Dear Readers,
It’s been a strange time since my last post.
You will have seen the photos and video of me laughing and dancing in celebration of my long-held dream finally coming true. I published my first novel. We threw a fabulous party. I wore the red dress. There was flamenco, Spanish food, alcohol-free sangria, music and a house full of people celebrating with me.
I wasn’t expecting there to be such an anti-climax afterwards.
It came accompanied by an awful dose of the flu, which sent me hiding under the duvet in more ways than one.
All I kept thinking was that I should be out there visiting more bookshops, asking them to take a chance on a novel by an unknown independent author. A few had already said no. That’s the reality of putting something you’ve made out into the world.
While lying in my sick bed feeling as though the joy was being sucked out of me, thoughts floated in and out like flags waving in the wind.
One of them stuck and it was this: Something can be monumental in one person’s life and barely register in somebody else’s.
Publishing this book felt enormous to me because I know what it took to get there. My family and friends understood because they knew the backstory and had shared part of the journey with me.
But why should everybody else feel the same way?
Now that I’m on the mend, I’ve been thinking about where we derive our meaning and satisfaction from in life. I’ve personally always found achievement seductive. I have a terrible habit of measuring my success by the amount of praise I receive for the things I achieve. It’s as though I’ve needed to keep striving in order to feel that I’m enough.
And so, in my sick bed, I found myself going around in circles wondering who I would be if I stopped striving.
What if the question that I’ve been asking myself all along – Am I enough? – is the wrong question altogether?
Maybe a better question is: What do I have to give?
What if I were simply happy living in the moment, tending to my family and friendships, nurturing my garden, writing because I love writing, riding my bike, walking my dog, and giving some of my time to people in my community?
Honestly, that makes me feel warm inside.
Around the same time, I was talking to my son about social media and the extraordinarily unequal distribution of attention we see on these platforms.
And, naturally, I thought of Oprah.
All it would take is for Opray Winfrey to somehow stumble across In a Different Light, read it, love it and hold it up to the camera.
Boom!
Suddenly thousands of people might want to read my book.
Who wouldn’t fantasise about that?
But lying there, shivering under my duvet, I started thinking about what would actually have changed. Not the book. Not one word. The only thing that would have changed would be the amount of attention being paid to the book.
That make me sit up. Because how often do we confuse attention with value?
How often do we look at something that millions of people are watching, buying, reading or talking about and assume that all that attention must tell us something about its worth?
And how often do we make the same mistake with ourselves?
Of course I’d be thrilled if thousands of people suddenly wanted to read my book. But then what?
My life would become considerably more demanding. The financial rewards might be lovely and I’d like to think that I would do some good with the money, but fame has never particularly appealed to me.
And that’s when I realised something else. What I have aspired to, for much of my life, is proving wrong the people who told me I was bad as a child and continued to treat me accordingly as an adult.
There it was. Something I had been trying to do for years without realising it.
Accumulate enough evidence to overturn an old verdict.
Look what I’ve achieved. Look what I’ve survived. Look what I’ve created. Look who loves me.
Surely all of this proves I’m not the person I was once told I was?
But I think I got my wires crossed somewhere. My achievements don’t prove that I’m a good person. And a lack of applause for those achievements doesn’t prove the opposite.
Maybe the original verdict was never mine to disprove.
I’ve called this blog Looking Up because I’m beginning to wonder whether I’ve spent far too much time looking inward, examining myself, evaluating myself and asking what everything means about me.
I think it’s time to stop navel-gazing for a while and look up. To notice who is around me. To see where I might make somebody’s day a little easier.
I have volunteered at different times in my life, and I know how much connection with other people can change the way I experience my own life.
That said, I must be careful. I don’t want helping other people to become another test of my worthiness. I don’t need to volunteer enough hours, perform enough good deeds or help enough people to prove that I’m a good person. That would just be moving the goalposts again.
But I do wonder whether contribution gives us something that endless self-evaluation cannot.
Connection.
Perhaps we don’t always need to feel better about ourselves. Sometimes we might simply need to think about ourselves a little less.
None of this means I’m giving up writing – or ambition. Far from it. I enjoy writing too much. And God knows, there are way too many stories baking inside my head. I’m afraid they might burn a hole in it if I don’t get them onto paper.
Book number two is now demanding attention. It’s already a well-baked story as I started writing it in 2009 – set in Singapore. Perhaps I can finish it without giving it another job it was never designed to do – that of proving I’m worthy.
The cloud that brought the flu to my door did have a silver lining. It forced me to stop long enough to think about where I am and where I want to go next.
I don’t have all the answers. After all this thinking, I may even have a lot more questions!
But today I’m going to look up.
I’m going to investigate a volunteering opportunity I’ve been thinking about for some time. Not because helping somebody else will prove that I’m a good person, but because I know from experience that connecting with other people gets me out of the hall of mirrors inside my own head.
Maybe that’s enough for today.
What’s one small thing you could do today to bring comfort or joy to somebody who might need it?
Thanks for being here.
Love,
Gill 💚
PS: Since I’ve talked about In a Different Light in this post, if you’d like to read it, you can find out how to buy it here.
