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.