Unexpected Feelings after Soft Launch of my Second Book A Guide to Growing Wings

I’ve been working on my memoir about my mother, and my healing journey after she took her life in 2013, for a long time. I think I first picked up the pen about it a year or so after she died. I scrawled hundreds and hundreds of pages in an effort to wring the sorrow out of me—to get it out, to make sense of the Biggest, Hardest Thing I’d ever met.

This project has taken up a huge space in my life—I’ve put it on the back burner a couple times, pushed it away, but I knew it was an incredibly important tribute to my mother and me that I would need to release in order to move on. After I published Be Surf, I picked the memoir back up. A few lessons I learned through Be Surf helped me finally give the memoir shape and, more importantly, complete it.

And as for a sense of urgency—the baby in my belly gave me a natural deadline. I knew that I wanted to get this book out, in some way, before the baby arrived. So I released the ebook on Amazon last week—a soft launch. At this time, I’m only telling a few people, because I want to really launch it with the print book.

I expected to feel proud, and confident, of the accomplishment (which I do) but I did not expect this—the feeling of an immense boulder suddenly rolling out of my path, and the feeling that I was free to choose other types of work and projects now. I hadn’t realized how tethered and cuffed I felt to the project. Not even in a bad way (right, because prison metaphors are a “good” thing…) but it’s true. I felt an incredible amount of pressure and duty to complete this project. It felt necessary to honor my mother in this way, and to share that story which is uniquely ours, one that no one would ever tell the same way.

And so, when I pressed “Publish,” and the book went live—it just felt like my world opened up. It’s like—ok wow! This tribe of elephants that has apparently been blocking my path has scattered and now my road is totally open. This is a really exciting and beautiful feeling.

I’m really excited to complete the book in its additional incantations—print and audio—on my on pace, around the baby, and I’m also really excited for what opportunities I get to give time for now that this incredibly important, urgent and individual project is done.

Digging into FOMO, plus an Actionable Exercise

Digging into FOMO, which stands for fear of missing out

I am definitely not the only one who experiences FOMO—that irksome itch behind the sternum that arrives when you’re looking at social media.

Life feels absolutely grand and great, you feel like the luckiest person on earth, then BAM—you open Instagram, you see some hot blonde chick skating down the boulevard with palm trees behind her and you think—what am I doing wrong?

I get caught up in this trap all the time—my feed is filled with surfing, surfers, sustainable living, artists/photographers/writers—and they always seem to be doing something totally rad, way radder than what I did today.

They fall into a few different categories:

1. Hot girls looking like they could care less:
   

Photo by Roberto Nickson on Unsplash

2. Anywhere that I don’t recognize. WHY HAVEN’T I BEEN HERE (TWICE!) BEFORE!?

Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash

3. Everyone partying! ie Tonight’s the night! I can take you there! I can feel it!

Photo by Pablo Heimplatz on Unsplash

4. EVEN THE PINEAPPLES ARE HAVING MORE FUN.

Photo by Pineapple Supply Co. on Unsplash

5. And, oddly, this one. But like, why?

Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

But then, a thought came to me today like a bird to the window—isn’t it possible I’m already doing a lot of this stuff? OR isn’t it possible that when it comes down to it, I don’t WANT to do all this stuff, or maybe I want to do it, but I’m not willing to put in the time it would take to get there?

That little mini thought exercise was enormously helpful. I chose a couple feeds I like to look at and asked myself these questions about the posts:

1.     Am I feeling FOMO, which suggests I don’t do this thing, but do I actually do this and therefore there’s no reason to feel jealous?

2.     Do I actually want to do this?

3.     Do I want to do this, but I don’t want to do the work it takes to get there? In which case I should either reevaluate or just get comfy with my choices?

I know it feels like way too much effort to ask these questions when you’re looking at Instagram or Facebook posts, but I assure you, it’s worth it. It staves off those awful gremlins that make you think you’re not doin’ cool shit when you actually ARE doin’ cool shit and BEING cool (there’s only one of you, in and of itself, that is cool and miraculous). Doing this little question exercise staves off the awful gremlins that make you jealous of ghost lives before you remember wait a second—you don’t want to be an astronaut in the first place! OR, you WANT to be an astronaut, but you don’t want to leave Planet Earth for 10 years-but-it’s-actually-100-in-space so everyone including your cat Foggybottoms is long gone when you return?

I think it’s incredibly important to question these gremlin thoughts that might have zero credibility when you actually spend a second turning them over.

::So give it a try::

·      Ask “Do I actually already do this?” (IE, this is a picture with someone with their friends, and oh ya, I hung out with my friends last night?)

·      Ask “Do I even want to do this?” (IE, this is a picture of someone swimming with sharks, and I just realized I actually have no desire to voluntarily hang with a gilled apex predator?)

·      Ask “Do I want to do this, but I’m not willing to make the sacrifices I need to get there?” (IE, So and so is circumnavigating the globe in the water on their Frisbee and unicycle, and while circumnavigating the globe sounds awesome and all, and maybe I’ll do it in a year, but this year, I actually want to hang home with my loves, see when the garlic’s ready for harvest, surf my home break, and watch my friend’s baby grow up?)

It’s the difference between being satisfied with your life and unsatisfied—it allows you to be grateful for what you’re doing, remember why you made and continue to make choices, and maybe it even allows you to go for something you should be going for, which all seems worth more than a bag of bones to me.