In which a love-seeker daringly takes her own good advice.
Whenever a family member or friend is feeling all beleaguered, stressed and overwhelmed—particularly by difficult people—I always like to send him or her off with this direction: “Remember who loves you!” These are the words I call it out to family members as they leave for work. I say them as counsel to friends who’ve been confiding their troubles. I even jot them on notes of encouragement that I pop in the mail.
I’m thinking about this now as I try, once again, to come to terms with the slow progress of my current personal reinvention. It seems to me that it is taking a very, very long time to emerge from my chrysalis. I am ready to flap my wings. That I’m still in transition to finding my next job, well, let’s just say I am not pleased. I want to know what my next right work is going to look like. I want a job. A clear job with a mission and a purpose and a fair income. Impatient? That’s my middle name.
Here’s the thing: I have this book manuscript—The Hungry Ghost: How I Ditched 100 Pounds and Came Fully Alive. And though I’ve been a professional writer and editor for decades, this work is so close to my heart that I’m having trouble putting it out there in the world. To do that, well, it feels kind of like sending a two-year-old off to kindergarten. “I’m not ready,” says the little girl. “You can’t make me!”
The crux of the matter isn’t that I don’t believe in the book. I do. It’s good. And it feels like it was given to me to give to people like me who every day battle all the indignities of food addiction, compulsive overeating and obesity.
I’m not sure what the problem is. Maybe it’s that I hate criticism. Not so much for my writing. I’ve faced that before. It’s criticism of me and what I believe that I fear. I’m also scared of living large—inviting the whole world to know my story.
I don’t know what’s going on. I do know that the difficult person I’m dealing with at the moment is, you got it, myself!
Because the fact of the matter is, maybe the timing just isn’t right. You know, in God’s time not mine and all that.
So why give myself a hard time? Maybe I should remember who loves me. Lean into the love. Remember a love-saturated moment and recall the feeling I had and summon it up. Absorb. Slow down. Feel it. Take it in.
What do you think? Couldn’t hurt, right? Okay. Right now. Let’s all take a slow, deep breath and remember who loves us!
I face this a lot in this writing climate. We can’t escape criticism in the digital world–every reader review is front and center, and they can sting. And with the crowded marketplace, it’s so hard to get noticed–by agents, by editors, and by book buyers. It can lead to a lot of doubt: “Isn’t this a stupid story to put out there? Why would anyone want to read this? Isn’t this just about me wanting people to read me?” Or maybe those are questions at are peculiar to my mean girl inside my brain. At any rate, when I go through this, I try to remind myself that writing is a gift for others–that it doesn’t matter if that gift helps just one other person or five or five million. It’s the gift that matters, not how it’s packaged, who helped you package it, and where it ends up on a digital or real life shelf.
I very much relate to your state of mind. I was able to publish a much revised version of my doctoral dissertation. Soon after I began working on another book, so that’s been 11 years. It has twice come under contract and both times the project did not survive the second round of reviews. One time two very highly regarded people in the field recommended publication and the publishers did not offer a contract based on a market analysis. That publisher (actually two publishers collaborating) is no longer publishing books.
While my second manuscript was still under contract, I met an employee of a crossover press that I had thought of but did not approach as I thought you needed an agent. He said no. So when the second contract was broken in October and November I immediately thought of this publisher. I obtained and read parts of two books on their education list. I kept discouraging myself as I felt the wind had been knocked out of my sails. I began a new research project, wrote a conference proposal on the research that was accepted for presentation in June, started an application for approval of human subject research. In the context of this detached state, two months after the rejection, I queried the executive editor of the scary press and, in about 45 minutes, received a reply that she was forwarding my query to the education editor. He replied the next day thanking me for reading their books, asking me some questions (he was not Interested In a how-to book and I replied that I disliked that genre and certainly hoped I had not written one). He asked for a synopsis and chapter outline. I revised what I had for this new audience and he said he would get back to me after the holidays.
Do I have a point? Not sure. Just read around and see who is publishing something like recovery narratives or illness narratives (pathographies), read some of their work, and query. BTW, you could test the market with a journal like the Yale Journal of Humanities and Medicine. They published my essay on diagnosis and treatment and recovery from a cyst on the brain written as creative nonfiction, “T Third Circulation.”