Congratulations to Bonnie S. Heisse for Winning the July 2026 Barefoot Writing Challenge! (Your $100 prize is on its way!)
The challenge was to write an essay that answered this prompt:
Many people dream of quitting their current jobs to write. What’s the biggest mental hurdle you must overcome (or already overcame) to start making your own way as a paid copywriter?
Bonnie shared a realization that completely changed her writing trajectory. Enjoy her winning submission:
The Story I Told Myself
For most of my life, I thought I knew exactly who I was.
Marine.
Postal employee.
Mother.
Caregiver.
Each role focused on what other people needed from me. I rarely stopped to wonder what gifts I hadn’t yet discovered in myself.
“Writer” never crossed my mind.
Then I emailed one of my first posts to my identical twin sister.
We’ve spent our lives being each other’s sounding boards. When one of us asks, “What do you think?,” we know the answer will be honest.
When we talked later that evening, she didn’t hesitate.
“You can really write.”
Without thinking, I replied, “I didn’t realize I could write like that either.”
After we hung up, I couldn’t stop thinking about what I’d said. It wasn’t what my sister had said that stayed with me. It was what I’d said.
Why didn’t I realize it either?
That question stayed with me.
When people talk about the biggest mental hurdle to becoming a paid copywriter, they often mention confidence, clients, or learning the craft. Mine came much earlier.
For years, I’d quietly accepted the story that writing was something other people did. Journalists. Novelists. People who had always thought of themselves as writers.
I wasn’t one of them.
Or so I believed.
I didn’t wake up the next morning convinced I was a writer. I woke up curious enough to find out if my sister was right.
So, I kept writing.
I studied the craft. I welcomed honest feedback. I rewrote until the words said what I meant. Every article, every contest, every critique challenged the story I’d believed for decades.
Eventually, I was paid to write two articles.
Seeing someone place value on my words changed something in me. Not because someone else believed in me, but because I finally began to believe I had been wrong about myself.
The greatest reward wasn’t getting paid. It was realizing I’d been telling myself the wrong story.
For decades, I delivered other people’s words through the mail. I never imagined this season of my life would be about sharing my own.
I’m still learning. I still take classes, rewrite constantly, and keep discovering things about myself I never expected to find.
The biggest mental hurdle wasn’t believing I could become a writer. It was believing there was still something new to discover about myself.
And maybe that’s the greatest gift writing has given me — not simply the opportunity to earn from my words, but the chance to discover a part of myself I never knew existed.
