"There is Room on the Mountaintop for All of Us"

Creative anxiety, artistic comparison, bids of connection, persistence, resilience, and the climb ahead.

Fatih Kata

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When I was young, and still in college, I used to walk obsessively.

As a person who tended toward anxiety from a young age, walking helped me to understand what I was thinking, separate what mattered most, and decide what I could let go of for good.

In college, I took a poetry seminar with an older professor named Cynthia. She had just won a big fancy award that meant she was officially a genius, and she told us that when she heard the news, she was in her garden planting the seeds of something new.

Someone called to her from the porch, her brother I think it was, and he yelled, “Cynthia, it’s the award people!”

“Tell them I’ll call back later,” she’d said and went on gardening. She told us the story with a giggle, with the self-satisfaction of someone who became everything they dreamed of becoming.

I yearned to care so little about what others thought of me, being so present and in love with my own day-to-day life that I didn’t go running the moment a phone call like that came for me.

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In college, I wasn’t that talented, and I knew it. I was passionate, but there’s a difference.

Years later, at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, my professor Amber confessed, “The most talented students never really make it. It’s always the students, who for whatever reason, just simply refuse to stop writing.”

I liked the idea that I might be remembered for this. My stick-to-itiveness. Who needed natural talent or innate brilliance, if you showed up every day and poured your heart out? That had to count for something, right?

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There were others in the class with Cynthia who were far more talented than me, who came from more illustrious families, some of literary renown. I didn’t understand the complexities of intersectional privilege yet. I was middle class and my peers were not. I didn’t know that while I was spending my summers watching Full House with my sister, they were spending their summers at Creative Writing intensives in Italy.

We were only 20 years old, still babies, and there were some that were already published in the big journals, already making a name for themselves in the industry.

I tried to not think about it, but sometimes it haunted me. I felt like I was starting a race in last place, on zero sleep, and with nothing but my Schopenhauerian will to guide me. These other writers had money and connections and famous family members. What did I have? Persistence, follow-through, passion. That was it. Still, I felt it had to count for something. That if I just kept plugging away at my craft one day I would arrive somewhere beautiful.

So, I kept writing. I worked my way up in the Stonefence Review, our school’s literary magazine, until I was the editor-in-chief. When I took over, I strived to create a space where everyone, even the untalented like myself, mattered.

I was still wounded from a freshman-year rejection of a grief poem processing the loss of my grandmother’s passing that a now-famous journalist, who at the time was the magazine’s chief editor, had laughed at and mocked publicly during our blind submission readings.

I wanted to be different than her. To strive to see the beauty in every submission, to publish as many things as we could, to be the opposite of a gatekeeper.

In Sanborn’s basement, my ragtag group of writers would meet and read submissions, eat pastries, read poems and passages from our heroes, and encourage one another. In free writing sessions, I would invite everyone to share, and try to find something that I loved about each piece to vocalize publicly, no matter how clumsy the writing was.

I remember what it felt like to be young and clumsy and I wanted our members, especially the new ones, to feel that if they kept going, that someday they too could “make it,” whatever that meant for them.

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Cynthia was one of the only professors who I felt never judged me. I took her classes again and again. She only wanted me to win. I needed that. Life had beat me down in those days. Loved ones lost to cancer, suicide, illness, car accidents. With each rip of my spirit, I sought refuge in the people who might see me as somehow still worthy and unbroken. Someone who was still possible.

My favorite person in the class besides Cynthia was my friend Sadia. She was a bit older than the rest of us and had already graduated but was just auditing the course. She and the professor were old friends. I loved the idea of being friends with someone who knew you as a young writer and again as whatever you become on the other side after graduation.

Sadia had just gotten back from France and shared powerful poems about anti-blackness in French society.

We were in an old room that was constructed so that if you whispered on one end, the other end could hear you clear as day. I would get lost staring into the void of that dome-like ceiling as I listened to her words.

Sadia was smart and like my literary hero at the time, Grace Paley, activism came before writing. We marched together in Black Lives Matter protests, strategized and chatted together, and worked together on late-night study sessions for me, writing sessions for her.

One night over coffee Sadia taught me about something called “bids of connection.” She said that whenever someone tells you something about themselves, it is as if they are offering themselves vulnerability for an embrace that might not come. That when someone offers something new, something you didn’t know, their soul is extending a bid of connection with yours. How we respond to these bids is what determines our relationships, she’d say.

I became obsessed with the idea, searching for bids of connection in everyday conversations, with my parents, friends, and professors, and trying my best to always validate them, before extending bids of my own. It was a beautiful time and I watched as my friendships began to feel deeper and somehow more connected than before.

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Some day after class, if it was still light out, Sadia and I would walk down to Occom Pond and walk laps, not for any particular reason, other than it was beautiful and we liked walking together.

There was a forest path that diverted away from the pond in one big wild loop that took you away from the town for an hour or so, into the forested house of gargantuan trees, creeping moss, little rabbits, and forest critters of all kinds.

We’d talk for hours about everything you can think of. She was the kind of person I dreamed of becoming. She just seemed so effortless, so confident, so smart. She was herself and she never made you feel bad if you didn’t quite know who you were yet, if you were still figuring things out.

One day, when walking, I asked Sadia how she handled the fact that some people our age are further along in their goals. Does it ever make you feel bad?

At the time, one of my friends had just graduated, securing a big book deal and while I was happy for her, I felt like there was something wrong with me. Hadn’t we taken the same classes? Hadn’t we been so similar? Maybe she had something I didn’t, some innate special quality that I would never know. Maybe this was the universe telling me to throw in the towel. Maybe passion and persistence just weren’t enough after all.

Sadia said something to me then, something that has stuck with me ever since, something that healed me in a way I didn’t know I needed to be healed. She said that her philosophy is that there’s room on the mountaintop for all of us.

She said that just because some people get there more quickly doesn’t mean the mountain is moving or closing up shop. It’s still there waiting for us. There’s no shortage of camps at the summit. There’s room enough for all of us and we’ll all arrive where we are meant to be eventually, so how can you fall in love with the climb in the meantime?

Lately, on Substack, I’ve been seeing a lot of people talk about competition. About followers and badges and algorithms. We came to this place to share art and to connect with one another.

And I just want to remind you that there’s room on the mountaintop for all of us. Some of us are just starting our hike, some have been hiking for weeks months, or years, and some of us are still ordering our hiking boots online, but each of us is a hiker.

Each of us matters. Each of our journeys matters. No one journey is inherently better or worse than another.

Our journeys to the summit are going to look so different, depending on how we climb, the breaks we take, and who we bring with us, but it doesn’t change the fact that there’s room on the mountaintop for all of us.

That the only thing we can do — when we are shown someone who got there faster, or who somehow scaled the mountain free-solo style — is salute them from the trail, and keep hiking and climbing anyway. Stopping when we need to, for Cabot cheese sandwiches and water, nights full of conversation and campfires and laughter, making a little more progress each and every day towards our own summit.

The summit will mean something different to each person, and I would encourage you to think long and hard about why you are making this climb in the first place, but if you find that you are overcome with self-doubt, self-comparison, and this gnawing persistent feeling that you are somehow just not enough — I want you to know that it is not true.

There is no scarcity of the world’s creative resources, your summit is there, it exists, and it’s real, and there’s a whole community of people who are cheering you on as you take each step toward your highest becoming.

Don’t be so focused on the destination that you forget just how beautiful that is. That you forget to stare at the brilliance of the forest path en route to the top. You might skin your knee, or get stuck wading through muddy rained out riverbeds, but your climb only stops when you do, and how you think of it is all about how you want to think of it.

Maybe that year you spent not hiking at all gave you the wisdom for this next section of the path. Maybe it was so that your hiking buddy, the one you didn’t know would keep you going, could forge a new way forward with you in tandem, so that the two of you could make camp together, each night of the climb.

Don’t let the people who hike faster than you convince you that you’re hiking too slowly and don’t let the people who’ve reach their own summit once a year make you believe that your slow and steady path is anything but exactly what you need.

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It’s been years since those walks with Sadia. I still look back on them fondly and think back on how great of a hiking buddy she was and still is. Since our time together, I’ve been so lucky to meet many supportive and loving hiking companions who’ve taught me, inspired me, walked with me, and guided me along the winding path.

One day, in 2021, when I was busy completing my graduate Master of Fine Arts degree, I woke up and logged onto poets.org, where I often start my day.

And whose face was looking back at me? Sadia’s! Her poem had been selected as the poem of the day, right there on the homepage! I felt overcome with a profound joy for her. I immediately wept. The thought that millions of people were reading her words and that someone so wise and kind and deserving was getting the star treatment filled up my soul with so much unbridled joy.

That same week, I received notice that a story of my own, that I’d labored over for a year, was being published in a magazine I loved and respected, and was going to be included in a fiction anthology that was set to publish the following year.

I don’t know if that week was Sadia and I’s summit. I’m sure there will be so many mountains that we climb in this lifetime, but it was so beautiful hiking together.

What she and that experience taught me is that I would give anything to go back to those walks around Occum. Those walks through the forests, beaming with wonder at another soul on the same journey. I long for those quiet days of dreaming in Cynthia’s class, those afternoons and evenings spent reading and studying together.

I see now why Cynthia didn’t immediately run to the phone. Why so many who reach their summit, immediately begin hiking someplace new. It is the journey that fuels us. It is the journey that truly matters.

That high, the rush of achievement, of success, I promise it is so brief and fleeting. But the journey, our collective wandering, our daily climb, especially when it is with people we love, that is what will continually prove to be the most rewarding thing of all.

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