welcome to my bullshit

I got an email from an indie publishing leader this morning. The opening paragraph was something like the title of this post.

"Someone who is a worse writer than you is making more money than you because they are showing up."

Now, this is true. Period.

However, the above sentence has the same effect as the therapist my sister saw on Saturday Night Live:

Therapist: "What are you most afraid of?"

Client: "I'm afraid of being buried alive in a box."

Therapist: "Well, STOP IT!"

The joke, of course, is that this method doesn't fucking work and everyone knows it. If it were that easy, we would all have done it by now!

I would offer another solution: figure out why you're hesitating. If you need to talk to a therapist, do it. If you can't afford therapy, read psych books and self-help books. Therapists often recommend them because they help. Where is your block? Be honest, but be kind with yourself.

The answer is going to be different for everyone. For me, it was the horrid teacher in fourth grade degrading me through my art. Maybe you have a boogieman like that in your closet of anxieties. Maybe your anxiety is just telling you that you can't. Maybe your depression makes moving forward feel like too much responsibility. I don't know. It's going to be different for all of us.

But that opening statement from the email this morning just frustrated me. I've heard it before. It never helped. It just made me feel guilty and more like a failure. What did help was having my feelings identified, validated, and explained.

So, a piece of advice when you want to motivate someone by getting them riled up, incensed, or pissed off:

It's fight/flight, and if those things are thwarted, then you go into freeze/fawn. If you find yourself going into freeze/fawn immediately as a fear response, it's because your flight/fight response has been thwarted so many times your brain has learned to skip over that step.

Then I got into trauma therapy, and was talking with my therapist about all the times adults told me that life wasn't fair when I was growing up. It was most often used as a justification to not be nice to me. Sometimes it was because I was being whiny over something silly, and sometimes it was to excuse themselves for being genuinely mean to a little kid.

And you know what?

Yeah, life ain't fair. Nature, red in tooth and claw and all that. Dog eat dog. Kill or be killed. I get it.

Justice and fairness are things we humans invented. They're not real. And if we don't offer them to each other, nothing much happens. Other than the mistrust of whomever we have denied them to.

But our society and our relationships are built on this non-existent idea of fairness. When you decline to participate, you decline to participate in society. You decline to participate in being human.

This goes for being fair to family and friends as well as the populace at large. Fairness is what our entire society is built on. We couldn't have cities or agriculture or science or anything that requires human cooperation if we didn't have any concept of fairness.

Fairness, justice, and mercy are essential components of who and what we are.

People are very basic creatures, but we try to make things so much more complicated than they really are. All it does is take up energy and make our lives fail to be satisfying.

We're all so afraid of not being good enough and are so mean to each other because of it. Trying to prove we're better than someone else for a momentary ego boost, or projecting our fears of not being good enough onto other people -- "I don't think I'm not good enough, YOU don't think I'm good enough!"

Meanwhile, we're just social animals -- we need company, safety, food, sex, water, shelter. We're no more complicated than our cats and dogs. We can DO more complicated things, and THINK more complicated thoughts, but we're not complicated creatures by any means.

Most of us are scared that if we're not good enough, we'll be kicked out of the tribe and die. But because we don't even realize that's what we're afraid of, and afraid to admit we feel that we fall short (because if you even think that you might not be good enough, even quietly to yourself, someone might figure you out and give you the boot), everything becomes a mess, from friendships to politics.

A couple years ago, I set a goal to be earning $2,000 a month from my books by the end of 2025.

I haven’t met that goal, and I’m not mad at myself. Here’s why:

If you’ve been following me for a while, you know that I’ve been going through some really rough stuff. Chronic pain that sent me first to my chiropractor, then my doctor, then the ER, and finally a trauma therapist. Trauma therapy. Working my day job more hours than I really want to.

At first, I was really angry at myself that I wasn’t writing through all this. There’s been a push towards healthier lifestyles lately in the public discourse, but the “you have to be doing, being productive, making art even if you’re dying” mentality has been hammered into all of us for so long and from such a young age, it can be hard to push past that and give oneself some grace and time and care.

Thanks capitalism and Catholicism, no one needed their mental health anyway.

But then I realized the progress I’ve made these past two years, dealing with a lot of what’s been holding me back all this time, and I’m good with not reaching my goal. Not yet, anyway.

I’ll tell you something cool I recently learned: Setting goals isn’t about putting yourself under pressure and meeting them at any cost and beating yourself up and giving up if you don’t make it.

It’s about trying, learning, and having your own back whether you succeed or need to adjust.

I had a whole bunch of mental and emotional anguish around a lot of things that I had not been dealing with. Part of trying to get my act together and accomplish a goal with my writing was figuring that out and appropriately dealing with it. I didn’t know that when I set the goal, I had to learn it along the way. But now I know, and I will move the end date of my goal appropriately.

It’s not time to set a new date yet. I still have things to sort through, and no idea how long that will take. Setting a new date will come when it comes. Hell, I might even succeed before I think I’m ready to set a goal date, I don’t know.

Bottom line, I’m here, I’m changing my life in the ways I need to, and I’m doing my best.

2. I edited chapters 13 AND 14 today, and got some work on 15!

Teaser: there was a fight scene in which I used the word "slam" or "slammed" NINE FUCKING TIMES on one page! That has been reduced to one time. Yay me!

I have a lot of reasons why. I went camping, I've had a lot of house chores to do, work has been super busy, therapy has been tough.

These are valid things. But I still feel bad saying they've pulled me away from the latest novel.

You're so bad you make me mad

Hey kitty!

👏👏👏

Hey kitty!