SELF-ESTEEM

The Mighty has declared 2017 the year of self-care, which, considering the outcome of the presidential election and its bloody aftermath, is essential for everyone in our country right now. Many of us feel bruised, heartbroken, scared, and in need of some nurturing and love. I say let's give that much needed love to ourselves because the more we do that, the more we model to the world that LOVE does trump hate.

I began the quest for self-care on January 1, where I was challenged to journal daily, and because self-care is all about not beating yourself up for your imperfections, it's okay that I missed a day or two...or seven. In February, I accepted (with much reluctance) the task of filling a happiness jar with daily moments of happiness. I am proud to share with you that I not only filled it daily with thoughts and observations that embody my happiness, but I was able to get my kids and husband involved, despite some collective eye-rolling.

Now, it's March and The Mighty wants me to build my self confidence...something I desperately need right now.

My business is The Write Touch, which serves people of all ages with every type of writing project and writing need imaginable. I've edited pet recipe cook books, formatted PHd dissertations, helped authors pen memoirs, coached self-help gurus to write self-help books....However, the majority of my work is as a college counselor and essay writing coach and that work is very seasonal. I see somewhere around 30-35 students a week during my peak season, which is the fall. Now the rest of the year varies considerably. Like right now, I have a handful a week, and they vary from resume help to SAT prep to pre-college counseling. This actually works out well because, for the last 2 years, I've been working as a mental health counselor about 15-20 hours a week and finishing up some course work towards my license. During these "off season" months, I spend lots of time writing, reading, being with the kids more, which helps me prepare for the crazy fall.

However, February is the leanest month, client-wise, and so it follows that by the end of every February, my self-esteem catches a nasty virus.

Self-worth. Fear of failure. Money-anxiety. These are just some of the themes of the inner-dialogue that runs through my thoughts. In these panic moments, I equate my self-worth with how many clients I have, with how many people need me, with how much money I'm bringing in to my family. My fear of failure is so infectious, it literally makes my self-esteem sick.

This happens every year, and every year I get to the end of February feeling depleted... and speed dialing my therapist.

But this year, I was innoculated from the worst of the virus, and though I had a few sniffles and sneezing attacks here and there, thanks to The Mighty's Monthly challenges, I've survived this month. I even had a lot of wonderful moments...moments I was able to have because I have less work.

So, I encourage all of you to make this month and the rest of this year, your year of self-care, your year to spread the love to YOU because that's where it all begins, with yourself.

Taking Away My Own Power

From age 14 to 15, I gained 45 pounds.

I started what would become an almost two-decade long struggle with food and my body in middle school, around age 11. Most of the struggle in the beginning manifested in sporadic guilt and regret: In my mind, I berated myself for the so-called roll of fat over my Gap jeans that preventing me from tucking my shirt in (God, did I ever want to tuck my shirts in like the other girls did), and I practically committed mental suicide over the way my arms looked in tank tops—a lunch lady dangle making me feel like I may have some kind of aging disorder.  Yet, most of this struggle only resulted in half-hearted attempts at restricting my food to all-veggie salads and sandwiches made with diet bread and before bed calisthenics routines and an occasional Jane Fonda workout video.

But as I made my way through middle school, the struggle became more and more real: I started to notice how my friends were able to consume an entire bag of Doritos, wash it down with real Coke (not Diet Coke), and top it off with a pint of Hagen Das and not ever even show a slight bloat in their incredibly flat stomachs. I began to feel horrible at sleepovers, regretting the hangover the next day from a night of pizza, ice cream, chips, cookies, and cake.

On the outside, I never had a “weight problem” and was always visually pretty average. My struggle was deep, deep inside. And it wasn’t about being fat or about being pretty or about fitting in. It was about feeling out of control.

Here is the thing about that time period, despite the internal monologue berating myself, I still ate fairly normally, eating when hungry and stopping when full.

It wasn’t until age 14 that I began to eat compulsively. A combination of the transition from middle to high school with my first real heartbreak sent me head first into a carton of Vanilla Fudge ice cream. These episodes were different from the occasional over-eat-athon with girlfriends at a sleepover. When the hunger switch inside me said “full”, I kept going…like driving a car and watching the speedometer lean all the way over—I pushed the peddle further to the metal.

Oddly, I felt powerful while binging. I felt a freedom that I didn’t feel in my day-to-day life. Yet, after each episode, I was left helpless and empty, despite the filled-to the brim murkiness in my belly.

Over the course of almost 2 years, I put on 45 pounds. Then something shifted for me…I no longer felt powerful and free when I binged. I felt horrible, I felt like I was violating myself, hurting myself, like I hated my self…yet, I didn’t hate myself and I didn’t want to do it any more. I was growing up now and with the promise of college to take me out of my small town, I saw that a wider world was waiting and I didn’t want to be stuck in my wall of food and fat, missing out on it all. 

So I stopped…with the help of a book by Geneen Roth called Breaking Free From Emotional Eating. I learned about the powerful tool called the hunger scale and I started to watch and listen to those numbers instead of the ones on my bathroom floor.

And my weight evened out, and I cured myself of the compulsion to binge.

But this isn’t a personal essay about how I cured myself of compulsive eating.

This is an essay on the connection between writing and self-love, writing and compulsive behavior. There is a connection to writing somewhere in this adolescent experience of mine. If I were to create an analogy, I don’t think it would fit perfectly but it goes like this: If writing is to eating, then compulsive writing is to compulsive eating. In other words, if writing is nourishment to my soul as eating is nourishment to my body, then it is possible to turn that act of nourishment into an act of destruction, as I did once with food.

Writing was, for many, many years, a natural expression and expansion of myself, my soul, my thoughts, my force field, my energy.

The way I feel about my writing now, is so very reminiscent to how I felt when binge eating stopped feeling powerful and free and started to feel limiting, horrible, and self-destructive.

The natural ebb and flow of my hunger was disrupted by my misuse of food. I remember that one day I woke up and thought, instead of going to school and dealing with the pressure and stress of 9^th grade with all of its uncertainty, newness, and heart break, I could stay home in my bed and eat…anything. All day long. I could taste and chew and fill and never have to feel the sadness and depression of loss that I was carrying around (starting with the sudden death of my grandfather, followed by a painful break up, and the ending two close friendships). If I just keep eating and tasting the tastes of delicious sweetness, I won’t have to feel a thing ever again!

Or so I thought.

When it didn’t work, I had to stop. I wanted to stop. I was more than willing to figure out how to eat normally and healthfully again. So I began to listen to the signals of hunger and fullness, and my eating began to be rhythmic and predictable and feel good and normal. I stopped obsessing all day long about it. Sure, my mind would wander and do what it did, but I became so grounded in my own hunger urges and needs and queues, that the chatter in my brain didn’t matter to what I actually did in terms of eating. My soul and body took over the chatter in my brain, and I started to trust myself .  

When my writing didn’t catch fire in the industry as I thought it would years ago, I just wrote more and harder and faster because then I didn’t have to face the pain of loss, disappointment, and heartbreak.

Geneen Roth talks about how food is just food and not love. It is not power or control either. Food brings you the ability to be nourished and it keeps you alive. The same can be said about writing, yet there is a break down in this analogy—writing can bring about change, and it can bring about love. It can also bring about hate, fear, rage…because writing is art. Art has power, has the capacity to be powerful. But writing is not love. Writing is not worth. When I write compulsively, I take away my own power, my own self-trust, my own authentic voice.  

When I use writing to avoid emotional struggle and pain, when I use it as a weapon against myself, when I go at it with a rawness that no longer feels healing, writing is just as bad as compulsive eating, gambling, or drinking.

Yes, something so good can become so bad, if you use it to avoid emotional distress and pain.

When I began to eat based on internal and natural cues, I started to remember that I used to do that, that before puberty took hold of me, before I started to be afraid of my feelings, I would do a lot of thing without too much obsessing and worry.

Today, I don’t eat to avoid pain. I don’t eat to block things in my life. I eat for hunger, flavor, and taste. Eating is enjoyable, but when it is over and I am full, I move on and live . There is no struggle.

Over the last year and a half, I’ve stopped writing compulsively and have started to listen to internal cues about what I love to write. I love writing this piece. I love helping my clients write. I love writing freely or writing for a purpose or writing on a deadline.

I hurt as I sit here and write this. I hurt about my manuscripts that sit in my computer and that are not agented and that are not considered by editors. I’m sad about my books that sit in my closet not in the hands of readers. The difference is, I allow myself to feel all the hurt and pain, and I don’t write to avoid it. I accept the pain of rejection, of “no”, and in that acceptance, I find my own yes, my own pleasure for writing.   

Yet, Another Blog On The Struggle To Accept And Trust Myself.

Last week I had one of those moments…You know, those moments where you are going along in your life, making decisions about things both big and small–"I’m gonna self publish again" and "I’m gonna buy myself a new pair of over priced jeans"– feeling confident, feeling like, "yeah, man, I know what I am doing."

You are going about your life, doing things that on a PMS-feeling-fat-and-ugly-day you might obsess over or question yourself on, but not on this day. On this day, you are sailing. You are in charge. You know what’s right and ain’t nobody gonna bring you down and then–

BAM.

You get an email or phone call, or maybe it’s an actual in-person encounter, but whatever IT is, it’s that small moment, a little tiny patch of words spoken or flashing on the screen that takes you down a notch. Words that you didn’t expect to read/hear. Words that you didn't expect to HIT you so HARD.

Well, THAT happened to me last week.

First, I should back up and tell you that I decided to go ahead and start the process of self-publishing the third Maddie book. It wasn’t just one thing that made me decide to move forward. It was several:

• An invitation to participate in the 1st RI Self Published Authors Fair (a sign to me that we have a chance at being legitimized).
• The outpouring support of Facebook Friends for my work (reviving interest and sales in a book that is now 5 years old).
• A phone call from Barnes and Nobles in Smithfield asking me to be part of their local authors’ fair in May.
• An invitation to be part of 5 Awesome YA Fans book of the month club in August (You should check out their site. They rock!)
• A no-response from yet another agent who has already rejected one book and then requested another but hasn’t given me word one about its status.
• The manuscript has been edited and copy edited since September, sitting, collecting dust, ready to go.
• My first residency experince in January at Pine Manor College, where I realized that I can focus on craft, writing new things, and still self-publish this next book, that my self-publishing doesn’t matter, doesn’t define who I am as a writer.

These signs hammered the nail on my decision to self-publish again. I have come to realize that I’ve been waiting 3 years (a total of 10) for a publisher to pick up my series, and I can’t wait any more. I was patient. I have done all the “right things”. Click here for the list. So, these were signs to me that, okay, the bottom line is, your book, your writing– some people want it, and so it’s now your job to get it to them, and since you can’t get a publisher to do it, you gotta do it yourself. Focus on who wants you, not who doesn’t. Let go of all these struggles, of trying to break into mainstream publishing, and accept where you are, which is without a prospect for a book deal and with the possibility of self-publishing.

Of course, there’s a real problem when you make a decision to do something based on someone, anyone, other than yourself. If the deciding comes from the outside verses the in, it’s actually a very thinly-made decision. It’s this subtle affirmation and validation to yourself that you, in fact, don’t matter as much as other people and what other people think. So even if I make this decision for those “who want me” as opposed to “those who don’t”–it’s still based on the flimsy validation of other people. I don’t mean flimsy to insult, but more on the reality that at the end of the day, it’s you who you see in the mirror, and you who you gotta wake up to every morning. Feel me?


Of course, I didn’t realize any of this until last week, when I saw those words in that email.

“Maybe you should wait to self-publish.” This was followed by a few reasons, none of which really matter to this blog (but I will talk about those VERY GOOD reasons in my next blog) The reasons aren’t the point; it’s how these words all hit me, that’s the point.

So, I read those words, and instead of taking a deep breath and reminding myself that I totally understood and knew that this person was just giving his/her opinion and from a very caring place, that I should listen and consider these reasons even if I do go ahead and decide to self-publish now, instead of doing that, I freaked.

My head and emotions will do what they do…So, I took his/her comments, spun them into “s/he doesn’t support me, s/he’s talking down to me, oh-my-god everyone is going to be mad at me. They are going to kick me out school…

Yeah, I lost my mind. Totally.

In making the decision to self-publish, I didn’t do something that’s very crucial to the process of making a good decision, a solid decision. I didn’t “ground myself in my feelings” as my husband always advises me to do before I do anything that I feel insecure about. Before you do it, just sit with yourself and get grounded in exactly what you feel. Make sure that what ever you decide to do, ultimately, that decision comes from you and not a desire to please someone else or guilt over someone else. Translation: if you are gonna do something, do it for you and not for anyone else and be prepared that some people will not like what you do, but if you are solid and grounded in you, it won’t matter. In fact, you will hear that person’s opinion, and it won’t even bother you because you are so grounded.

Recently, and I will get back to my story in a minute, but you know that I had to mention my father in all this because, of course, in the middle of all this lingers the ghost of my “Daddy issues”, which, I know are where all this looking outside myself for approval came from. Well, in the last two weeks, as I was preparing to self-publish, my father and I got onto a battle royal that resulted in me making a huge decision to let him go, officially. I got grounded in this decision before I made it. I wrote a well thought-out caring letter that said, “ I need to say goodbye for now because this relationship does nothing but make me feel bad.” Then, of course, he responded, and I was thrown, off course. Started to second-guess myself and my decision, etc.

So, as you can see, I’m kind of sensitive, anyway, right now. My dad has a way of making me feel wrong about myself, untrusting of myself so this email, those words, to me, implied that my decision to self-publish was wrong.

Now, back to today to the email.

As I said, I started the process of self-publishing book 3 and going into this experience, this time around, I made a decision that I thought I was grounded in. My decision was to do this in a really no-frills, no-stress way. That is, not run around begging for endorsements to put in the book, not send out a press release way in advance. This time I was going to publish it, and do mainly things on-line and kind of let things happen, you know. Make it fun and organic. Realistically, I have to consider this time around that I have less time and money to spend on pre-publishing publicity. I decided to rely on my online presence and my already established fan base (as small as it is). Let things happen. After all, I wasn’t publishing for profit or fame but for the sake of sharing with people.

However, I thought about contacting this one particular person (who sent me this email), not to get approval for doing this but to see if s/he would maybe want to read it and give me a quote. Something I might put on the cover or website. I made sure to stress that he/she totally had an out, and I wouldn’t be insulted if s/he said no. I chose this person because I thought that s/he understood me as a writer, as an author, understood this long journey I have been on.

Here’s what happened:

Instead of a “yay” or “nay” or “go get ‘um tiger but I don’t know if I have time to read it”, instead of any variation of those responses I got:

Wait. Maybe you are rushing into this.

Which, in and of itself, is not a bad or negative response. I mean it's not what I expected. Only because I hadn't asked what this person thought about me self-publishing, but that's okay. I welcome input.

But… suddenly (thanks to daddy issues circulating my emotional stratosphere) I was zoomed back to a terrible experience I had with an author on a message board who told me I should “stop all this self-publishing and work on being a better writer so you can get a real book deal and be legitimate.” I won’t out her here, but she is a very famous author. She spent several postings ripping me– publicly– a new one. I gently invited her to read my work before she called it “not legitimate” and she never responded. Other people on the list who had read my work told her that I was, in fact, a very good, if not better writer than a lot of regularly published authors. Well, I left the message board and left them all to debate me and my legitimacy.

That was 4 years ago.

This week, staring at these words and those reasons why I shouldn’t self-publish, I felt just like I did four years ago. I felt not legitimate. I felt wrong. I felt stupid.

Just when I got my groove back, my self-published author mojo, someone who I thought supported and understood why I would go back and self-publish again, just– BAM– knocked me out of orbit.

But can I blame the person who wrote this email? Just like with Dad. Can I blame anyone for my mind going a-flutter? For my own lack of self-trust? No. I can’t. I can’t blame anyone when I have a sudden second-guessing moment. Well, I can blame someone.

ME.

This is all about me, as per usual.

When I hear something about myself–an opinion of someone about me and what I am doing–I typically jump to “oh, they must be right”. Up until I was 30, I believed those people (okay, my father) who told me I was wrong. Wrong about my career path. Wrong about my decision to work from home and be with my children. Wrong about self-publishing. As a child, I often felt like I was such a mess that I couldn’t be trusted to make a good decision. After all, I am too “impulsive”, too “talkative”, too “emotional” and too “expressive”.

But I am 33.75 now and truly don’t believe any of the above, but I’m still insecure and some times it still can take very little to shake my foundation. Considering my vulnerable state last week thanks to “daddy issues”, my foundation was a little shaken by those words.

So, shake it, these words did. However, those words didn’t break it.

The thing is, I want to self-publish and don’t see what difference it makes to my work at school or to anyone. Really, isn’t self-publishing about me?

Isn’t it?

But another thing for me to consider, to understand, to chill out about is, people are going to tell you what they think, and most of the time, as in this particular time, it is out of caring for you, not putting you down or telling you what to do. The only reason why I, we, anyone gets nuts when stuff like this happens, is because we are not fully grounded in our selves and part of us, a large part needs/wants the validation of others. But, truthfully, others don't matter as much as yourself and what you feel and know to be right for you.

And now that I have gotten my baggage out of the way, I can really hear what this person who sent me that email has to say because what they have to say does matter.

It really does.

But, I'm still gonna self-publish.

And it's all okay.