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cosettepontmercys · 1 year

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I met Chloe Gong at a book signing and was so excited to meet her (I'm also Gen z trying to be published) and I told her this and that maybe I could be in her author friend group and she just...laughed. She shot her friend or whoever was helping her a side eye like "get a load of this loser" and then did that mean girl thing where they giggle and humor you. I know she was making fun of me with her friend. I felt humiliated and got home and gave my sister the signed book because I didn't want to look at it anymore. I've heard other people say she has mean girl energy but I didn't want to believe them and now I'm crushed.

hello love!! first, i'm really sorry that that your experience meeting someone you really looked up to was less than desired, to put it lightly. i don't know what chloe is like personally, and even if i did, i don't think that matters in this conversation. on another note, it's really amazing that you're working towards being published! i wish you all the best in your journey, and i hope you find your community soon. i know that publishing can be really isolating, and while i'm not personally trying to get published, i know a lot of traditionally published authors i follow + friends who are querying have spoken about that. i would encourage you to seek out people who are in a similar boat to you (trying to get published), and trying to build authentic relationships, whether it's through things like writertwt, writeblr, instagram, mentorship programs, discords, or other areas. while reading this ask, it reminded me of something i read once in my emails — an author that i like, allison saft, occasionally offers up writerly advice in her newsletters, and i thought some of it might resonate with you/offer you some comfort. it's from her september 24, 2021 email newsletter (i had to dig for this one in my inbox). i've copy/pasted both the initial letter, and allison's response, under the read more 🤍 i'm sending you a big hug, and a lot of love your way!

initial letter:

Hey Al,

I’ve been struggling with the loneliness of being a writer. I understand that it’s just part of the job, and I also recognize that my personality/mental health only makes it more isolating. Sometimes it feels like I’ve made a sort of self-inflicted prison, and I don’t know how to get myself out of it.

I’ve tried being more involved on social media, which is terrible for my mental health for several reasons. Part of it is seeing people succeeding – and often only seeing the highlights of someone’s career – while I’m trudging through a draft feeling like every word is awful and I’m never going to get anywhere. Sometimes it feels like all the ambition in me is turning to rot.

But another (possibly even worse) struggle with social media is seeing the bonds other writers have formed with each other. Of course, I know that sometimes social media interactions can make it seem like people are closer than they are, but I think pretty much every writer/author I’ve followed has at one point or another talked of the importance of having writing friends and critique partners, having people you feel comfortable sharing your work and your struggles with, people to encourage you along the way. And seeing those reminders of what I’ve always struggled to form…well, it gets to be a lot. I’ve heard authors talk all the time of how, despite writing being a very lonely thing, it’s impossible to do it alone.

But, when you are alone, how do you cope with that? I know I’m supposed to be my own cheerleader – and sometimes I am – but more and more often I feel like I’m only my worst critic. And sometimes it’s hard to even want to keep writing when there’s no one else to share the process with. I think another part of the problem may be that I feel like I should be able to do it all on my own, and yet I keep failing in every possible way.

I’m not even really sure what I’m asking at this point, but the combination of mental health struggles and writing being a very solitary thing have me feeling like I’m sort of just desperately grasping at any bit of advice.

Thanks, Lone Wolf

allison's response:

Hi there LW,

I want to begin by saying that I’m so sorry you’re hurting—and thank you for writing in. This may be a strange thing to say, but… this letter is beautiful, both in sentiment and in writing. I can only imagine how your books must read; they must be just as true and aching. I believe I will speak for at least 75% of people reading this right now in saying, OUCH. This was painfully relatable.

You said you don’t know what you’re asking, but it seems to me that you have a clear and important question. When we yearn for connection—both as artists and as social beings—how do we carry on without it? I think there is a second question lurking underneath the first, one I have asked myself many times: How does everyone else manage to do what I can’t? These are hard, heavy questions. I’m going to answer them to the best of my ability. But first, I want to tell you a few things—not to diminish your concerns but maybe to soften them. I can tell how tight of a hold they have on you.

I think you’ve hit on the great paradox of being a writer. Writing is solitary, yes, but it’s not done in a vacuum. Even when you are alone in a room, you conjure someone else beside you. The act of writing requires you to imagine an audience, a reader on the other side who will find truth and meaning in what we’ve written. Stories are meant to be shared. However, when our imagination is constrained by feelings of hopelessness and self-loathing, the only reader we can envision is hostile. My hostile reader wears many faces: upside-down versions of my editor and agents who realize I’m a hack after 2.5+ years of working together; the snarky Goodreads reviewer; or perhaps the unsmiling countenance of anonymous reader from a publication you may know, Kourkis Reviewz. But more often than not, that reader is wearing my own face. As a read through my work, I leave sneering comments to myself like, “oh, come on” or “do better” or—the most elegant in its cutting simplicity—“bad.” My standards grow more and more exacting with every piece, and yet, I never know whether I’ve achieved anything by the time I finish.

How can you possibly create under those conditions? On the most practical, career-related level, I think that’s what feel-good advice like “you can’t do it alone!” tries to address: if you’re harsh on yourself, getting outside perspective is a much-needed reality check. Sometimes, I crave validation or want others’ ideas to breathe new life into a project. So, while unpleasant, I think it’s certainly possible to write alone. I wrote Down Comes the Night before I knew “the writing community” existed, although I did have my partner to listen to my meltdowns about the process. I know a few writers who write books without critique partners. I know many more writers who have virtually no online presence, and I imagine they lead happier, more fulfilling lives than I do. But I digress.

I think you know all of this intellectually—exactly as you know that social media can be like a car’s sideview mirror: people may appear closer than they are. Let me climb back onto my Myth of the Writer hobby horse for a moment and say that this: the writing community has a toxic positivity problem. It will sell you all sorts of self-torture implements. One of them is this emphasis on an unconditionally supportive community. Find your people, we are exhorted, as if it’s a simple thing. We’re all in this together.

It’s sometimes hard to reconcile that attitude with what we’re willing to do to each other, with the zero-sum mentality The Industry implants in us. And even if people aren’t actively malicious, it can be difficult to navigate the vast gulf publishing wedges between us. Jealousy and self-pity can hurt others if we’re not careful, and in my experience, few of us are equipped with the communication skills to take that care 100% of the time. What I’m saying is that writer friendships can be deeply fraught, and we don’t see the struggles behind the scenes. Certain friendships can become part of your online persona—and consequently, they become shackles. But I’m not going to sit here and tell you something ridiculous and curmudgeonly like, “You don’t need friends!” or “All friendships between writers are doomed to fail!” because it’s not true. We all need friends. We especially need friends who understand what we’re going through. Honestly—and it sounds like you may relate to this—we need friends to keep us from becoming jaded. On the days where my own ambitions feel pointless and rotten, I can feel hope for those I love.

So let me gently push back on that lie you’re telling yourself: you can’t go through life alone. However, I don’t want you to turn that into a stick to beat yourself with because, oh, here’s Al telling me what I already know: that I do need writing friends and I’m a failure for not having that squared away already. But listen, LW: you are not a failure. You’re torturing yourself with this belief that you should be able to power through feelings of self-doubt and loneliness all by yourself. You’re punishing yourself for finding it difficult to connect with others when you’ve mentioned your mental health is poor right now. So, I don’t mean that you ought to find friends so that you can be on your way to succeeding in life and in writing. What I mean is that you deserve to share your joys and sorrows. You deserve to feel supported. You deserve to be loved.

This is allegedly an advice column, so I will now attempt to give you some advice. First, I’m afraid, we must talk about a guy named Jacques Lacan. Bear with me here, LW, and forgive me. I’ve been poisoned by my partner’s Lacan phase from early grad school. Anyway, Lacan has this concept of objet petit a, which is meant to be an algebraic symbol that represents “the unattainable object of desire.” It is, if you like, the Hitchcockian MacGuffin. Like a MacGuffin, objet a is empty and arbitrary. It’s a placeholder for something we believe will fill the void within us. If only I get this one thing, we think, I’ll be happy. And inevitably, that’s why our goalposts always move. The truth is, we will never be satisfied.

I think that’s why social media is so punishing. Beyond the fact it’s designed to keep us outraged and scrolling, it also seems to present us a window locked from the other side. We look in on the textures of people’s relationships—their inside jokes, their memes of each other’s characters, their gushing praise on each other’s snippets—and in our most self-pitying moods, we think, If only I were there. If only they’d open the door to me. If I had what they have, I’ll know I’ll have arrived. It feels like starving while you can hear all the Ring-Danes feasting in their mead hall. We’re all Grendel in this metaphor. Beowulf was the real villain all along!! Just kidding—I don’t believe (in a majority of cases) what I see people describe as “cliques” are anything more than friends being, well… friends. But I think all of us can understand that pang of longing.

Now, you may be thinking that this is a deeply depressing model of the psyche. If we’re never going to get objet a—if nothing is ever going to make us happy and whole—what’s the point of this whole living business? I don’t presume to have the answers. But Lacan says what keeps us going is not the getting but the trying. More accurately, it’s the failures. That try-fail cycle is what keeps us engaged with the world, exactly as it keeps readers engaged with a story. Love isn’t the prerequisite for happiness, and making the connections you yearn for won’t fill the void within you. But reaching out—even when it’s awkward and painful—might get close.

Forgive me for presuming, LW, but as I read your letter, it struck me that you talk about being alone almost as though it’s something you’ve resigned yourself to. That your loneliness is indeed a solid thing, a prison with no doors and no windows. It sounds terrible. And I think to a certain extent, you’re right. Loneliness is a prison. But I’ve come to believe that it’s not designed to keep us in—but rather to keep everyone else out.

Loneliness is an old friend of mine. It’s a comfortable, familiar kind of pain—one that’s often easier to bear than risking rejection. As we sit and rot in that prison of our own making, we start telling ourselves stories about ourselves: cruel fairytales that grow more powerful the more we repeat them. As they become ingrained within us, we agree with poisonous thoughts like “being alone is tolerable; it’s something I can endure indefinitely” and “friendship is not for strange, sad people like me” or “connecting with others comes easy to everyone else but not to me”—a feeling exacerbated by PDOF (public displays of online friendship, naturally).

But those are not truths, LW. They’re stories. And you are not alone.

You’re not alone in feeling alone, and you’re not uniquely broken—or broken at all. I think all of us feel as though we are strange little aliens deposited on this earth with very half-baked instructions from the mothership. We go through our days, doing our best to imitate human behavior and do our silly human tasks. We blunder through social interactions. We hurt people’s feelings by mistake. We struggle through conversations with new acquaintances. We let old friendships fade with time. We form snap connections with someone we’ll never see again. And at the end of the day, we sit with ourselves and wonder, Am I completely alone in this world? Am I doing this right? Can someone please tell me if I’m doing any of this right?

At least, that’s how I feel. Would you believe me if I told you that I’m shy? I do my best to project outgoingness and geniality online and in my day-to-day life, but often, I feel as though there is a thick pane of glass between me and the rest of the world. Sometimes I feel like I am too afraid and exhausted to go through the effort of making friends, so I flatten my personality and slow my replies until people give up on me. Sometimes I feel so unbearably lonely, even in a room full of people I love. Because of this, at various points throughout my life, I have found myself friendless in a new place or wallowing beneath the weight of relationships I needed to end. Every time I find myself alone, I think, Alright, this is it. All the best is behind me now. I will never love anyone as powerfully as I loved the people I had and lost. No one will ever crack me again. But it’s never has been true.

I didn’t have a single friend in California for the first year we lived here. I hated myself for being too weird, too reclusive, too cowardly to make the effort. I sat in my circus classes, wretched and bitter, and envied the easy camaraderie my classmates had with each other. I thought, Why not me? Why haven’t I been folded into the group? I attended events that my partner’s academic program hosted and watched people’s eyes go dull the moment they found out I wasn’t a student. But then, one fateful day in 2019, someone I recognized from Twitter of all godforsaken places walked out of the apartment a few doors down the hall from mine.

Life is serendipitous and strange that way. What’s so beautiful to me is that there are billions of people out there, basically an infinite number of them. Some of them will hurt you. Some of them will be indifferent to you. Some interactions will be awkward or neutral at best. But sometimes, you’ll meet someone who will completely change your life. You’ll hold tight to them while you have them and know that in a million years, you’ll never find a soul who’s just like them. How fortunate I feel, even in goodbyes, to have brushed against them in the fleeting time we have. I want all of this desperately for you, LW. I want you to know the rush of joy that comes when you hear your friend’s book sold—and maybe even the sting of it, too. I want you to have a group chat that implodes spectacularly and a group chat that makes you feel as though you’ve finally found your place in this world. I want you to have a writer friend who you meet for the first time at a conference, and when you embrace them, you realize that all the chemistry you had online translates to real life.

And you will. But you can’t give up.

I know it’s hard when you’re feeling low. I know it’s hard to keep trying when all of us are so isolated—especially when you know social media is bad for your health. Right now, it’s difficult to break routines, try new things, and encounter potential friends in the wild. Some days—maybe even most days—you’re not going to be able to try. That’s okay. Be gentle with yourself. And be open to anything. I met one critique group when my day-job boss—another author by some wild coincidence—generously included me in a Slack with a few of her friends. Or, if you want to give social media another go, you can do it in a limited way. Maybe join in on things like Pitch Wars prompts or weekly chats hosted by other writers that allow you to tell people about your work. Don’t scroll the dread TL, just stay in your mentions and the hashtags you like. See if you can find people whose work sounds cool and ask them to swap pages. And if you manage to find someone who gives good feedback and whose writing you like, GRAB THEM AND RUN. You don’t need to stay on social media once you’ve established a rapport.

This may take time, and you’re not going to connect with everyone you meet. But there are so many writers out there, and someday, you will find someone who it feels as easy as breathing to be around. You will find someone to keep your inner critic at bay. And I know you’re able to do it. Writing to me with what you’re feeling was brave. It was a moment of connection. Even if it felt like whispering your thoughts to the void, hey… The void is looking back, and it’s (I’m) sending you love. Nothing is permanent. Know that the coping lies in the struggle. So take it day by day. Do as much as you feel you’re able. I promise you, that’s enough.

Yours, Al

#post: answered

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