But even I considered quitting. My writing had been rejected more times than I could count. And it was the beginning of my sophomore year – with college apps impending, it was taking up too much time with nothing but dozens of rejections to show for it.

It is a question many teenagers face and a simple answer most of us fail to recognise. I saw friends abandon activities they once loved when nothing came out of it. Footballers stopped playing in their teens when they assumed they would never gain recognition at a college level. Artists stopped painting when their work went unnoticed. Suddenly, the drive to do what we love to do becomes conditional on external validation.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Harbingers’ Magazine (@hrb.mag)

Especially in high school, many of us are taught to reward outcomes, not effort. Grades, awards and recognition are tangible markers that tell us what we are doing is correct, and that we are “good” at something in the first place. It is hard not to believe that without them we are investing our time into things that lead nowhere.

Still, in today’s society, this belief is understandable. Recognition opens doors, creates opportunities and oftentimes is academically and professionally necessary.

Writing, especially, has taught me to reckon with this reasoning. It is a subjective field, so there is no guarantee that what you see is what someone else sees. Even Nobel laureates continued to be critiqued.

I will always remember the first time I was published. It was a poetry competition with the theme being “heritage”, and I submitted two poems.One of them, I crafted painstakingly, pouring in hours of writing. The second I wrote haphazardly, simply submitting it to meet the requirements.

To my surprise, one of them was published while the other wasn’t. The one I spent hours refining wasn’t chosen, while the other one was selected and even nominated for a prize.

I almost didn’t submit to the Harbinger Prize either, I didn’t see a point in submitting something that in my mind had little chance of winning. It was an article I had pieced together for school, nothing exceptional in my eyes.

Yet this piece morphed into something I never anticipated: it won me the grand prize giving me the scholarship for a one-year journalism internship with Harbingers’ Magazine and to travel around Europe this summer with the Special Newsroom.

What I learnt from the Harbinger Prize was simply that my perception of value differed from others. My win forced me to look at writing through a different lens: I could not control how others saw my work, nor could I judge how my writing would be received. However, what I could control was whether I would write at all.

This experience had revealed to me how arbitrary writing could be: if I tied my passion to external validation, I would always be at risk of abandoning it.

I’ve continued to face rejection, but that’s no longer an obstacle.