You Can Do Hard Things
I haven’t been able to post for a while, life moves along at one second per second. Never stops, never pauses. Time ticks by.
I have been more up to date on my YouTube Channel, but honestly that’s because I find video editing to be easier than straight writing. For me, writing requires a lot of concentration and the right amount of motivation. Video editing has more of an immediate feedback, there are visuals and sound you can work with. When it comes to writing, I have to generate all of that in my head and hold it steady long enough to write a scene or make a point.
The last post I wrote was in mid-February and I have been silent ever since. Lots has happened in a short amount of time.
In mid-February a publisher reached out to me and requested the full manuscript of my novel. That required me to re-read the whole thing and edit it in three days. Had to make sure it was as polished as I could make it before sending it off.
After I finished the novel and it was safely sent to the publisher, I had a bit of an emotional crash. I became very depressed the next few days and I think it was a kind of post-partum depression. I had worked so hard on that book, sunk so much of myself into it. I wrote that book during the worst moments of my life and it was an idea that I had been brainstorming for twenty years. I had sent out 144 queries to agents and publisher and got 143 “no’s.”
Now, that book I had poured so much energy into was out of my hands completely.
I’ll hear back from the publisher between June and August. In the meantime, I’m building my YouTube channel to be a platform and an audience I can point to when the publisher asks how much of a risk it might be to publish my novel.
But such was my post-partum depression that the only thing that helped me feel okay again was starting work on another novel. Now, I’m working on a cyber-punk noir thriller that I hope to have finished by May 31. That might be a bit of a stretch, but I can adjust my own schedule.
I wrote a full novel the same year my life completely fell apart—Imagine would I could do if my life was stable.
In the meantime, I secured a job. I will start that job on 3/16, fingers crossed it will be enough for me to pay the bills but also be a job that can leave me enough creative space to keep working on my passions. When I was a teacher, it drained all of my creative energy and left me miserable (my emotionally abusive marriage didn’t help either). I would love to have a job that doesn’t ask for my emotional energy. I want a job where I can actually clock out.
I also moved to a new apartment a week ago. I’ve been spending the last few days alone in my own space, arranging things the way I want them to be. It is the most amount of independence I have had in 14 years, perhaps ever had in my life.
It’s been a hectic month. I hope that with the job and the apartment I can settle into a more natural rhythm. Settle into a new life that I create on my terms.
My psychiatrist thought that I tend to minimize my own accomplishments. I tend to catastrophize and imagine detailed scenarios of how things could go horribly wrong. It’s hard for me to see how things could go wonderfully right. It’s hard to trust that anything good will happen to me—feeling hope is itself an emotional trigger. It feels easier to just assume everything will go wrong, I’ve been carrying that weight for so long and I know how to carry it.
After I told my psychiatrist all of the updates over the last month he told me something I so rarely hear: “Good job.” He then told me to write on a piece of paper an affirmation that I desperately need to tell myself more often: “You Can Do Hard Things.”
Do you need to hear that too?
