The Joy Thief

And Other Things You Are Not Supposed To Talk About After Launching A Novel

“Comparison truly is the thief of joy.” – Caroline Fleetwood (and Theodore Roosevelt)

I’m 40 minutes into an interminable HIIT class, my core is shaking, and the instructor cues a minute of sit ups. As an added challenge, she reminds us, we can hold a weight to our chest. I take a breath, close my eyes, and set my weight to the side. Tune inward; be kind, I tell myself. It doesn’t matter what everyone else does.

I dragged myself to this class a week after my book launch despite initially feeling too raw to get off the couch. I’m doing the thing that I know will start to dissolve this pit in my stomach, if I can just get through the class without pushing too hard that I injure myself.

It almost works. I manage to keep my eyes shut for about 50 seconds. When I open them and look around, I see a weight at everyone else’s chest. I grab my weight.

This is a metaphor, I think as I roll the weight off my body when the set is finally over, my abs screaming. I know I’ve just crossed the line from self-care to self-punishment. And all because of that exactly right line from Caroline’s insightful interview last week that keeps popping up into my consciousness despite my attempts to bat it away: Comparison truly is the thief of joy.

Comparison is a lot of what I’ve been doing for the past two weeks since my debut novel launched: looking at other authors’ reviews and followings and awards and bestsellering. And then, when I’m at my lowest, after days of disciplining myself not to look at reader reviews, I dive into them. I don’t start with the good ones. I go straight to the bad ones, and I read them when I’m at my worst. It’s me picking up at the weight at the end of the set, when I’m already shaking.

There has been so much good in the past two weeks. I am teary-eyed grateful for the messages from people moved by the book, who are taking away from it things I most hoped readers would take; the faces of so many people I care about gathered together on an unseasonably cool day in Denver, there to celebrate the book and dance the afternoon away. These are places to focus. I spent years thinking this book into which I’d poured so much of my heart would never make its way into the world. And now I’m seeing it in loved ones’ hands.

There has been so much good, and there has been so much hard. It’s true for every part of the creative process, so why should this part be an exception?

I originally wrote something in this final paragraph about learning to keep my damn eyes shut a little longer next time. But then I remembered: Tune inward; be kind. I don’t know that any of us can shed comparison completely. But I do know that the part of me doing the comparing is hurt and scared, and hurt and fear respond better to kindness than commands. So I’m trying to coax my eyes away from comparing instead of damning them.

Success still to be determined.