I got my first freelancing rejection today. It’s a wonderful, wonderful thing. Because it’s real.

In a sense I’ve just started freelancing. I’ve been “working on it” for over a year. Most of that time was spent reading and learning and not doing anything. For awhile that was great. When you know next to nothing about a subject you can expand your knowledge at an amazing rate. The first few days it grew exponentially. It’s intimidating and inspiring. You dive in and learn how much you don’t even know about the vast amounts you don’t even know. The more open your mind, the more intimidating and inspiring it is. Those first few days I flashed from moment to moment between “what am I getting myself into” and “I can do this!” and “wow, this is complicated.”

The rush doesn’t last. It doesn’t take long before you can’t ignore the fact that learning isn’t enough. You have to do something. This terrified me. I was scared about showing anything I wrote to anyone. No, scared doesn’t get anywhere near it. I was mortally paralyzed. How could I go from that to writing professionally? The gap seemed impossible to cross.

Because it was. If you are scared of climbing a ladder you can’t learn to climb a mountain. That is an impossible goal if your fear of the ladder is absolute. If you think about the mountain you’ll just curl into a ball so tightly it will crush your bones. Instead you need to think about the ladder.

So I started a blog. It was very, very difficult psychologically. But of course I had nothing really to worry about. The fear was exactly as artificial as it was real. Within a month of starting a blog it was hilarious that it ever frightened me. I started a blog to make writing a habit and to get used to communicating with others.

It took a long time to move to the next step. Of course it did. Sure, I could write for myself. But that didn’t matter. Writing for other people was still impossible. I couldn’t do that! It was mortally paralyzing.

But I did it. After months of planning and strategizing and learning, all in circles, I started to write for content mills. Most of the professional advice says “don’t do that!” But they are speaking to your career. They are speaking to people who can make themselves write. Who aren’t paralyzed. They are providing career advice, when what I needed was immersion therapy. The content mills provided that therapy. It was a low stress way to do something enormously stressful.

My writing for the mills was successful. I would say phenomenally successful. It was a low bar, and my performance was far above it. Everyone loved what I wrote for them, it was always accepted, and it got huge compliments.

Then I stopped. I stopped because I fell into a funk. I stopped because this kind of writing was too easy. I was good enough to move past it, just like the pros told me I would be. That was encouraging, but I was wasting my time here. It isn’t lucrative, but more to the point it was so easy it wasn’t real. I was on top of the hill, but the mountain loomed. I felt no closer to climbing it than I had months before when I was staring at a ladder. It was time to take the next step.

But the next step was terrifying. Paralyzing. I had to cold call? I had to do blind pitches to business and big time blogs? They were going to laugh at me. I didn’t know how to do that kind of writing! Of course, no one does. Everyone starts somewhere.

I spent a few months not doing much of anything.

But now I’ve started. Finally, as of last week, I’ve started. I didn’t go back to the mills. I took a few steps up the mountain. I started to pitch to nonprofits to get samples. I reached out to friends. I pitched a guest post to a contest on a major writing blog. I wrote letters of introduction to trade magazines. I did more in a week than I had in the last year.

The friends I reached out to were excited to work with me. Why was I so scared to do that? The pitch to the blog contest—which I almost deleted because I saw some counterexamples to my idea in a book on blogging—won third place. Why did I ever hesitate? I haven’t heard back from the non-profits yet. I need to do more of that, but they can be slow. I’m not worried, because I’m actually doing it. If none of them reply I haven’t lost anything. I know that most of my pitches and queries won’t go anywhere. That’s the game.

But one of the trade magazines replied. They rejected me. It wasn’t personal. The editor with the scary picture on their website replied and told me politely that they don’t use freelancers. She told me to try some of the sister magazines within their company.

I’m overjoyed. Yes, I had an emotional sting from the rejection. Of course I did. Rejection is painful, and I’m not used to it. But mostly I’m very happy. This was my first professional failure. The important word there is professional. She told me they don’t use freelancers. She didn’t say “little boy, who are you fooling?” She didn’t say “that was a really bad LOI; have you considered remedial writing lessons?” Of course she didn’t.

That would have been ridiculous.

Every step makes it a little more real. That is the key. All of my fear comes from a very specific belief. I don’t I realized that until recently. The belief is this:

Becoming a professional writer is a fantasy. Like becoming a superhero. It’s not a real thing that people do. It’s certainly not a thing that I could ever do. I can’t climb mountains! Those things are huge! There’s no oxygen at the top and they’re covered in snow!

What do you mean hundreds of people climb Mount Everest every year? What do you mean some of them are elderly, and some of them are missing a leg? What do you mean lots of people make a living as freelance writers?

Of course I can do this. I’m smart, dedicated, and a damn good writer. I just got my first professional rejection. It’s not going to be effortless. Good! Nothing real is effortless. Not even breathing. And you know what? It isn’t effortless for Spider-man, either.

That’s how you know it’s real.