Publishing and Catastrophizing

I was lying in bed the other night, doing the thing I do best when I should be sleeping: catastrophizing.

Actually, I was getting a lecture from my inner critic. She’s tall, blonde, and attractive in that way that automatically qualifies someone to be a meteorologist on a morning show. She taps long, fake, blingy nails on a phone better than mine, guzzles Red Bull, calls kale smoothies “meals,” and has never had a thought she didn’t share. She wears jeans bedazzled with judgments too cruel to make it into a burn book, and the back pockets are stuffed with internalized misogyny. Worst of all, she can initiate a Zoom call into my brain at 2:00 a.m., no “reject” button available.

“Who do you think you are?” she wanted to know.

I rolled over, curling tighter around my pillow, thinking, “That is a good damn question.”

I’ve self-published a book. I’m doing a few things to let people know that this is happening (like this blog post! Surprise!), but I’m really struggling because part of me doesn’t want anyone to know.

Part of that is because I am writing about my family and my Mormon childhood in a way that is not always flattering. I want to be honest about my experience, and I am proud of what I have written, but I am uncomfortable with the idea of hurting anyone’s feelings. The other part is that I’m almost 50 and still carrying an unfulfilled dream — one I fear I’m bothering everyone else with. I don’t want anyone to think I’m not satisfied with my life. It is embarrassing to ask for more.

That’s what the voice in my head was nattering on about. She wants me to know I am stepping onto the stage that the gatekeepers of what is good and marketable (i.e., Traditional Publishing) told me I wasn’t qualified to enter, and that pushing in anyway was like trespassing. She told me, “Fine. Get this book out, tell no one, and then be satisfied. Your dream didn’t happen. Get over it. Now be quiet and small so you don’t make anyone else uncomfortable with your delusions of grandeur. Stop now; you are embarrassing yourself!”

After much cogitation, when I didn’t receive a green light from any agents or publishers, I decided to self-publish. I decided that I put too much work into my manuscript to deny myself a proper finish line. A friend from my writing group had done it, and that gave me the courage I needed to start the process. Then, in the middle of editing in the spring, I stalled out, stuck in the mud of doubt.

I told myself that someone might find my book (and my writing in general) informative and interesting. There are days when I think, “It’s just for fun! Why am I so stressed about this?” And then other days — usually after trying to figure out how I’m supposed to be marketing this thing, which feels so cloying and desperate — when I ask myself… well… “Who do I think I am?”

Then I read Chelsea Devantez’s I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This: (But I’m Going to Anyway), and I came across a passage that gave me a needed push:

Every time someone shares their story, the lie that we are alone in our pain is shattered, and the more I read these women’s stories, the more I begin to reach the surface myself.

That quote became my permission slip, my hall pass, to keep going. It let me believe, for a while, that my story mattered.

But permission slips expire. One quote, one kind word, one nudge will carry me for a time, but eventually I’m back in the mud.

I suspect it has something to do with where I came from, colliding with where I find myself now. I grew up in a world that prized smallness in women. Don’t want too much, don’t make yourself the center, don’t draw attention. Wanting was dangerous and greedy — a kind of sin.

And now I’m living in a world that prizes the opposite — clamoring, influencing, attention as currency. If you write a book, you don’t just write it; you market it, post about it, brand yourself around it. Be louder. Be shinier. Be everywhere.

There is this conflict playing out between the part of me hanging on to my good-Mormon-girl-values and my desire to be read by someone who might benefit from what I have to say (while also chuckling to themselves admiringly, “Damn, this chick is funny as hell!”)

No wonder my critic thrives here. Because I still hold the core belief that I don’t deserve my dream. Until I stop believing that, I’ll always be reaching for another hall pass. The real work is loosening the belief that my wanting is shameful. That will take time. Until then, I’m faking it until I make it — pretending I belong in the room. And maybe that’s the real trespass. Not self-publishing but daring to believe I belong in the room without the slip at all.

Which brings me (with no small amount of discomfort) to say: my book, Pieces of String Too Short to Use, is out! Writing it was hard. Publishing it is scarier. Telling you about it is the scariest of all. But here I am, without permission, daring to walk through the door. My inner critic is already rolling her eyes, but I’m hitting ‘publish’ all the same.