My book, The Year of No Nonsense, slams into publication in three weeks.
It’s also hitting shelves in stores that I never imagined possible: amazing indy stores across the country, Target, Wal-Mart, Barnes & Noble.
I can’t imagine what it will be like to be buying my carrots and hummus in Target, and rolling down their small book section to see this - my - book.
Last night, The Year of No Nonsense hit “Amazon Hot Releases” (#4) in Women’s General Health. I was so excited, and then I was terrified.
My mom, for example, posted about the book on Facebook to all of her friends. I am not sure that my parents are actually going to be proud of this book. I am not sure that they will be proud of me.
Then there I will be-at the strange new age of exactly 40 - wondering (again) if I am hard to love. A childhood/adulthood theme I have played over and over in my head to the point of insanity. A theme that low-rumbled along with the Fear of hell that I felt sitting in cult church at age five.
But in writing, I learned a long time ago, that our story is the one that we, personally, lived, the one we own.
Somewhere between 2017 and 2019, I stepped into my story - the good, the bad, and the really (really) dark - and I looked it in the eye. All of the confusion. All of the past. All of me.
And I simply owned my story. Then I figured out how to take a scalpel to that story - and make my Life what I wanted.
The Year of No Nonsense - is the life I have lived. The ways I have dug out from suicidal thoughts, a suicide attempt, a raging depression and twenty-year long addiction. This book is a chronicle of the way I changed myself - and how I did it - the process of the #TruthOnion and the #CatClownAvocadoClownCar (yeah, you’re gonna need to read for that explanation).
This book is the uncertainty of the question: Will I be loved if I write the Truth about what happened, how I feel, and how messed up it all made me? Will I be loved if I try to help anyone who may have felt the same way?
Finally, the book is an answer to the question I have always asked myself - without realizing I asked it: Am I worth loving - without any good acts, straight As, or skinny thighs?
The answer to the question is a resounding yes. But not for the reasons that I originally believed.
Shaunta Grimes has inspired me beyond words in the last few months, for a long list of reasons, but one of the things she talks about with writing is persistence. She helps writers write (mostly fiction) - but she does something that inspires me everyday - she writes.
And in reality, that’s what I did, and have done also for the last ten years. I have just written words. Only this particular serial of words feels like the rawest, the scariest of all. Then I realize that I am only scared because of what people will think. My inner people-pleaser is really, really alive and deep - but not nearly as bad as she once was.
I am uncertain, scared, freaked out and beginning a streak of what I believe will be the gift of the writer’s insomnia. I have felt this before - but never quite so real.
Why? Because, for the first time, in maybe my entire life I know that I sit here telling the Truth as I know.
I stand here knowing that I am worthy of love. And no matter what happens with this book - that fact changes none.