Success won’t save you. But that’s okay - it doesn’t have to.
One afternoon last September, I went to visit a close friend for the first time since The Sex Myth had been published. It was a week or so after the book had been reviewed in The New York Times, and my friend’s mother was visiting at her house as well.
“You must be on top of the world with all the success you’re having!” she said. “Not really,” I replied, knowing that my friend’s mother had raised my friend and thus was well equipped to deal with expressions of millennial neuroticism. “To be honest, I feel kind of anxious and depressed.”
I share this story because last week another friend emailed to say that she’d achieved one of her big goals: she’d been invited to contribute to a prestigious magazine in her field. “I didn't think I would achieve that for another 3 to 5 years,” she wrote, “after pitching at least 3 times.” And yet it didn’t feel the way she thought it would.
“It's this feeling of finally realizing that achieving my dream work things will not transform me into the person I wish I was, or cooler, happier, richer, more interesting, less stressed, more creative, more self-esteem, instagram lifestyle or whatever,” she wrote. Had I ever felt that way, she wondered? She felt like I might have.
Hells yes, I responded. In fact, you might say it’s been my major existential challenge over the past five years - through trying to sell the book, through writing it (and rewriting it...), to sending it out into the world. This belief that once I had a certain thing - an agent, a book deal, a book in bookstores that people could buy - I would feel validated.
Releasing a project you’ve spent the better part of a decade working on is a weird, intense experience. I spent the first few days around publication in a state of fear, bracing myself for waves of social media hate that never really came. I quickly realised that this thing that was all-important and all-encompassing to me was but a small grain of sand in the world of everyone else... and that came with good and with bad. The good? It meant I could relax and enjoy the media I did, realising that most people weren’t waiting to jump on Twitter to talk about how crap I was. The bad? The wave of validation I had been hoping for and anticipating never really came.
On the outside, things looked pretty successful. I got a tonne of media coverage - so much, in fact, I didn’t even share it all on social media, because I didn’t want to annoy people or look too self-promotional. I got lovely letters and emails from people who read my work and connected with it, including a heart wrenching letter from a guy in prison. I got to read awesome essays written by people other writers who had read the book and found it interesting enough to use as a spin off for their own thoughts. I went on a 20-city book tour (which I paid for myself), and Molly Ringwald came to one of my events. I got invited to speak at a festival in my hometown that I watched and admired from afar for several years.
But while most people I knew seemed to perceive me as successful, I was keenly aware of all the ways that my work was not a success. *I* knew, for example, that sales were not as good as I’d hoped they would be. (”I was convinced I would be a bestseller!” an author friend declared dramatically last weekend. “Me too!” I responded, laughing.) *I* had read (and agonised over) the lukewarm reviews on Goodreads. *I* knew that I had paid for my own book tour (as most authors do, it turns out, but we still can’t shake the feeling that if our publishers really loved us, they would have coughed up the cash). *I* had walked into bookstores and died a little inside when I had seen my book misshelved in a section where no one who wanted to buy it would find it.
Most of all, *I* still felt unremarkable, unloved, not good enough.
Fortunately, I had enough sense of mind to realise that if I felt unremarkable and not good enough in that moment, there was no amount of success that would make me feel that way. I could be Jonathan Franzen or Donna Tartt, heralded as a great literary talent of the early 20th century, or Roxane Gay, greeted by 300 adoring fans at every reading, and I would either be wondering why I hadn’t won a Pulitzer Prize yet, or fixated on the people tweeting about how my work wasn’t nearly as good as people say it is.
I had to accept that I would never feel transformed. That no amount of work, no amount of output, no amount of external validation would save me. So long as I believed that it would, there would always be a hunger for more.
And that has actually been an enormously freeing realisation. If my work can’t save me, that means I can stop expecting it to. Which in turn allows me to enjoy the work for what it is, to appreciate the people who connect with it in whatever numbers they arrive, and to focus on the thing that really drives me to create in the first place: the surprising things that happen when you put something out in the world, the new things that get created in return, and most of all, the people and collaborations it draws into your life.
It means knowing that while throwing myself into my work at the exclusion of everything else might make me marginally more “successful,” throwing myself into it 80 percent will probably get me the same returns in terms of personal happiness and fulfilment - and will make room for other sources of creativity and fulfilment as well. It means pursuing projects because they look fun and stimulating, rather than pursuing them because I feel like I “have to” in order to remain visible and relevant (ie, ego).
The truth is, I actually do feel pretty happy - and pretty successful - right now, as I write this. I’ve just come off the back of 10-campus tour over the spring, which was emotionally challenging at first, but ultimately bred some really beautiful moments. Hanne Larsen, a student I met when I spoke at Northeastern last Fall, is going to be creating a theatre production of The Sex Myth, which will be playing in Boston at the end of June. The Sex Myth may not be the “rolling bestseller” I imagined it would be, but it is reaching people, helping people, entering the media discourse - and it might just achieve my long term goal for it, which is for young women and men who need it to still be finding and connecting with it ten years after its release, in 2025.
But most of, I am happy because my happiness is not contingent on being “successful” or being a megastar. It’s contingent on creating and watching people create in return, on building friendship and community, and in finding joy in life even in those moments when I don’t feel like a success.
PS If you liked this post, you might also enjoy these ones:
A funeral for my freelance writing career
5 ways to pass the time while you’re waiting to make it
My name’s Rachel, and I’m a workaholic. And I think the internet might have something to do with it.
