Rejection and abandonment are my Achilles heel. For me, those are even worse than not feeling believed. Feeling irrelevant is the big one. The way I felt all those years ago.
Some parts of the kid in me are still wounded and angry. He cries out, “THEY DID THOSE THINGS TO ME; THEY GOT AWAY WITH IT. THEY STOLE MY INNOCENCE AND CHILDHOOD, RAPED ME, AND ROBBED ME OF YEARS OF MY LIFE. THE FUCKING YEARS, THE SUFFERING, THE DAMAGE.”
As the inner child yells, the inner critic still yaps its ugly words. “It’s not that they don’t believe you, bro. It’s just that they don’t care. You don’t matter. No one gives a shit.” While writing and putting in the hard work and money to publish Angel Blue, this voice has had a big party in my head. The most evil lies typically have a hint of truth.
The big machine of the publishing industry gives zero fucks about my story. They care about projections and dollars, platforms, and notoriety. This rejection was brutal for me to navigate while figuring out the new territory of storytelling through a memoir. I am in a consistent practice of not throwing a tantrum at every corner.
I fear that the people helping me, even those I paid, will abandon the project without finishing it. I suspect that the manifestation of this underlying fear in our interactions makes their work slightly more difficult. Writing about all those bad things inflamed all the insecurity and psychosis I have struggled with for my entire adult life. And that’s ok. I get to have compassion for myself while I do this project.
I recently began reaching out to organizations that support veterans and sexual assault survivors to ask for help spreading the word about my story. The inner critic whispers, “They only want to help other survivors, not you, not someone who worked the last four years and faced all that shit and worked and worked. You don’t count, buddy boy.”
I can analytically dissect those thoughts. Maybe they don’t help authors. Perhaps they’re busy. Possibly it’s against their business model, etc. I have kept so consumed with giving all to this project that I am probably just tired. But it’s not over yet, not time to rest yet.
I don’t have a mentor to look to who did what I did the way I did. I am in personally uncharted territory. I watched a documentary called I’ll Be Gone in the Dark about a woman named Michelle McNamara, whose book about the golden state killer was instrumental in his eventual capture. The story was very personal to her, as she had crossed paths with the killer as a child. She accidentally overdosed and died in the process of writing that book. I do not intend to let this project kill me, but I understand how that happened.
Developing and maintaining momentum has been a constant struggle, and I am not yet completely exhausted, but I am close. Before I edited this document, I took a time out and meditated for 20 minutes. Little reliefs, little steps. Almost there.
I will not quit. I will never surrender, never back down. I am stubborn like that. I love you.