Escaping the Black Swan Mindset
I’ve always loved to sing. Even before I knew words, I loved making noise, using my voice as a tool. I think that’s why writing feels so natural to me—the brain-to-body connection, the way thought turns into sound, or in this case, words on a page.
In elementary and middle school, I joined Drama. I remember sweating under hot lights, rehearsing after hours while janitors shuffled through the halls. The cafeteria transformed into a stage with tables pushed against the walls, and for two hours we’d sing, dance, and mess around. It was fun. Pure fun.
By high school, things changed. Drama wasn’t just fun anymore—it was performance. To audition, you had to wear all black (a memo I missed because I didn’t have Facebook, so I was cut early). Everyone else seemed impossibly talented, fearless, beautiful. I had a good voice—I’d taken lessons for years—but pressure strangled it. My throat tightened, my voice cracked. It was as if an invisible hand clutched my windpipe, silencing me before I even began.
Around that time, I watched Black Swan for the first time. The movie follows a ballerina who destroys herself in pursuit of perfection. What struck me most wasn’t just the beauty of the dancing or the psychological unraveling—it was that final scene. Natalie Portman, fully transformed into the black swan, dives from the platform, landing with a radiant, blissful expression. Only then do we see the truth: she’s fatally wounded. Blood pools beneath her, but she whispers, satisfied, “It was perfect.”
That moment lodged itself inside me. Art was worth pain. Perfection was worth everything.
I carried that belief with me into college, where I studied Creative Writing at SUNY Geneseo. At first, I didn’t even know what “literary fiction” was, only that it was beautiful, difficult, and serious. Very serious. So I decided I’d master it by competing with everyone else in the room. My workshops became battlegrounds. I pared my stories down to eight pages, killed my darlings, obsessed over punctuation and subtext. I convinced myself that to write something worthy of The New Yorker, I had to bleed for it. My own version of the Black Swan dive. And it worked—at least on paper. I got A’s on my Fiction portfolios. (Poetry was another story, but this is my Substack, so we’ll let that one slide.)
After graduation, that same perfectionist mindset followed me out of the classroom and into the rest of my life. At 21, I was moorless—working two jobs, trying to squeeze in writing between late shifts and grad school assignments. By 23, I had the Master’s degree and a steady boyfriend; then came the dream job and an engagement. At 24, a new job. By 25 and 26, I was publishing and building a writing workshop series that I now teach at libraries nationwide. On the surface, it all looked steady, even successful. But underneath, I was applying the same pressure I had in workshops: every page, every milestone, every choice had to be flawless. Writing became especially hard in my mid-twenties, because I wasn’t just trying to write—I was trying to write perfectly. Every sentence I drafted, I asked myself, Is this publishable? That constant pressure pulled me into a cycle of negative thinking, where the act of writing felt less like discovery and more like suffocation. I wasn’t just trying to write perfectly—I was trying to live perfectly, too.
But here’s the truth: I don’t want to be Natalie Portman’s ballerina, lying there radiant but bleeding out. I don’t want writing—or life—to kill me in the name of being “perfect.”
This past year has been about something different: exploration without pressure. My last two publications, “Cookie Jar” and “Queen Bee,” are dark, yes, but they feel freer. They echo the horror I used to write as a teenager, back when I wasn’t trying to impress anyone—just experimenting, just having fun. I have another story forthcoming in Onyx Publications, maybe my darkest yet—a suspenseful little thriller with rabbit guts. It’s still literary, arguably. But more than anything, it feels like me.
And maybe that’s the real shift: not perfect, not serious, not bleeding out for art. Just writing that feels alive.
Warmly,
Gabrielle Esposito
Writer, Instructor, Editor
