Here were people handing me the book I wrote, cover pulled back, the title page held out like the soft skin on the inside of a wrist. Sign here. Write my name next to yours.
Tomorrow is the launch of my book. And I’ve had mixed feelings about it. But as I was talking about it with my friend Juliette she stopped me.
“Revel,” she said. “You’ve been working towards this for years. And now it’s happened. Revel in it.”
Our culture has so many narratives about success or dreams achieved. It’s going to be wonderful. Or it’s not. I’ve seen clips on social media of very rich and famous people talking about how being rich and famous did not fulfill them, even at their richest and most celebrated.
We are told “be careful what you wish for” as if we are all little children reaching for shards of broken glass because they are shiny and we want to grasp them in our little hands. But what if what we are reaching for is, indeed, what we are here for? What we are built to do? What if we are reaching for our destiny, not a shiny object?
This weekend I had a pre-launch event for the book. About 40 people gathered on a sunny Saturday of a three-day weekend to participate in a day long workshop/retreat about discernment, the topic of my book. I was hoping to get a dozen people, given the date and the weather. I live in Seattle and our nice weather is telescoped into such a narrow slice of time that we all tend to stream outside in the sun, especially those first days, which these are. I stood at the entrance to the retreat center and watched people walk down the hill in groups of two or three, in relief.
It's tough content to present. I’m talking about big decisions, cultural narratives that limit or support us, spirituality. In a group with people aged 20 something to 80 something, with Buddhists, Mormons, agnostics, Christians and a Catholic nun, I was intentional about being welcoming to everyone. The group was wonderful, responsive and curious. I like teaching, fielding questions. But it is exhausting in a very specific way, and during lunch I fled to a private room and sat, semi-stunned, eating the food I brought and looking out at Lake Washington, trying to gather energy for the rest of the day.
At the end of the sessions, we brought out the box of books for people to buy and for me to sign. One of my friends asked if I had a pen, and then laughed, saying “you’re a writer. Of course you have the pen you chose to sign your books.” She was right.
I sat at the table and signed books. On my right the sun shone through the French doors and windows that line the wall. On the left a line of people stood, holding my book with its bright yellow cover, waiting for me to sign their book.
And I realized that I had imagined this moment since I was quite young. How I would sign the books, what I would say, what it would be like to have people want to read what I wrote. I was, actually, living the dream.
And it was so much better in reality. It wasn’t about winning, or checking a box on a bucket list or saying I did that, as if acquiring an experience is another way of amassing and accruing, a kind of shopping spree of the soul. It was about being where I was supposed to be, at that moment, and knowing it. That experience didn’t make me whole, or erase the difficulties in my life. What it did was to resonate so deeply, it was like a kind of time travel.
I always knew this was what I wanted to do, where I wanted to be. Write, publish, have people read my work. Since I was a child. But it hasn’t happened in this specific way until now, 40 years after I started trying to get published. I’m 62. Many many times in the intervening decades I have questioned myself, this stubborn insistence on continuing to pursue a dream that most people would have jettisoned, like so much extra weight holding up their progress. Not me.
I wondered if I was delusional, wrong about my talent, too resistant to the relentless self-promotion authors must now do. You often hear stories about writers who received an impressive amount of rejection letters. These stories are only told by and about writers who eventually were accepted for publication and became famous. It’s droll to hear about the spurious reasons that Emily Dickenson, William Faulkner, Norman Mailer, Jane Austen, Maya Angelou, Stephen King and Agatha Christie were rejected, some repeatedly and with snarky commentary, by publishers. It is not droll to hear about those of us with a collection of rejection letters who have not become famous or well-regarded. At some point you wonder. I did. I have rejection letters in various file folders that are on paper, before email existed, when you sent a SASE, self-addressed stamped envelope, along with any query or manuscript. Then you waited, checking the mail for the envelope in your own handwriting, with the stamp you affixed so hopefully.
But there was this imperative. My experience is that I must write. When I’m not working on something creative my soul shrinks. I remember being a kid and breaking my arm. When the cast was removed, that arm was pale and thinner than the other, the weeks in the cast caused my muscles to atrophy, my skin to blanch. That’s what it feels like not to write, to get wrapped up in whatever day job I have and not be doing creative work. It does some kind of violence to my soul. I do believe that artists need to create, and if they don’t it harms them. There may be people who decide to be a writer or painter or actor because it seems like a good way to make money, or they want to be perceived by others to be a certain way. But for some of us, it’s not negotiable. It’s identity.
And for a few moments, on Saturday, as I signed book after book, I felt this deep sense of rightness. That I was right all these years to persevere. That it wasn’t crazy, it was me understanding my destiny. And it worked out. Not when or even how I imagined. But it worked out. Here were people handing me the book I wrote, cover pulled back, the title page held out like the soft skin on the inside of a wrist. Sign here. Write my name next to yours.
Reader, I reveled. I felt this deep joy. And I came home and told Juliette. I was so exhausted that I picked up the TV remote and tried to open the calculator app on it, because I thought it was my phone or maybe the old calculators we used to use before apps. But the first thing I did when I got home was call Juliette. I sat on my front porch in the sun and told her how good it felt to sign those books, and I got choked up and she got choked up. And we reveled.
My book, The Saint and the Drunk A Guide to Making the Big Decisions in Your Life is available now at Bookshop.org and Amazon. If you get the book, it would be a big help if you could post about it on social media. If you want me to do a reading or workshop in your town, get in touch. More about the media and any upcoming events at speirolo.com