Before the launch, my cousin asked whether I’d relax afterward. I said, God, no. Here’s what the launch actually looked like.
On Thursday, October 1, my book came out. That evening Melissa and I met our friend Tess at a pizza place in Forestville. Tess wanted to celebrate. She brought a sparkler, which was really sweet, and two guys were playing guitar and singing in the background. She asked me how I was doing.
The truth is, I felt incomplete.
Earlier that evening, at 5:38, Melissa and I had sat outside, lit a pipe with ritual tobacco, and said prayers. I thanked her, my parents, and my brother Scott. October 1 is the day Scott took his life, thirty-five years ago, and I said how much I hoped this book would serve others. But I had worked right up to the edge to get there, and for two nights I’d been waking around 3 a.m. with anxiety about everything I still had to do.
So there I was with a sparkler and live music, and I didn’t feel joyful or celebratory. I’ll be frank. I don’t really know what completion feels like. When I graduated from college, I remember thinking, okay, off to the next thing. There wasn’t a thing to sit and stay and be with. Launch week turned out to be the same.
By the weekend, that restlessness got louder. I had asked readers to post reviews of the book on Amazon, and then some were filtered out or taken down. I had tied the success of the book to the number of reviews, so when they started disappearing, it kicked my anxiety into full gear. I felt like I could not possibly stop. This part of me took over and went into hyperdrive. My wife was invisible to me. Our dog, who’s like our child, was invisible to me. Nothing mattered except getting this thing across the finish line.
Many of those readers wrote reviews, and some of theirs were among the ones that came down. None of that was their doing, and I’m grateful for every word they wrote, whether it stayed up or not. The goal I set of 40 reviews by Halloween was part of the chase.
The thing is, I wrote a book about this. I coach people on it.
If I’m really transparent, I can see what was underneath. I’ve always had a longing to be seen as somebody special, and an ambivalence about it too. Years ago, after Scott died, I sat in a meditation retreat in Sri Lanka and thought, what I want least is fame, but what I want most is to be free. And still, now that the book is out, part of me is asking the same old question. Now do you see me? Now am I enough?
Then, this past Sunday, I went dancing, and something different happened. The room was ninety degrees, the music was transfixing, and after an hour and a half I was out of time and in my body. When the dance dances itself, when the breath breathes itself, there’s just this isness. The moment is full. The other person isn’t thinking about my status, and I’m not thinking about theirs. We’re just trying to stay connected. I felt enough as I am. Not fine. Enough as I am.
The next morning, Monday, I was on a call with a friend who’d been hard on himself, and I told him I’d spent the weekend in my own version of the same drive. He said he felt less lonely, less stuck on an island by himself. We were able to laugh about it.
Sitting with all of this now, here’s what I don’t want you to take from my week: that I fell into a trap, and now I have to figure out or get rid of some old part of myself once and for all. This drive is human. It isn’t going away. There’s a part of us that can simply be, and there are parts of us that are always becoming, and we can’t pretend they don’t exist. What I can do is step back, notice it, have some humor about it, and be in relationship with it without being identified with it.
Gosh, we wish we could be better, and maybe we can’t, not always. That we can’t is part of what links us with other people.