What have I done..??

On making your private life public

My book comes out in exactly one week. Seven days.

People (lovely people) keep asking me how I feel about it. And the truth is, I’ve been very up and down. Excited. Then terrified. Then over-tired, burnt out. Then impatient and energised again.

Most recently, my inner monologue has been one long panicky wail, along the lines of: What have I done????

Or perhaps, more precisely, why have I done this to myself?

No one was forcing me to write a book.

I didn’t need to do this, at least not in the literal sense.

My livelihood didn’t depend on it.

I didn’t have to share these details of my life, of Dan’s life, of our family life.

I didn’t need to put myself in the path of any potential criticism.

Throughout this entire process – the writing and then all the other work that goes into actually publishing – I have been trying very hard not to turn a gift into a burden. After all, I chose this. I wanted this. I dreamed of this.

I also know that what I’m experiencing is a vulnerability hangover. (Albeit of Jägerbombs-at-3am proportions). I also know I need to try to keep some perspective here. I’m not Prince Harry.  

But I also want to be honest and say that the last couple of weeks have not been fabulous for my mental health.

It’s such a long, slow burn, writing and then publishing a book. People actually reading it feels like a distant prospect for such a long time….right up until it isn’t. (For context, I finished writing the first draft more than a year ago now. I finished the final round of edits in the summer).

Since handing in the manuscript, any anxieties I’ve had have mostly centred around the actual technical work of it: getting my facts right, citing my sources, writing inclusively, quoting people in ways they’re comfortable with, etc etc.

Then, in the last month or so, I passed some imperceptible junction, which seems to have switched all of my anxiety on to a different track. I’ve gone from worries about being a bad writer to worries about being exposed as a bad person, a bad friend, a bad wife, and – most of all – a bad mother.

In particular, this has meant I’ve been hyper-sensitive to less-than-perfect parenting moments. And it’s not nice. I feel guilty. So I shout. I snipe at Dan. I tell myself I can’t do it. That I shouldn’t do it. How can I have written this book, and be such a crap parent, I think.

The good news is, things tend to calm down when I recognise what’s going on. (And also when I take a bit of a break, eat square meals, and go to bed early. I really do need to remember the advice I read recently that: if you think everyone hates you, you’re tired. And if you hate everyone, you’re hungry).  

Anyway, at the weekend an extract from Life, Almost was published in the Times Magazine (you can read it here) which was such an incredible vote of confidence. I cried – in a good way – when my publisher told me they wanted to run it.

And while the over-whelming response to the piece was positive and really heartening, I also got my first taste of other kinds of feedback:

‘There are thousands of children in need of fostering or adopting.’

‘The world is over-populated already.’

‘Seriously, early miscarriage is not that unusual – it happens to loads of women.’

And the exact sort of personal judgments I’d been dreading – that I’m wrong in some way, selfish, even attention-seeking – made me feel completely different in reality than they had in my imagination.

I felt calm. Resolved in a way I’d lost touch with, recently.

Those comments gave my question an answer.

Why have I done this? Because we live in a world where people still feel the need to say things like ‘you could just adopt’ or ‘just keep trying’ when people face recurrent miscarriage or infertility. Because people still don’t understand. Because there is still such a lot to learn.

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Things I’ve read/watched/listened to…*

It’s Groundhog Day! Here’s what a film lecturer learned from watching the Bill Murray classic every day for a year. (I am going to re-watch tonight.)

On the subject of re-watching, the Sentimental Garbage podcast’s two-parter on Gilmore Girls arrived exactly when I needed it. I’ve been watching GG on and off – for comfort, for company – for ten years now. My own pet Very A Dissertation take on the show is that it wraps pro-choice messaging up inside a premise that at face-value would seem to be the opposite. The Planned Parenthood poster on Rory’s wall at Yale? Obsessed.

This poem.

And this on the early signs of burnout - and what to do about it.

*Overwhelm edition

(Thank you for indulging me with this super-indulgent post. Did I mention that there’s only a WEEK TO GO until the book is published?)