Prepping for NaJoWriMo

In preparation for NaJoWriMo, I have been doing some nightly reading of my journals dating back to 1989, when I was a 13-year-old 8^th grader experiencing my first love, all the way through 1999, when I married my college sweetheart.

What strikes me—after the mortifying reality of how teenage-me was so boy-obsessed—is the way my voice and sense of self evolved from 13 to 24. I was always very introspective and self-aware but as a teen, those things were way too clouded by hormones and a desperation to be loved (and my parents’ crumbling marriage). As a young adult, I had unclouded access to that same introspection and self-awareness, which acted as intuitive guides through the terrifying maze of post-childhood, post-college reality, including career and marriage decisions.

Now, here I am at 42, and as I approach a month of pen-to-paper journal writing, I wish for myself that same total access to my inner-me. An access that, in adulthood,—with the onslaught of social media when I was in my late 20s—has been as clouded, at times, as it was during my teenage-hood.

What I have learned in my social-media entrenched adulthood is that I need my public writing outlet (blogging and posting) and my private writing outlet (my dear old diary). Both have helped me to navigate the transition from early adulthood into middle adulthood. Through social media, I can lament and validate the hardships of being a writer, a mother, and a therapist. Through my private journal, I can gripe and moan about things I would never even say out loud…about mothering, writing, and therapy-ing.  

I can tell you all this: Nothing I write over the month of April will be for public consumption—and that’s the point, right?

Walking Towards Your Values

I’m now over halfway through the third month of participating in The Mighty’s Monthly challenges for 2017.

Me and my oldest.  About to go for one of our walks.

The Mighty declared March to host the Self Confidence challenge, and the first task in week one was to identify your character strengths by taking the VIA (Values in Action) Survey of Character Strengths. The second part of this challenged was to write examples of those traits, which I did in this post. This week is the third part of the Self Confidence challenge and that is to write a list of activities to do that support these character strengths. For me, this has been a lot harder than the first two parts of the exercise.

First, putting expectations on myself is something I’ve overdone in the past and has led to tremendous anxiety. So, for me, I need to set realistic expectations, or this whole exercise won’t be an act of self-care but an act of self-destruction. Second, when I looked at my list of character strengths, I felt like I needed to figure out which of my personal values these strengths were connected to….and that the activity I chose for each strength needed to be in line with one of those values.

Why are values so important? For me, self-confidence and mental health have always been connected to the idea of walking through my life in the direction of my personal values; if I have the focus in mind that whatever I’m doing, I’m doing because it matters to me, deep in my heart, then there is peace and contentment in what I’m doing.

Long ago, when I began to really work on dealing with my Generalized Anxiety Disorder, I used a workbook called Get out of Your Mind and into Your Life. The basic premise of the book was that if you figured out what you cared about in your life, what you valued and how you wanted your life to be, then your anxiety would eventually decrease because you would be doing behaviors that supported those values. Most of us who have suffered from anxiety and depression develop avoidance behaviors to help us cope with the overwhelming physical sensations that come with our illnesses, so we tend to miss out on a lot of things we value. That’s where the concept of walking towards your values comes into play.

This premise of walking towards your values really connected with me during my recovery because it helped me tolerate my anxiety symptoms. I understood, for example, that, though I felt very anxious driving my car while having a racing heart or depersonalization or scary thoughts, the value I had for getting to the place I needed to be helped me to tolerate the discomfort. At one point in my recovery, driving to therapy was anxiety-producing, but the value I had for both the therapy itself and my therapist’s time, made me continue on, even while my anxiety increased. It helped me with avoidance behaviors, like social isolation, because, for example, I disliked crowded rooms, but I valued my children, so I had to show up to their dance recital or student of the month assembly and tolerate the crowd. The bonus was that once I arrived at therapy or was engrossed in my children’s performances, I became lost in those moments and my anxiety went away.

Date night with my hubby.

           Getting our steps in. Me and my youngest. 

     

With the idea in mind of knowing my values from all the work I’ve done in recovery, knowing my strengths because of the recent survey, and knowing my ability to over-do in my expectations, I came up with the following list of activities that are designed to boost my confidence through boosting my values:

According to the VIA (Values in Action) Survey of Character Strengths, these are my strengths: “zest, enthusiasm, energy; curiosity and interest in the world; self-control and self-regulation; industry, diligence, and perseverance. See my chart below for how I put various values and activities that go with those strengths:

Strength	Value	Activity
Zest, enthusiasm, energy	Writing and community	Support another writer through social media shares every day.
Curiosity and interest in the world/ Social intelligence	Being social/having fun	Go out with another couple for a double-date night.
Self-control and self-regulation	exercise	Hit 10,000 steps a day and exercise daily.
Industry, diligence, and perseverance	writing	Write a blog post about my experience with this exercise

So far, I’ve been pretty successful in these endeavors, and I know it’s because I set realistic standards for myself AND because I’m playing on my strengths. Together, that has boosted my confidence.

After Compulsive Eating Ends

A few weeks ago, as I was doing a routine cleanup of my inbox, I clicked open an email from one of the many writer websites that spits out lists of the latest call for submissions. I began to do what I always do when one of these lands in my inbox—scroll and click, scroll and click. As I made my way down the list of possible places to publish my work, I also started to click and open various files in my dropbox, all the time my mind was sorting and figuring out—that piece could go there and this piece could go here…it all feels good and possible and exciting until…I finish the sorting and matching process, and I’m left with the next step: editing the pieces to fit within the guidelines of each publication.

At the first highlight and cut, I feel fine, normal, neutral. But within about ten minutes, I’m sweating and my stomach hurts. I keep going, thinking that if I work harder or faster or longer, this feeling will dissolve…Only the harder and faster I work, the worse I feel. This type of editing feels like an itch that I scratch and scratch and cannot satisfy, no matter how long or hard I edit. Soon, I’m hating the piece, hating the publication the piece is for, and hating myself.

This reminds me of the days I suffered from binge-eating disorder, the days when I felt an un-scratchable itch, an insatiable hunger, when my life felt out of control and all I longed for was to fill a desperate emptiness.

Though it’s been almost two decades since I’ve suffered from compulsive eating, the internal mechanism of compulsivity hasn’t died. I now suffer from bouts of compulsive writing, and much like compulsive eating, I can’t exist without eating, I cannot exist without writing. And much like what cures compulsive eating, what cures compulsive writing is learning how to eat (write) from internal hunger (inspiration) cues.

And like the recovery from compulsive eating, the recovery from compulsive writing is very, very hard. Especially when there are triggers just a point and click away.

In a previous piece that was posted on The Mighty, I discussed this connection, and I also stated that I had stopped writing compulsively.

That’s not completely true. The truth is I’m trying to stop writing compulsively and like my recovery from binge-eating disorder, this process may take a very, very long time with moments of relapse.

When I received the YES from The Mighty about that piece, I was delirious. See that picture below? 

That’s me receiving the YES. Then, not more than ten minutes later, I was terrified: Would this trigger compulsive writing? After all, I definitely felt the pull and desperate itch of MORE. Of wait, if this piece got published, maybe this one that’s been sitting on my desk top will and maybe that one stuck in my works-in-progress folder can get published…Suddenly I was in a tornado of opening and closing various documents of various pieces, deleting and editing and slicing and cutting. My heart pounded and my brow was damp.

I had to catch myself, I had to yell STOP! out loud, in front of my 12-year-old daughter who sat at the dining room table watching this all.

And it reminded me of those times while I was in recovery from binge eating disorder that I would be starting to binge, I would be knee-deep in a large pile of food and my hunger meter would be tilting further and further towards full and I would have to yell STOP! and then physically stand up and walk away.

That day, a few weeks ago with my daughter when I received the first YES to a piece being published in years, that day I pushed away from the laptop and yelled STOP!, stop to the compulsivity, stop to the self-loathing, stop to the desperation of trying to fill that which really cannot be filled—at least not in that compulsive way—that day was when I made a really important pivot.

I stopped myself before it turned into a full-on writing binge.

And yes, just a few weeks ago, I started to write-binge again, but I caught myself, just as I was about to start deleting, slicing, cutting, and rewriting in that desperate rage-y way.

I don’t know what to do about these triggers I have because, just like with food, writing and publishing opportunities are EVERYWHERE. They are no longer hidden in the back of writer’s magazines or tucked into the The Writer’s Market. For me, going online is like a compulsive eater going into an enormous all-you-can-eat buffet, opportunity to binge is right there.

I guess one way is to avoid triggers, like a compulsive eater may avoid an all-you-can-eat buffet. The problem is, it is not realistic to avoid the Internet, my biggest trigger. Not to mention, avoidance wasn’t what cured me of compulsive eating. What cured me was to recognize the internal cues for hunger and for satiation, and if I wanted to eat when I wasn’t hungry, I had to learn to do something else, including tolerate the emotional discomfort of feeling instead of eating.

When I was recovering from binge eating, I had to allow myself to get hungry and in the beginning, it meant recognizing what physical hunger feels like, what were the signs? A gurgle, a hallow feeling inside, a gnawing. Then, I had to learn how to feed the hunger to satiation rather than stuffed-to-the-gills. This went on for a year or so, and as I became better at this, more space was now left in the day to feel feelings instead of eat them. This meant I also had to get better at allowing myself to feel.

What cured me too during that time was writing, writing in my journal, writing poetry, writing short stories, writing in this effortless, spontaneous over-flow of ideas and feelings way. This was authentic expression, not forced, not obsessed over, not desperate.

So now as I write this, I feel that flow, that effortlessness and I let go of compulsivity, of self-loathing, and of binging.

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.