My Failure Matters

What about when you fail at something you’ve worked your ass off for, when you’ve taken all the carefully-researched, right steps, when you’ve dotted every “I” and crossed every “t” on the journey, and yet, you still fail. What about when you’ve done this over and over again, for years and years, intent on achieving the goal you set out for yourself? What about when, each time you fail, you tell yourself positive affirmations and extend gratitude to the universe —as you’ve been instructed by others who have pursued and achieved the same goal as well as many self-help gurus and, her majesty of all positive-thinking, Oprah?

What about if the failure breaks your spirit over and over, sends you into a deep depression, and, yet, you still persevere only to be met again, over and over, with more failure. And what about if you ask the universe/those-in-the-know/friends/family why? and what am I doing wrong? and the replies are all I don’t know. Nothing. Wait. Be patient. It’s just a matter of time before IT happens.

And, what about the guilt and depression you have about your failure, especially when so many people tell you that you are so lucky to have had the small successes you have had in a field that is so difficult—impossible, even? Or, even more depressing, when people say to you but you have your health and a good family! And the guilt on top of that guilt, because, these people are absolutely right—I have had some small success within this field (publishing), I do have an amazing and healthy family, and despite a large tumor in my colon being removed recently, I have my health.

Or, add to this my own self-flagellation in the form of negative self-talk: Aw, play me a small tiny violin. You didn’t get your books published. Boo-hoo. That should only be a person’s worst problem in life. Followed by listing all the people who “have it worse”.

The thing is…my failure to get a book deal has nothing to do the goodness or badness of my family or health. It also has nothing to do with how good or bad another person’s life, health, writing career are either.

And to be technical, that type of logic is not logical at all. It’s a form of what they call in CBT, cognitive distortion in the form of overgeneralizing.  

Basically, my repeated failures to get a book deal and the way it has affected me have zero to do with other areas of my life that happen to be going well.

This overgeneralizing is something I had to finally get over and accept. I do tend to feel guilty about just about everything. That is another problem to discuss for another time—guilt, magical thinking, and control—all good topics to discuss especially when it comes to failure.

The reason I tell you this is that I am officially owning my failure, owning its significance to my life, to my writing, to who I am. I am letting go of the guilt I throw over it, the way I have of attempting to whitewash it. I am going to openly and completely tell you my story of failure in the writing world. I am going to tell all of it, without allowing my fear of what you may think of me. I am going to tell it because we all have a story to tell and that story matters, no matter who you are or what you do, your story matters because you are here. 

--> So, get ready because if you are interested, I’m about to tell you a really good story about how I tried and failed to make my dreams come true and then found meaning and purpose to my failure. To read the full story, head over to my failure blog

Now what?

Since parting ways with my former agent last October, I have slowly allowed myself to widen the scope and perspective I have on writing and publishing. Over the course of the last 10 months, I've written several blog posts, a book review, articles, papers for school, and published a novel on SwoonReads.

Newest Novel!

As I begin the college application/essay season (my 13th as a college counselor/essay coach) and listen to countless stories of overcoming failure, I can't help but think of my own failures over the last five years (documented, here, on this blog).

Students who write about failure generally talk about what they learned or how a failure changed and affected them. They don't psychoanalyze themselves or their failures, and they don't try to figure out the why or even the how.

When I've written about failure over the last few years, I spent a lot of time on the why and how and not so much on the now what. When my students write about failure, they talk about the now what.

Finally, I am, too.

Now what?

My failures in publishing have caused me a lot of emotional pain and suffering because I had the mistaken belief that because I was doing all the right things, failure was impossible...So, when failure happened, I blamed myself—when, in fact, failing in publishing is a lot like failing to win the lottery.

No one controls the lottery.

I cannot control agents or publishers. I can only control myself and what I write.

So, now I have a new goal.

One reader.

That's it. Not how many books I've sold or how many comments I get or how much money I make (ha!). And, most importantly, not how many publishers I've submitted to (and been rejected by). My writing goals are to write what I want, make it the best I can, and then reach ONE reader who reads my work, whether it's a book or a blog post. From this post forward, I aim to reach one person with each piece I write, and I don't necessarily even need to know who that person is or even have evidence that they have read this, meaning comments or feedback through an email, etc.

I am going on faith. On hope.

So, dear reader, I believe that if you are reading this, you have been touched in some way, and I hope that you will come back for more (and maybe leave a comment ;)

I also hope that you are still reading this post because I would like for you to read my novel Till It Stops Beating on SwoonReads.com. Click here.

Thank you, Reader, whoever and wherever you are.

On Closing Doors and Failed Dreams

Over the course of 16 years, I’ve tried various methods towards getting a book deal—several different agents, submitting to publishers myself, and getting an MFA. I faithfully followed all other prescribed paths, which include but are not limited to: conferences, critique groups, self-publishing, and contests.

You name it, and I did it and if you’ve been following this blog, you’ve probably read about it here.

I know what you are thinking because it’s what I thought for years when I would start saying that I was wasting my time. You’re saying, You can’t fail if you try. It’s all part of the process. Your time will come. NEVER give up. All the platitudes, all the self-affirmation, all the blind faith, all of it—every single bit of it no longer is encouraging or helpful to me. It’s become a waste of my time, time that is so very precious and so very limited.

My only New Year’s resolution this year was to let go of trying. Initially, I had two really good reasons to, at the very least, take a break. One, was my agent fired me (or we mutually parted, depends on how you look at it), and two, I was back in school and the workload was increasing exponential.

The truth was, I had wanted to quit for YEARS.

***

Over the final five years of my quest to become a traditionally published novelist, not only did my desire to chase the dream wan, but also another dream began to emerge. A dream that I couldn’t ignore any longer.

From the time I was in high school and probably long before then, if you talk to my middle school or grammar school friends, I wanted to be a psychotherapist. In fact, when I was in high school, I was a Natural Helper, which was this program that you were put into by your peers who would fill out anonymous surveys about who in the school they felt they could talk to about their problems. And, when I was 16 and a CIT at summer camp for creative writing, my camp friends voted me to be Most Likely To Be Psychoanalyzing Saddam Hussein on CNN. Then later, as a teacher, my students often came to me with there problems and not just the academic ones but biggies—sexual identity confusion, pregnancy, bullying.

And the whole time I took it for granted…in that I minimized its significance and my own talent for listening and helping.

The older I became and the more my tutoring business began to be successful and the more requests I received from clients to be their therapist or their child’s therapist, the more I couldn’t ignore the quiet calling I felt—to give myself over to the world of counseling. At least three or four cases a year would start off as tutoring in writing or assisting in the college application process and then quickly make a sharp turn into counseling. These clients weren’t just struggling with typical stress from life and school, but many times their struggles were with serious issues like cutting, eating disorders, and bipolar depression. Never did I make a claim to be a therapist and always did I refer people out to licensed professionals. But as these years went by and more and more people were saying, not only did they wish I were their therapist but also, when will you finally go get your license so I can refer people to you?

A year from now, I will have completed my license, and for over a year, I’ve been working in a group practice in Warwick. This dream is coming true.

***

Sometimes we have a desire, a passion for something, and we think that we are supposed to make it our whole life, our career. I’ve learned that there are different types of passions and some are meant to become a career and others are meant to be something else.

Teaching and counseling have always come easy to me. Writing, itself, has always come easy, too. Publishing my writing and pursuing a career as a writer has been filled with terrible struggle, like dating the wrong guy you are terribly attracted to, like a bad but electrifying romance.

***

My acupuncturist described my struggle with writing and publishing like the struggle of her infertile patients…they work really hard to get pregnant, but it doesn’t happen. Then they finally let go of the struggle and hard work, and you guessed it, they get pregnant.

But not always. Sometimes they let go, don’t ever get pregnant but instead adopt or in some cases, give up and dedicate themselves to a fulfilling career or to being an awesome aunt or pet parent.

The cliché is true—when one door closes, another opens.

I love to write, but I never enjoyed publishing. It was always hard and relatively unfulfilling. It was always filled with struggle that never felt any sense of relief or satisfaction. And then it began to eat away at my love for reading and writing, that’s when I realized something was very, very wrong here.

I guess it’s how I feel about yoga. I used to be a very dedicated student of yoga, and at one time was asked to teach it. When that happened, all of the sudden I hated it, and I struggled with it. I lost that passion for it I once had. So I canceled the weekend certification course I had signed up for and told the manager at the local gym I couldn’t do it. Then I found myself back in love with yoga.

Just because you are good at something doesn’t mean you have to make it your career and just because you have a passion for something doesn’t mean you have to pursue it to death. Some things, like yoga and now writing, are hobbies that I love for the sake of what they are and struggling with them simply isn’t worth the emotional toll it takes on me.

So my energy now is on finishing up course work to get my license to be a Mental Health Counselor and to open up my own small practice. I see writing as a part of the work I do, and I see myself still being a writing coach and tutor, but I see other things like teaching at a college and also supervising other emerging counselors.

***

We are so terrified of failure in this culture. We must succeed at every endeavor and if we stop trying or pursuing a goal, even if that goal no longer holds interest within us, we have failed and even if that failure is a blessing, we can’t see that. We see failure as weak.

***

The years pursuing becoming a novelist were not a waste—the experiences I had and the people I met along the way enriched my life and widened my perspective on myself, my writing, and the publishing world. The biggest gift was the community of people who understood the weird and terrifying life of being a writer and it was awesome to feel so understood.

The waste was the beating myself up when I got to a point where I didn’t want to do it any more but felt I should. After about 8 years of trying to get several novels traditionally published, I was exhausted and really wanted to stop the submissions game. Not only had I been pursuing that, but I also had self-published three novels that actually were pretty well-received. So, I thought the best place to “rest” was an MFA program, which, truthfully, I feel, saved my sanity. I left my then-agent and spent the next two years in a cocoon of a writing community and didn’t worry about agents or publishing. 

The desire to stop happened gradually, rather than all at once. There was a period of time after I completed my MFA where I had this manic surge of energy to get back out and try again. But this time it was not about loving writing or even believing in my work, but it was more of anger like, fuck you, I ‘m gonna show you whose boss.

I created Sucker Literary and it was a labor of love and it was my fuck you to publishing (think about the name, after all). Then I had two giant strokes of good luck…getting featured in Publishers Weekly and signing with a new agent who had sought me out. Yet, my gut, the entire time, was telling me something was off. But I surged forward in this angry and frantic state and spent the next five years in misery, which was funny because in many ways I almost had everything I had dreamed of having…and the goal of published novelist seemed within my grasp.

Hindsight is not necessarily 20-20. Meaning, I could look back and say, well, that’s why ultimately my novels never got picked up…because my heart center wasn’t in the writing I was doing. But I don’t believe that is why my novels didn’t get picked up. Plenty of people have their novels published that are formulaic and not from their purpose place or heart center. So when I look back, I don’t know why those manuscripts never got published, but I can say now that I’m sort of glad they didn’t. Because I wasn’t happy writing them. I felt a sense of disconnect and fear. It’s scary to admit that I spent about 5 years doing something I really hated, especially when it was once something I loved.

Don’t get me wrong. I still love to write. Fortunately, that never wavered during this time period. What I don’t like is writing out of a fear of failure, writing to prove something to someone…someone I don’t even know and haven’t even met.

And I don’t hate publishing. I just don’t like the game of it. Never been a good game player. That’s why, right now, I’m not playing the game. I’m not looking for an agent or a publisher. But I’m writing. I will always be writing. And publishing, I’ll always be doing that, too.    

On Closing Doors and Failed Dreams

Over the course of 16 years, I’ve tried various methods towards getting a book deal—several different agents, submitting to publishers myself, and getting an MFA. I faithfully followed all other prescribed paths, which include but are not limited to: conferences, critique groups, self-publishing, and contests.

You name it, and I did it and if you’ve been following this blog, you’ve probably read about it here.

I know what you are thinking because it’s what I thought for years when I would start saying that I was wasting my time. You’re saying, You can’t fail if you try. It’s all part of the process. Your time will come. NEVER give up. All the platitudes, all the self-affirmation, all the blind faith, all of it—every single bit of it no longer is encouraging or helpful to me. It’s become a waste of my time, time that is so very precious and so very limited.

My only New Year’s resolution this year was to let go of trying. Initially, I had two really good reasons to, at the very least, take a break. One, was my agent fired me (or we mutually parted, depends on how you look at it), and two, I was back in school and the workload was increasing exponential.

The truth was, I had wanted to quit for YEARS.

***

Over the final five years of my quest to become a traditionally published novelist, not only did my desire to chase the dream wan, but also another dream began to emerge. A dream that I couldn’t ignore any longer.

From the time I was in high school and probably long before then, if you talk to my middle school or grammar school friends, I wanted to be a psychotherapist. In fact, when I was in high school, I was a Natural Helper, which was this program that you were put into by your peers who would fill out anonymous surveys about who in the school they felt they could talk to about their problems. And, when I was 16 and a CIT at summer camp for creative writing, my camp friends voted me to be Most Likely To Be Psychoanalyzing Saddam Hussein on CNN. Then later, as a teacher, my students often came to me with there problems and not just the academic ones but biggies—sexual identity confusion, pregnancy, bullying.

And the whole time I took it for granted…in that I minimized its significance and my own talent for listening and helping.

The older I became and the more my tutoring business began to be successful and the more requests I received from clients to be their therapist or their child’s therapist, the more I couldn’t ignore the quiet calling I felt—to give myself over to the world of counseling. At least three or four cases a year would start off as tutoring in writing or assisting in the college application process and then quickly make a sharp turn into counseling. These clients weren’t just struggling with typical stress from life and school, but many times their struggles were with serious issues like cutting, eating disorders, and bipolar depression. Never did I make a claim to be a therapist and always did I refer people out to licensed professionals. But as these years went by and more and more people were saying, not only did they wish I were their therapist but also, when will you finally go get your license so I can refer people to you?

A year from now, I will have completed my license, and for over a year, I’ve been working in a group practice in Warwick. This dream is coming true.

***

Sometimes we have a desire, a passion for something, and we think that we are supposed to make it our whole life, our career. I’ve learned that there are different types of passions and some are meant to become a career and others are meant to be something else.

Teaching and counseling have always come easy to me. Writing, itself, has always come easy, too. Publishing my writing and pursuing a career as a writer has been filled with terrible struggle, like dating the wrong guy you are terribly attracted to, like a bad but electrifying romance.

***

My acupuncturist described my struggle with writing and publishing like the struggle of her infertile patients…they work really hard to get pregnant, but it doesn’t happen. Then they finally let go of the struggle and hard work, and you guessed it, they get pregnant.

But not always. Sometimes they let go, don’t ever get pregnant but instead adopt or in some cases, give up and dedicate themselves to a fulfilling career or to being an awesome aunt or pet parent.

The cliché is true—when one door closes, another opens.

I love to write, but I never enjoyed publishing. It was always hard and relatively unfulfilling. It was always filled with struggle that never felt any sense of relief or satisfaction. And then it began to eat away at my love for reading and writing, that’s when I realized something was very, very wrong here.

I guess it’s how I feel about yoga. I used to be a very dedicated student of yoga, and at one time was asked to teach it. When that happened, all of the sudden I hated it, and I struggled with it. I lost that passion for it I once had. So I canceled the weekend certification course I had signed up for and told the manager at the local gym I couldn’t do it. Then I found myself back in love with yoga.

Just because you are good at something doesn’t mean you have to make it your career and just because you have a passion for something doesn’t mean you have to pursue it to death. Some things, like yoga and now writing, are hobbies that I love for the sake of what they are and struggling with them simply isn’t worth the emotional toll it takes on me.

So my energy now is on finishing up course work to get my license to be a Mental Health Counselor and to open up my own small practice. I see writing as a part of the work I do, and I see myself still being a writing coach and tutor, but I see other things like teaching at a college and also supervising other emerging counselors.

***

We are so terrified of failure in this culture. We must succeed at every endeavor and if we stop trying or pursuing a goal, even if that goal no longer holds interest within us, we have failed and even if that failure is a blessing, we can’t see that. We see failure as weak.

***

The years pursuing becoming a novelist were not a waste—the experiences I had and the people I met along the way enriched my life and widened my perspective on myself, my writing, and the publishing world. The biggest gift was the community of people who understood the weird and terrifying life of being a writer and it was awesome to feel so understood.

The waste was the beating myself up when I got to a point where I didn’t want to do it any more but felt I should. After about 8 years of trying to get several novels traditionally published, I was exhausted and really wanted to stop the submissions game. Not only had I been pursuing that, but I also had self-published three novels that actually were pretty well-received. So, I thought the best place to “rest” was an MFA program, which, truthfully, I feel, saved my sanity. I left my then-agent and spent the next two years in a cocoon of a writing community and didn’t worry about agents or publishing. 

The desire to stop happened gradually, rather than all at once. There was a period of time after I completed my MFA where I had this manic surge of energy to get back out and try again. But this time it was not about loving writing or even believing in my work, but it was more of anger like, fuck you, I ‘m gonna show you whose boss.

I created Sucker Literary and it was a labor of love and it was my fuck you to publishing (think about the name, after all). Then I had two giant strokes of good luck…getting featured in Publishers Weekly and signing with a new agent who had sought me out. Yet, my gut, the entire time, was telling me something was off. But I surged forward in this angry and frantic state and spent the next five years in misery, which was funny because in many ways I almost had everything I had dreamed of having…and the goal of published novelist seemed within my grasp.

Hindsight is not necessarily 20-20. Meaning, I could look back and say, well, that’s why ultimately my novels never got picked up…because my heart center wasn’t in the writing I was doing. But I don’t believe that is why my novels didn’t get picked up. Plenty of people have their novels published that are formulaic and not from their purpose place or heart center. So when I look back, I don’t know why those manuscripts never got published, but I can say now that I’m sort of glad they didn’t. Because I wasn’t happy writing them. I felt a sense of disconnect and fear. It’s scary to admit that I spent about 5 years doing something I really hated, especially when it was once something I loved.

Don’t get me wrong. I still love to write. Fortunately, that never wavered during this time period. What I don’t like is writing out of a fear of failure, writing to prove something to someone…someone I don’t even know and haven’t even met.

And I don’t hate publishing. I just don’t like the game of it. Never been a good game player. That’s why, right now, I’m not playing the game. I’m not looking for an agent or a publisher. But I’m writing. I will always be writing. And publishing, I’ll always be doing that, too.    

Social Comparing and Social Media

When I was in school studying creative writing, the director of my MFA program started off each of the residencies with a mini speech about the dangers of comparing yourself to other writers. The main danger is that you can render yourself not only artistically paralyzed, but also emotionally frozen by focusing on how much better you think everyone else is compared to you. Envy and comparing were dangerous emotional paths to take during workshops with other writers because it took away from both your own experience as well as the experience of enjoying another student’s writing. Not to mention, as our director would often say, there is room for all successes, and one person’s success doesn’t detract from your own. In the nurturing environment of the MFA program, coupled with the inspirational speech from our director at the twice-a-year residencies, I can honestly say, I never experienced more than small flickers of envy and comparing during those two and a half years.

Then, I graduated, thrust out of the cocoon of warm and fuzzies that was The Solstice MFA Program and into the Real World where I encountered a serious problem with envy and comparing, encounters that got increasingly more emotionally upsetting over the subsequent four years post graduation.

Looking back, thanks to my newest pursuit of becoming a psychotherapist, I know from my studies of psychology that comparing yourself to others is a normal and even healthy way to measure your own successes and failures and that envy also is a normal response to such comparisons. However, there is an insidious cognitive experience that occurs when we start comparing ourselves to others, and it’s called Social Comparison Bias.

Social Comparison Bias, which stems from Leon Festinger’s Social Comparison Theory that states humans have an internal drive for “accurate self evaluations” (basically we want to know how well or poorly we are doing), and the way that we humans get those self evaluations is by comparing ourselves to others, across the many domains of our lives (looks, economic status, education, etc). Festinger’s theory was expanded upon by a guy named Willis, who talked about upward and downward comparisons. This is where it all can get tricky and exceptionally bad for us artist-types because we are pretty sensitive and emotional creatures. Willis’ idea is that in order to measure our own success, we look up (for motivation to be better) and we look down (to feel better). This is all well and good if you can, in fact, compare yourself to an Olympian, or the Olympian of YA fiction, Judy Blume, and become inspired. Or, if you can compare yourself to an out-of-shape slob and feel good about the three miles you jogged. And, in my case, if you can compare yourself to someone who isn’t as far along in the world of publishing as I am—someone who hasn’t had anything published yet—and feel like you are progressing towards the goal of published author.

The problem lies in this: as we are looking up or down, if our self-esteem isn’t in a healthy place—instead of being inspired by Judy Blume, I actually started to resent her (as if I even knew her personally!)—this psychological shit hits the fan.

And, friends, my shit (emotional, spiritual, psychological) hit that fan, hard, splatteringly hard upon graduation of that MFA program.

On the surface, I was a model post-MFA student—within a year I was launching a YA anthology, landed in Publisher’s Weekly, and was receiving an offer from an agent. Deep inside, something terrible was happening.

These successes were trumped by the failures that came along with them. The YA anthology, while widely recognized and submitted to, didn’t “take off” as I hoped. Signing with an agent I loved and who believed in me didn’t guarantee we’d sell my work. Within a few short years post MFA, I was sobbing in a therapist’s office, declaring myself a complete and utter failure and sham of a writer. I took this even further, by the way, attaching guilt to the fact that I’d spent over a decade of my time and money to this to turn up with nothing and sacrificing time away from my family. I took my failure to launch as an author to be a failure as a mother, wife, friend, daughter, teacher, etc.

How did this happen?

As soon as I graduated from Solstice and began my YA anthology, I spent a lot of time on social media, building up interest and excitement over my new endeavor. Unfortunately, I also started to compare myself to other writers/authors, who I perceived as being better than me, and neither comparing up nor down served me well. Not to mention, my comparisons were 24-7, thanks to Twitter and Facebook.

All of us are continually bombarded with Facebook posts and Tweets that espouse successes, triumphs, and achievements, as if life is truly always endless bowls of cherries and constant dancing unicorns. This is such a problem that in recent psychology studies, researchers have been able to link Facebook with depression, making this social comparison bias phenomenon a possible cause to mental illness! This makes perfect sense! When we continually see statuses about job promotions, new relationships, and expensive purchases or, in my case, new book deals, we start to compare ourselves to those statuses in unrealistic ways. The bias (tendencies to think in certain ways that stray from what is rational) part is the worst because this is the part where now we actually start seeking out information that supports this cognitive distortion that I suck and everyone else doesn’t. Thus, when I see the status that so-and-so got a “nice” book deal, I start to seek out more information about the book deal to either confirm that, in fact, I suck or, the opposite, that they suck. Everyone who has a Facebook or Twitter has committed the social media “crime” of stalking that ex-boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife/friend’s page to find out more about his or life…in search of some information to reassure yourself that somewhere in his or her life things are not perfect. Aha, Suzie may have just married a hot guy in Fiji but scroll down a few years we find out that she got divorced from an overweight, former, high school sweetheart. Or, in my case, aha! Suzie may have signed a book deal, but it was with XYZ publisher and “nice” means that she could have gotten no advance. Woo-hoo! Boy do I feel good now because she isn’t such hot shit.

There were times, for a few of those post-MFA years, Suzie’s new book deal simply drove me to work harder on my craft and on my research of publishers to send my work out to. Unfortunately, more times than not, it made me feel like total shit. My “illness” took over for a period of time and rendered me depressed. By comparing myself to others, it didn’t inspire me as it could have had I been in a better mental state.

And, as I discovered in therapy, this constant comparing, over time, changed the way I thought about myself not just as a writer but as a mother, wife, friend, teacher, etc…What rendered me so depressed was the major change in my thinking and my perception of myself. The comparing myself to others I perceived as more successful, reinforced the thought, I am a failure…at everything and that thought became the lens through which I looked at myself and my world.

Eventually, the healing came in the form a serious commitment to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. By both challenging these thoughts about failure and gathering up concrete factual evidence to both support and refute that statement, I was able to start seeing myself more clearly. I started to examine failure and discovered that I was equating my failures as crimes rather than what they were, simply failures and that failure doesn’t make me a bad a person. A bad person is many things but not someone who simply fails to get a book deal.

I also discovered that I was putting my worth into something that is kind of equivalent to winning the lottery: saying “I suck because I don’t have a book deal” is like playing the lottery and saying “I suck each time I don’t win.” Not only is equating suckage with whether or not you achieve a certain goal or dream ridiculously illogical, but also you can’t control winning the lottery any more than you can control if someone wants to publish your book. All you can do is play the game.

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