DMB Digest: Woop, Woop. It's party time.
We gonna dance all night, dance all night to this DJ.
When it comes to the ins and outs of daily life, I’m more of a distance runner than a sprinter. I naturally tend toward setting a realistic pace and then maintaining it for however long is necessary. Perhaps this is why I struggle to allow myself to celebrate.
For the most part, I’m neither up nor down. I tend to downplay stuff when everyone else is freaking out. On the one hand, this mode of existence makes dealing with failure pretty dang manageable. I usually just shrug it off as success delayed. Just need to keep going. Try again. Take a different angle. Devise a new strategy. Keep pounding.
On the other hand, it has occurred to me that I’ve never learned how to deal with success. And perhaps this is at least part of why I seem to fail all the time while nary a success is to be found.
I just finished (yesterday) the first draft of the novel I’ve been working on for the last several months. After typing out the last words, I put my computer to sleep and went downstairs for dinner. I ate the shrimp scampi my oldest son cooked for dinner as his final project for culinary arts class. It was pretty good. I finished out my evening as I normally would. Then at midnight it hit me that I should celebrate. This thought only entered my mind because I’ve been intentionally trying to celebrate accomplishments for a few years now. Still struggling to understand what this actually means, I poured myself a glass of sweet, white wine and decided to sleep in for thirty minutes the next morning.
And it was one wild celebration, let me tell you. I talked to the rabbits a bit and managed to kill a weird cricket like thing chirping crazy loud in the living room. Good times. But even now, I have to admit, I’m not really sure what I’m celebrating. I mean, I’ve only completed the first draft. The book isn’t finished. Then again, when is a book ever really finished? At a certain point, an author has to choose to publish. That doesn’t mean the book is finished. Even then, what is there to celebrate? There haven’t been any sales yet. And what about the first sale? That’s just a few bucks back into your pocket. It probably cost several hundred to produce the book, and that’s definitely not compensating me a bloody, red dime for all the hours I spent at the keyboard and pacing up and down my block at midnight.
Should I celebrate after selling a hundred copies? A thousand? The moment I’ve finally “made it” as a full-time author? All of these things seem arbitrary.
That’s when it clicked for me. That’s the point. We simply choose which things to celebrate, and then we celebrate them. Because we’ve decided they are worthy of celebration.
It’s like I’ve lived for nearly fifty years afraid that celebration would signal to someone (or to myself) that the work was finished. That I had accomplished everything I had set out to accomplish, and there was nothing left to be done. For that reason, I’ve embraced failure as an indicator that I’m not finished yet. I’m still trying.
But celebration? How can one celebrate when there is still so much left to accomplish? So much undone? The fact is, I’ve learned there is stuff to celebrate. It’s called progress. It turns out success deferred can be thought of as progress. Rather than ongoing failure. I’m progressing, and that is something I can celebrate. I’ve finished another lap of my long distance race. Sure, I’ve got another few hundred laps left (I can only hope). I’m not done yet. But I’m progressing. And that’s something worthy of celebration. Woot. Woot. [pulls party popper]
I guess I still need to work on my celebrations.
From the Desk of DMB
As I was saying, I’ve finished the first draft of the project I’m currently calling, “Catching Jars.” I’m tentatively really happy with the result. Tentatively. I can’t escape the fact this is a “slow” read. It is NOT plot driven like basically everything else I’ve ever written. It’s thoughtful. Painful. There is a chance this was simply a book I had to write for my own therapeutic purposes. But I’m suspicious there are others out there like me. That there are many who are scratching and itching at their cultural skins in a vain effort for their “true selves” to emerge. We conform to the interpretive lenses and methods imposed on us because everyone and everything around us makes it painful to diverge. Divergence is painful. But what if we are all better off for diverse perspectives? What if, like dog breeds, our cultural lenses tend toward dangerously narrow selection? What if, for three hundred years, the Age of the Enlightenment has been dangerously limiting our perception of reality?
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Also, your "Catching Jars" project sounds mightily intriguing. Glad you're doing it. I agree -- surely, you're not the only one. There's an audience for it.
Thanks for putting into words something about celebration, success, and failure that I'd also been wrestling with -- but without putting my finger on exactly why I felt the way I did. But you nailed it. No wonder I tend(ed) not to stop and celebrate, not to enjoy relaxing, when there was still so much left to be done. It felt like failure to sit still for a moment.
I've been better with it in the past few months. I realized that I'd been living with an endless to-do list hanging over my head for decades, and it had shaped my perception of reality in dangerous ways. Ways that left me ignoring family and friends. And all because of the illusion that the List was All, the List was the Measurement of my Success or Failure as a person.
But the List was an illusion. And even my self-perception of whether I was making progress on the List was actually self-deception. The important things weren't getting done. But I always felt like I was making some form of progress because I was accomplishing something else on the List. Meanwhile, decades pass and some things that could be easily finished in a few weeks have not been tackled because I always deferred working on them until The Right Time. Pfffft.
There is never a Right Time, if by Right Time I imagine that somehow it will empower me to magically write my novel perfectly on the first try. There's no perfect environment or mental state that will make that happen. Ugh.
But there CAN be progress, if I just do the work. Write the imperfect first sentence. First chapter. Write the imperfect first draft. Thanks for the reminder that progress is worth celebrating.