How I'm defining success this week

achievement/ connection/growth/peace

Photo by Thom Milkovic on Unsplash

The Ghost Lake has been published for two weeks already, and I feel like I have been surfing a wave of absolute love for it. I’m watching reviews coming in and seeing it appear in shop windows and on reading lists and my heart fills with utter joy. On paper, this is what success looks like.

I am very aware of the pressure I put on myself to be successful, and also of the framework that society places around what success looks like.

It is important for me to be able to define my own success, to reach for the things that are more than awards and listings and to connect with myself on my own terms. I am a person that needs to remind myself that I am doing what I set out to do, that I am growing personally alongside hitting my career goals.

Here’s how I’m defining success for myself this week:

Achievement

These are the marker points on my author journey. I have a mental list of things I’d like to achieve, things that more in line with what I see as a traditional viewpoint of success. Amazingly, three of those things have been ticked off with the publication of The Ghost Lake.

Two career highlights in quick succession:

1. This article that I wrote for The Guardian talking about my experiences with imposter syndrome and walking away from a PhD: The Guardian

2. Followed by this review of The Ghost Lake in The Guardian: Review

3. Appearing at Edinburgh festival.

Connection

These are the places where I feel all the years of writing and working on the book have been worthwhile. Here are the places where I have seen The Ghost Lake, and my writing, genuinely connect to people.

1. I received about 50 messages from people who had read the Guardian piece who wanted to share their own stories of feeling like an outsider, of having their accent mocked, or/and of the shame they felt from walking away from their own PhDs. I am still receiving messages about it. I feel honoured to be trusted with those stories.

2. An in person visit from a village friend. Someone who I met daily while my old dog was alive as our dog walking times were similar. In the book I acknowledge how much that walking community meant to me, and how much their interest and excitement for the book pushed me forward. To come out of my little office room full of doubts and anxieties and be met with the joy and excitement of other people really did give me the boost I needed on some days. This particular villager came to my house and told me he felt he had ‘been on a journey with me’ as he’d been listening to the audio version while he walked his dog. How strange and wonderful to have the story overlaid on the places where we’d talked about it. Just wonderful.

3. This review by Sophia Yeo in The Inkcap Journal. This could quite easily be up in the achievement section, but it deserves its place here as it’s a review that genuinely ‘gets’ the book and what I wanted to do with it. I’m forever grateful to people who do these sorts of deep reads.

4. My Scarborough launch. An invitation only event for family and friends where my publicist read a speech and I did a little reading from the book and had a little cry and the whole room cheered me and my book on. I don’t think I have ever felt so loved as I did in that moment, and realised how many friends I actually have.

Growth

This is a difficult category to define, but is important to me. I feel like I am still on a journey of self discovery, and markers of growth on a personal level are very important to me. These ones probably won’t mean anything to anyone else, or maybe you will relate. Maybe it will help you to look for your own markers of growth.

1. I feel like an author. How do I define that? By constantly treating myself as a writer/author and being treated like one, I have kept quite a lot of the imposter syndrome at bay. It will return, but right now I feel like an author. I feel like I will plug the book and do what I can to push it, and whatever happens with it, I know I did a good job for myself. I can take my mood board down, put my The Ghost Lake scrap book away and get on with the next project. This sounds so utterly simple, but quite a lot of my time is spent feeling embarrassed that I even attempted to do a thing that I wanted to because I feel like I’m not good enough. To not feel like that is a big thing to me. A hard to define thing. It is a moment of growth because although those negative thoughts are still there, I have been able to allow them to come and go, holding onto my core truth: I am an author.

2. I decided it was ok to take whole afternoons in bed to cope with the overwhelm of publication week. There is such a lot going on, and a lot of what is going on are the things I find most difficult: travelling to new places, meeting new people, being ‘on’ for an audience, social media etc. I need to just lie in bed and look out of the window to deal with that. That’s my coping mechanism. This is a moment of growth because people who don’t know, don’t know. But those that do, do. I don’t have to justify my coping mechanisms to anybody. Personal growth gold star.

3. Not comparing myself to other authors. This is a big one because it ties into my terrible habit of judging myself by other people’s standards. I don’t need to do that. Another gold star growth moment.

Peace

When I could see the publication whirlwind approaching, I was a bit worried I’d go into overdrive and burn myself out, which has, previously, been a way of being in control of the anxiety. It’s taken a while to work out that it is much more beneficial to find moments of existence, of peace and ‘being’ in the whirlwind. It’s those small pools of connecting to the world that really help and allow me to regain my energy levels and be the best I can be.

1. Walking. I’ve made time to walk and made sure that I saw that as equally important to my promotion work around the book. Yesterday I got caught in a light, late summer rain shower and stood under the trees listening to the water running over the leaves. Those ten minutes did so much for my sense of peace and belonging.

2. Reading. Not just stuff that I know I should be reading for events, research etc, but joy reading, comfort reading. Currently I’m re reading Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light. There is something gloriously peaceful and nourishing about stacking yourself up with pillows and sitting on the bed reading while the world turns.

3. Gardening. My garden is out of hand. But just taking a few minutes daily to deadhead the roses, or trim the ivy, this is also a place of peace, of making sure my hands are in the earth, on the green leaves, in direct physical contact with the seasons.

This is success.

Other News

1. TONIGHT - I’ll be one of the guests on

   Victoria Bennett 🌼🐝🐺
   Wild Women Salon alongside Cal Flynn and Annie Worsley to discuss landscape, place and belonging. It’s online, and pay what you can - tickets here.

2. Next week - 3rd September - join me in York Waterstones for an in conversation event with Abi Curtis. Tickets here

3. Next week - 4th September - join me in Hull for Women of Words where I’ll be talking about and reading from The Ghost Lake. Find out more here.

4. Next week - 5th September - join me at The Little Ripon Bookshop for an author event where I’ll be talking about The Ghost Lake. Tickets here.

Until next time

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