BIGGEST FAILURE IS MY GREATEST SUCCESS

We interrupt this blog, which had been focusing on mental health and my own journey into mindfulness and inner peace, to report:

Hell has frozen over (literally, because it’s about -5 degrees here in Rhode Island) NOT ONLY is Donald Trump still president, BUT ALSO I just signed a contract with a publisher for one of my books!

2018, so far, has exceed any expectations, which isn’t hard, since I, long ago, gave up on believing in expectations, especially when it comes to writing and publishing.

My publishing story is long and sad and funny. If I ever get it together enough to write a memoir (terrified), I would call it Failing Forward. It’s not that original or clever but, then again, titles are NOT my forte—see all of my previously (self) published novels.  

I’ve detailed my story in various writing forms and across various blogs. A year ago, I tried to cram it all into what I referred to as a “blogmoir”. Click here to read.

I only reached chapter four, but with this recent turn of events, let’s skip all the way to chapter…let’s say, ten.

Failing Forward: Chapter 10

It’s the end of 2015, and I break up with my agent, but we are still “seeing each other”, so-to-speak, as we await to hear from some publishers we had submitted to prior to our break-up.

By early 2016, I receive the final rejection, and so begins a new journey in writing and publishing. One of total and utter, delicious FREEDOM!!!!!

For the first time in 10 years, I will be completely and totally free from obligation to someone else about MY writing. From 2005 to 2009, I was signed with my first agent (actually, she was my second, but like many “firsts” in life, that one didn’t actually count), which resulted in countless misses and a few near-hits. From 2009 to 2011, I was at the Solstice MFA program where I was (albeit happily) beholden to multiple mentors and deadlines. Then, from 2011 to 2015, I was signed with this most recent agent, a relationship that wasn’t right for me—though she was a funny and interesting woman—it wasn’t a match. I knew this from the start, but back then, I was desperate for a book deal…about as desperate as I was in high school for the attention of a certain soccer player…so desperate I allowed him to drunkenly slobber all over me at the homecoming dance my sophomore year, even though he already had a certain cheerleader girlfriend…desperate was a theme for me for a long time.

[By the way, that story was fictionalized and featured in volume three of Sucker Literary—shameless plugs will begin now!]

Anyway, after the break-up, I am lost but in a really good way. I go back into therapy (What else do you do when you have failed at something for almost 20 years, that is your passion for your entire life?) and together, my therapist and I come up with a plan: instead of the goal being success, it would now be FAILURE.

My shrink, a total CBT kind of guy, believes that I need to become desensitized to failure.

The objective of this plan is to seek out as many publications as possible, big and small, and submit…anything. Articles, manuscripts, whatever. Submit and get rejected. He even advised for me to send out some really bad writing to increase the chances of FAILURE.  

So, I go NUTS with my submissions…old blog posts, old short stories, new pieces, bad pieces and good pieces. The rejections come flying in pretty quickly. Sometimes I don’t even read past the first line of, “Thank you for your submission. Unfortunately…”  

After about the fifth rejection, the sinking sensation of failure in my stomach is gone. By the tenth, I don’t even care. At some point, I start to write new pieces about failure and mental health. I begin to realize that I actually don’t want to be the next Judy Blume (somebody once referred to me this way). I just want to be me, a woman who writes about whatever she wants.

By this point, my success or failure to become a published writer no longer defines me. I devote my time to my family and to finishing school for mental health counseling. Along the way, I also encounter some major health issues in both 2016 (a colon operation for a noncancerous yet sizeable tumor) and 2017 (a small bowel blockage). Each moment in the hospital reminds me of what I really value, and it isn’t a book deal with Random House.

In between hospital stays, summer of 2016 and then summer of 2017, something amazing and unexpected happens—success. One after another, over the span of about a year, I have some first-person essays published by internationally read mental health sites (The Mighty, MindBodyGreen, and OC87 Recovery Diaries.) I even get a nice check for one of those essays. Every one of those pieces had been previously rejected, multiple times by multiple places.

Yet, suddenly, it is my time.

And then, just this week, the most significant success of all—a book contract from Black Rose Writing. Mind you, this is a place that I previously received one of those rejections from, a rejection that, for all intents and purposes, I sought out!  

I want to take a moment to underscore this story with the fact that I had EVERY reason to believe that I would be successful as an author. Whether it was creating a literary magazine that landed me in Publishers Weekly or winning first place of a Writer’s Digest contest or simply that both agents I had sought me out, rather than me seeking their representation. So, my failure to launch as an author was all the more depressing because the expectations were so very high. Everyone—from mentors to fellow writer friends to agents—thought I would make it.

But I didn’t make it.

Yet, that failure has been my greatest success.

Check out this piece from NPR about a man who sought out rejection after a break up. 

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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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.

Social (Media) Comparison Bias: The Artist’s Illness

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.