Feral Fridays #3

you don’t have to be successful

distorted views of normal

YouTube in 2013 was so much more fun. There were all these people making videos that weren’t very good. There were people trying to be influencers and failing at it. There were people not trying to be influencers at all. There were all these people with little to no followings.

The algorithm ruined all of that. You aren’t (rather, I’m not) fed videos of people with crappy cameras and poor audio, who are saying interesting and weird things. When I look for yoga or ASMR or meditation videos and try to dig, dig, dig to find these people, the search results just show me unrelated videos with huge views/followings.

The same with TT, insta, everywhere. The rich get richer, the popular get more popular.

We all know we aren’t supposed to compare our lives to others on social media. We all know we do it anyway, and when we can’t find anyone that is unpopular, we think that the norm is this level of success.

someone teach me what normal looks like

The nostalgia is getting to me a little, because it was still hard in 2013 to find those “unpopular” people. I was pretty obsessed with life coaches, before life coaches were like a big thing, but I was always looking for a life coach who wasn’t doing well.

I wanted advice from someone who was struggling to be successful, not from someone who was already successful.

To me, the successful people all had the same advice—stay positive, keep trying, don’t give up. Sure, depending on the industry they had some more specific advice, but it was survivor bias.

The successful people all attribute their success to hard work, not giving up, and being lucky (but luck happens to those who show up kind of lucky).

Well, I was already working hard. I was already not giving up. I was already showing up and waiting for my luck.

I didn’t need their advice. I needed advice from life coaches who success wasn’t working for.

I wanted meditations from people who didn’t have high-end editing software and pretty videos. I wanted to do yoga videos with people who weren’t filming on a beach with amazing close-up shots. I wanted ASMR videos from people who weren’t pretty and weren’t good at what they were doing. Not the kind of “good” that was in my feed, that was getting thousands of likes a minute.

every day we hustlin’ or nah?

Before I could even consider what giving up on my publishing dreams looked like, I had to get radically okay with saying no to money opportunities in favor of doing nothing.

What do I mean?

I have two main appraising jobs. Commercial reviews and residential reports. The commercial review jobs come in and I cannot control how many I get (some weeks it’s five, six, seven, sometimes it’s zero). The same is true for residential, but together I can usually stack up on commercial and then fill in my empty time with residential. As you can imagine, commercial reports have a higher pay per hour, whereas I spend much more time on residential for much less money. It only makes sense to do residential work when commercial work is slow.

I have grown to deeply dislike residential work. For many reasons that I’m sure you don’t care about.

But while I held my publishing goal, I could convince my brain that it was “okay” that I was spending time writing instead of doing residential work (I obviously am always finishing commercial work every day cause that’s how I pay the bills).

If I just write enough, readers will find my books.

If I do enough reels/tiktoks, readers will find my books.

If I write more, faster, better, to market, readers will find my books.

I’ll pay off the thousands of dollars in expenses. I’ll make money! The goal was actually to make $10,000 to pay off my expenses in the first year and then $10,000 the next year so I could officially “quit” residential work.

I can’t tell you how I finally let go of this insistent need that had been bred into me, that I’d been seeped in my whole life. I think it was a combination of these books:

The Mindful Way Through Depression: accepting where you are, and it’s actually not that bad

Four Thousand Weeks: relaxing/not doing things will feel terrible at first

Meditations for Mortals: eat the damn marshmallow (instead of saving it for later)

Mind Your Body: temper tantrum journalling

The Artist’s Way: twelve weeks of proving to myself I’m allowed to enjoy life without earning it

The Tragedy of Heterosexuality: finally understanding what it means to view things from a queer perspective / understanding the fetishization of normal

Finally, one day, during my morning pages/temper tantrum journaling, I wrote out that I was allowed to quit residential work. Relief filled me.

I was allowed to spend my days (after commercial work was done) doing whatever the hell I wanted. I was allowed to “waste” time writing romance books that would never make me money. I was allowed to “waste” money on a website that no one will ever look at. I was allowed to play on photoshop with covers for my books. I was allowed to spend hours making playlists to fit characters and write scenes about rockstars and none of it ever had to “earn” anything. It didn’t need to earn money. It didn’t need to earn me eyeballs or popularity. I didn’t need to do anything.

All of the things I wanted? Publishing to make money, people to care about my characters and my writing? All of it? It was just a preference, not a problem.

giving up on success

I’m immensely privileged that I’ve found a career where I can work and make money and still have a little bit of time left over in the day for writing/doing things I want. It is absolutely a privilege to give up on success. One that, if I was reading this even a year ago, I would have scoffed at such a notion. The thing is I’m making less money now than I ever have, but I’m choosing to make less because the quality of my life is more important. I don’t think it’s something that you can convince yourself logically to do. I don’t think there is any step-by-step self-help book that can tell you how to stop buying into the idea that your time needs to be spent productively.

I think you have to wake up every single day, and recommit to giving up on success. Catching yourself when your thoughts are focused on the gap between where you are and where you want to be. Catching yourself in the moment that you do the mental tally at the end of the day of everything you did or didn’t do and using that as the basis for beating yourself up.

The only advice I could give anyone, give my past self, is that success in publishing is a preference, not a problem. Don’t let your desires destroy your happiness.