Feral Fridays #2

giving up on your dreams

I write this substack post as if someone in the future will read it, but I write without the hope that anyone will. It’s a complicated mental calculus, but I think it’s the only way that one can write anything.

I research, write drafts, edit drafts, revise and proofread, assuming that someone other than myself would read this article, or my next books, but I don’t expect that anyone will.

I make instagram posts because I finally found some templates that are pretty and it’s soothing to me to scroll through my feed and see these little cohesive images of my books/thoughts.

I’ve stopped making tiktoks because they aren’t fun to me and they only made me about $38 over 10 days. A lot more than the $0 I make now, sure, but not worth the hours I spent filming. I’ll definitely try it again eventually, because again $38 isn’t nothing, but hustling for $38 isn’t fun.

The first thing people say when I tell them I've given up on my dreams is a backward kind of encouragement.

"Well, you know, things always happen when you are least trying."

Wink, wink.

“Okay, you’re giving up. Riiiiight.”

Nudge, nudge.

They think I’m using reverse psychology on myself or saying that I’m giving up as a defense mechanism against disappointment. If I give up, I don’t have to be disappointed that it’s not working, but secretly I’ll keep hustling and then be oh so very surprised when it finally does work!

I understand the reaction. I think I did have that exact feeling for a few months at a time, on and off in the last three years.

People really really don’t want you to give up on your dreams.

Some of it is a kindness, sure. They want you to be happy and successful, but I think a lot of it is also their own defense mechanism. If I give up on my dreams, it calls into question whether they can achieve the dreams they have. Some people are so steeped in the capitalist mindset that it feels like a sin, a moral failing if I say that I am giving up, if I say I’m not striving anymore.

Choosing Your Definition of Success

“You have to define what success means to you.”

Holy fuck, I hate this advice. Every self-help book about anything ever tells you that you have to figure out what your definition of success is.

It pisses me off.

They say it like as if we aren’t people who have been raised to believe only one definition. You can’t hold out a banana and tell people, “Hey, everyone calls this a banana, but you are pOwerFuL. You define it for yourself!”

And then the self-help guru gets to instill another layer of blame on you when you “define” your success and it doesn’t erase the definition of success that we’ve had shoved down our throats our entire lives.

As if every commercial doesn’t sell you something to make you richer, prettier, more appealing to the general masses. As if fame (being adored by as many people as possible) isn’t hardwired in our brains. As if any of us can find contentment or “enough” money when a single devastating medical bill can wipe out every part of your savings or a natural disaster or a tyrannical government.

Anyone who has ever “defined” success for them is partitioning the part of their brain that already knows the definition of success and no, it’s not “I just want one person to read my books and make them happy.”

Knock it off. No, you don’t. I don’t believe you.¹

I don’t believe that your brain has literally rewritten the definition of success into that.

We all know what the definition of success is. The one culture created and taught us. And I’m sure as hell not mentally strong enough to undo a definition created by a bajillion of years of capitalist propaganda.

So screw it.

Keep your definition of success. And I’ll just quit.

HA.

Give up / don’t redefine

I’ve been more anxious than ever before in the last few months. It’s the thing that happens when you have a long-term goal and you meet it and it’s supposed to change everything and it doesn’t.

In 2020, I finally quit my corporate job and started my own business, I had several panic attacks as my brain and body realized that owning my own business and choosing my hours and my work didn’t actually give me the confidence that I could succeed. It didn’t make me believe in myself.

In 2024, I finished publishing a trilogy and it didn’t magically make my books well known. Of course, my brain and body have decided to turn the anxiety dial to an eleven. How could achieving my goal not give me my result?!

Of course, it seems naïve and stupid that I thought it would. Or actually, no, fuck that shit. It wasn’t naïve and stupid. I believed the lies that I was told. That the American dream was working for yourself. I believed the hundreds of writing threads that told me writing a trilogy was the best way to go. I believed my algorithm which fed me proof everyday of unknown authors becoming known by finishing their trilogies. There was nothing naïve and stupid about it. Rather I was susceptible to societal messaging just like everyone else.

Redefining success is like fighting your way through a jungle. You’ll have to hack away at all the synapses that have already strengthened.

It’s better to just give up.

It’s exhausting to hold a goal/dream and wake up every day, taking stock of where you are and realizing the gap between the two.

In Burnout by Amelia Nagoski she calls this the “monitor.”

The Monitor knows (1) what your goal is; (2) how much effort you're investing in that goal; and (3) how much progress you're making. It keeps a running tally of your effort-to-progress ratio, and it has a strong opinion about what that ratio should be. There are so many ways a plan can go wrong, some of which you can control and some of which you can't, all of which will frustrate your Monitor.

It’s painful to focus all of your mental energy on bridging that gap.

There is a numbing agent to that pain, it’s called hope. As long as you hope that one day you’ll make it, that pain is still there, your body is still enduring it, but you are numbed by the adrenaline of hope that keeps you running toward a destination that may never arrive.

But giving up doesn’t make you a “loser.” It’s not a sin.

In Bittersweet by Susan Cain, she tells us that our country runs on a “prosperity gospel” which holds that “wealth is bestowed by God to the worthy, and withdrawn from the undeserving.” It is a relic from Calvinism, a religion where everyone had to run around and hustle to prove their worth, to prove that they’d go to heaven.

I’m not strong enough to redefine success. I’m a Capricorn. Achievement and traditional success are the only thing I’ve ever known. I have “motivation, ambition, determination” tattooed on my foot because at twenty-one those were the only three words that I could definitively say would never change about my personality.

God, my heart hurts so much for that girl.

I can’t redefine success. I can’t tear down the neural pathways that are already there, but I am going to try to build new ones, detours, if you will.

If I give up, feel into all those delicious ramifications of giving up—releasing resistance, relaxing, taking a break, no longer having a gap to judge of where I am and where I want to be—then I get the relief that I actually thought “earning” success would bring me.

resignation vs giving up

Part of my resistance to giving up (and declaring publicly that I’m giving up) is that I don’t want it to be seen as crying and wanting pity and boohoo poor me and my unsold books. There is really only two ways that we are allowed to discuss failure in public:

1) failure that has already turned into some silver lining and we are discussing it after the fact to give everyone insPirAtioN to keep trying

2) tears—(usually white women) crying on camera and trying to get sympathy as a fake kind of vulnerability. Or maybe not fake, it’s probably incredibly real, but it feels uncomfortable and inappropriate

I will definitely not be sitting around waiting for number 1, and I hope you’ll feel the energy is not the same as number 2. The difference between describing my failure to achieve traditional success in publishing (what I’m trying to do through this article) and crying about it on social media is…

drumroll please

The lack of tears.

LOL

I’m not crying. There is grief, sure, the grief of a period of my life shifting into something else. So much grief for that girl of three years ago and how much pain she put herself through reaching for something she didn’t get. There is grief because some days I cannot believe that my work ethic didn’t produce results like it had in every other arena of my life. But there is no more grief over the lack of a result.

I’m not resigned, rather I’ve accepted exactly where I am.

Radical Acceptance is not resignation. The greatest misunderstanding about Radical Acceptance is that if we simply accept ourselves, we will lose our motivation to change and grow. Acceptance might suggest that we resign ourselves to being exactly as we are, which often enough means "not enough." Our deepest nature is to awaken and flower.

(Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach)

In Burnout, Amelia Nagoski gives a solution for the monitoring problem (monitoring the gap between where you want to be and where you are). Her solution is “positive reappraisal.”

Positive reappraisal involves recognizing that sitting in traffic is worth it. It means deciding that the effort, the discomfort, the frustration, the unanticipated obstacles, and even the repeated failure have value--not just because they are steps toward a worthwhile goal, but because you reframe difficulties as opportunities for growth and learning.

i.e. the silver lining approach.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with this approach for most goals/dreams. But be aware, you are keeping the numbing agent of hope alive by reframing the pain you are feeling as positive. And I think this advice can lead some people (achem, me) to run themselves into the ground because it doesn’t acknowledge that some goals/dreams are not achievable.

Oh boy, I can hear the collective GASP.

Clutch your pearls.

I just committed the biggest sin in all of the land. It feels icky, doesn’t it? To even have read that sentence aloud in your head? Think about how the owners of capital (employers, CEO, wealthy) do not want the masses to ever think that they couldn’t achieve something. If you stopped hustling, they wouldn’t be able to exploit your labor.

but but but… i don’t wanna give up on my dreams

Mmkay, don’t. You do you, boo. Don’t take advice from me, a rando on the internet, who is literally talking to imaginary people she doesn’t think actually exist.

But I would challenge you to be honest with yourself about how much pain you are enduring for this dream. Is it possible that giving up might make you feel better?

And isn’t that the whole reason you had the dream/goal in the first place? You though achieving it would make you feel better.

It’s a preference, not a problem

This is where I’ve landed. If you told me to give up last year—fuck, if you told me a month ago to give up—I wouldn’t have listened. I think there is a lot of emotional work that needs to be sifted through before giving up feels like an option.

No matter how much insight and understanding we develop, the rational brain is basically impotent to talk the emotional brain out of its own reality.

(The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk)

I had to have a lot of internal temper tantrums before I could accept this path. Accept where I am. And yet, I’m still here writing this. I’m still going to edit this. I’m still going to make an instagram post about it. Doesn’t sound like I’m giving up, does it?

But the difference is subtle.

I’m giving up on my books ever making money or paying off my expenses. I’m giving up on thinking anyone will ever read this substack, my website, my instagram posts, blah blah blah. I’m giving up on it because it’s not a PROBLEM that none of those things are happening.

It’s just a preference.

I’d prefer my instagram posts to go viral, but it’s not a problem to solve that they don’t.

I’d prefer someone commented on this substack and subscribed and people cared what I had to say, but it’s not a problem that they don’t.

Because I don’t hold these items, these definitions of success, as the place I want to get anymore. There is no gap to bridge. There is nothing wrong with writing and editing and typing words and spending money on a website and spending time making book covers (that I could have been spending making money in my real job). There is nothing wrong with it. There is no problem to solve. Only preferences. And preferences don’t hurt.

So yeah, I guess I sorta lied before when I said I wasn’t giving up to get away from disappointment. The disappointment that I’m not living up to impossible standards. The disappointment that I’m not already an amazing, viral, no-one-hates-ever author. The disappointment that I could spend my entire life doing something…and no one might ever care.

But that makes it sound like I’m giving up to escape from disappointment. And it’s the opposite. I’ve stopped being disappointed, so I can give up those impossible expectations.

It’s all a preference, not a problem.²

1. If you actually believe that, great. Keep on, keeping on. Obvi, I don’t have to believe you for it to work for you.

2. fucking hell, please do not tell me that I’ve somehow redefined success into “it’s a preference, not a problem” just let me keep my quitting narrative it makes me feel like a bad ass rebel, mkay?