Why I will probably be kindly asked to leave Target soon

I suppose because I am someone who talks a lot about my feelings, I get a lot of platitudes and advice on how to stop being so darn sad all the time. Sometimes this is well-meaning. Sometimes I think it comes from a place of annoyance or guilt or whatever other feeling the toxic positivity machine has made people feel.

One of my recent favorites is the insinuation that I just haven’t yet learned how to manage my feelings. I need to get better at handling rejection and don’t I know that it’s just part of the industry. I need to adopt some sort of coping mechanism.

This is another one of those times where the number of assumptions people make about me/my writing journey/my personal habits/my ability to control my own emotions gets pretty annoying. Here’s the thing. Yes, I believe that rejection is part of the industry. I don’t know how I would have somehow not noticed that after ten straight years of rejection. Yes, I believe healthy coping mechanisms are important. I recommend a lot of them.

The fact of the matter is, you cannot self care your way out of a toxic system.

When people suggest that I just haven’t bothered to find healthy ways to deal, it’s actually really dismissive of the fact that I do so much to manage my own mental health around writing. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of things I’ve used as coping mechanisms:

• taking breaks from writing
• taking breaks from Twitter
• Buying stickers as treats for query rejections
• Buying vinyl as treats for full rejections
• Getting more positivity reads
• printing out compliments from betas and posting them on my walls
• having a good cry
• going on walks
• crying while on walks
• looking for fun little notebooks and pens at Target
• crying at Target
• sad girl showers
• crying in the shower
• screaming
• swearing
• making up new swear words because the old ones aren’t good enough
• getting art commissioned to celebrate
• having book funerals to process the grief of shelving a book
• venting in small group chats
• baking a consolation cake when shelving a book
• hiking
• running
• baking
• learning to embroider as a fun new creative outlet
• learning ukulele as a fun new creative outlet
• trying fanfiction
• writing a next book and another next book and another next book and…

I realize nobody else is responsible for my mental health. That’s on me, and I’ve obviously got some shit to figure out. But I could do without the suggestion that I would be handling things better if I just bothered to implement some coping mechanisms.

I have coping mechanisms. Most of them have stopped working. And frankly, the amount of public crying is getting a little weird.

“Everyone’s journey is different.” This gets used all the time in publishing, often to dismiss the fact that the industry is, bluntly put, ultimately unfair. This phrase is often used to suggest that you shouldn’t feel bad if your journey is harder than someone else’s. Yet while we recognize that the path to reaching different milestones is different from everyone, we never turnaround and consider that as a consequence, everyone’s emotional journeys are also different. And just because one emotional approach works for you, it might not actually fit someone with a different publishing experience.

I truly believe everyone in the industry has experienced feelings of rejection. I don’t think everyone experiences rejection the same way, though. I don’t want to make assumptions about what anyone else has or hasn’t felt. But I know that as a person querying her first book, I did not feel rejections in the same way I do as someone querying her fifth book. Which makes me skeptical that people who haven’t queried as long is actually understand what I’m going through. Maybe they do.

I think a lot of people imagine progression in the industry to look like this. Yes, you’re always experiencing set backs, but they come in intervals and the overall trajectory is up. For these people, coping mechanisms are the things that get you through those little downward dips until you’re on the up and up again.

My trajectory has felt a little more like this. I’ve seen each subsequent book query worse. Coping mechanisms that used to work no longer do.

All this to say, I’m absolutely an advocate of finding healthy coping mechanisms. I’m not such a big fan of insisting that authors are capable of compensating for a system that is failing them if they just tap into the sheer power of positivity and self care a little more.