I’m proud of myself.

This kind of post is usually reserved for New Year’s stuff, but screw it. This is my blog, and I just thought of this topic recently. Also, I don’t really do New Year’s recaps or resolutions. I have some goals for the year, but that’s about it.

I’ve been sharing how I’ve been struggling lately. I’ve been trying to keep it positive, with the stories ending with how I’m making changes or what I’m improving or how I’m feeling better after doing X thing.

But I’m still getting a lot of comments from people about how I should handle the struggle, or empathizing with me feeling down. I deeply appreciate that people are empathizing with me and want to offer sympathy or advice, but like, did you read to the end? Like to the part where I said I figured out why I felt bad and found a way to feel better?

So let me just talk about the ways I feel better, and how I’m proud of myself for figuring my shit out.

Firstly, there’s the marketing thing. I had been avoiding marketing, and it turns out the reason was that I was afraid of the people who might read my books. Like, they might be demons or something. (My brain was literally conjuring images of demonic creatures reading my books and trying to kill me when they didn’t like them. As if a. demons would be reading my books, and b. they definitely won’t like them. Brains are crazy.)

I identified the problem, I began picturing the people I’ve actually met at art fairs who’ve purchased my books, and every time my brain wanted to show me demons, I replied with images of the fun nerds who are not all that different from me. When my brain tried to quibble, I could insist: I’ve MET these people! They are real! They like what I’m doing, they’ve told me so! All I have to do is find more of them. That’s what marketing is — looking for more people who will LIKE my books.

And slowly, I started to get excited about marketing. Yay me!

After that, I started suffering from comparisonitis bad. Like, bad enough that it was affecting my ability to write. That can’t stand. I need to be able to put words on a page and not be crippled with worries about whether or not I’m doing “enough.”

So I figured out what the issue was and why, (well, my husband was the one who pointed it out, I knew I was feeling bad but I was clueless as to why), and came to a decision about working for myself: If I have to work part time for someone else to pay my bills in order to be able to write at my own pace, so be it. I will do that. I cannot let myself get crazy stressed about writing so that I don’t write. If the idea of writing as a full-time job is making me stressed, then that idea has to go.

And pretty much right away, I started writing more and feeling better about days when I can only find ten minutes to write — or no minutes at all. Yay me!

My own mind is a minefield of doubts, anxieties, and insecurities combined with a wild imagination. That imagination is great for writing stories, not so great for setting fire to anxieties. (Well, I suppose having a wild imagination is great for setting fire to anxieties — that’s the whole problem. But I digress.) I started learning a long time ago with my excellent therapist how to manage all that, and I am learning every day how to build on those lessons and keep up with the bullshit my brain keeps coming up with.

I’m practically my own therapist these days, and I’m pretty good at it. It can take me a little while to realize what’s happening in there, and sometimes I need an outside perspective to clarify things, (thanks, husband!) but I’ve developed good responses to my issues, and I’m learning better and better practices all the time.

Yay me!