Maybe it’s a drawing of the fearsome creatures you see in your head at night. Maybe it’s a modern dance in a strip club instead of the stage ballet you were trained for.

Whatever we do, there will always be people who believe we’re wasting our talent on trash.

Create anyway.

They will whisper into our weak, What are you doing with your life?

And we will say, Everything.

We were made for this, what we’re doing right now, and nothing they say, none of the fear or discouragement or negativity they heap on us will ever change that.

So instead of feeling lousy about what we do, we must embrace it as something vital and valuable and beautiful for the world.

Because it is.

Do you have a story about a critic? How did you overcome the voice that followed you? What do you believe about your contribution to the world?