When Will I Learn To Have More Faith In Things Working Out?

Apparently, the universe has a plan... is it too much to ask for a sneak peek trailer of what's ahead?

Hey loves,

Well the newsletter has been pretty grim for two weeks, hasn’t it? It’s been all heavy and miserable news but the skies have parted and not only did my Bradley Cooper show up (you’ll get it if you read last week’s love letter!), multiple Bradley Coopers did and wow were they worth the wait! After I wrote to you last week, everything started working in my favour. While I was writing last week’s love letter, I was hoping that would be the case but I didn’t know whether things could change that quickly because my world really was looking dire. I hit ‘publish’ on that newsletter crossing my fingers that I wouldn’t just leave you all on a miserable note and instead, I would be able to show you that things can change pretty quickly. And they did! Less than a week later, my book has gone from one rejection to a multi-publisher auction! I can’t share more about that until the process is over but it’s all good news! I’ve never had more than one offer for a book so my career has never looked better which is funny because last week, my career has never looked worse.

My whole idea about being transparent about the book industry (and the social media one too!) and the feelings that come alongside it have hopefully demonstrated that I get really down in the dumps too. I hesitated on hitting publish on it for the fear that it read as one massive pity party but if we don’t talk about the lows, it’s no wonder as a society, we all think everyone else is living perfect lives and we are the only exception to the rule. It’s easy to think only we have it hard but the reality is life has hard moments and it’s how we handle those hard moments that builds our resilience.

As you probably saw last week, I still am not great when I am down. I find it all too easy to go into the mindset that I am stuck in the low for life, nothing will ever change and I’ll feel like this forever. I’ve always been so jealous of the people who can very calmly say ‘what is meant for me, will be for me’ because I have never been good at holding the faith when things are not going my way. Instead, I like to curl up in a ball, not face the world and think everyone is against me. Helpful. Not.

The reason why I want to get better at handling the low moments is because if life is comprised of both highs and lows and let’s say there is a 50/50 split, that is a seriously large amount of time to be miserable for. I want to be the kind of person who doesn’t light the whole world on fire just because one match fizzled out. I want to be the kind of person who can still see all the good things going on in the world and keep perspective that you’ve been here before, you’ve survived it once and you’ll survive it again.

I have learned this lesson so many times and yet the importance of holding the faith has never stuck with me. The truth that no life coach tells you is sometimes you need to keep making the same mistake. until you are bored of your own shit. And I’m bored now! We don’t always learn lessons on the first go, or the fifth. Sometimes it’s an entire lifetime of doing things the same way to realise you are making life harder than it needs to be.

Last week, I told you about how it’s easy to tell success stories in hindsight with this painful rejection period as the climax to the story and now that I’m out of the low, I feel the urge to do it again. I remember when I first pitched out ‘Am I Ugly?’, I was with an agent who only replied to my emails two months later and didn’t even tell me she had pitched out the book. I was so young that I believed sending follow-up emails were nagging and so when I hadn’t heard a reply in three months, I finally hit send on the follow-up email that had been sitting in my drafts for too long, to get a reply that read ‘You’ve been rejected by A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H. Maybe try self-publishing? x’. That was the whole email. Yes, she actually listed out every single publisher that rejected me. I had two options. Believe her or to find someone else who believed in me. I left the agency that day, sent 10 emails to agents I found on Google the next day, signed to a new agency within the week and had a book deal for Am I Ugly? within the month. Being an author of four books (and many more rejections), I now know when you get the first round of rejections, you should have a list of backup editors to go to and you don’t just quit. But more importantly, even if a book has been completely and totally been rejected, you still don’t quit, you write another proposal and try again. When you find someone who actually believes in you, they shouldn’t be your agent for the quick and easy pay-out or the one-off book deal, they should be your person for your entire career and if they are so easily out the door, that person doesn’t believe in you enough and you need to find someone else who does! And it’s not just the people in your work life. When I had that email, I had two kinds of friends in my life. I had the kind of friend who said ‘well you’ve been at this for a few years, don’t you think it’s time to shelf this dream and maybe return to it in a few years?’ and then I had the kind of friend who said ‘now is not the time to quit, this is the time to push harder’. Thankfully I listened to the latter but at the time, I had both types of friends in my life. Now, I only keep the latter around. Controversial or not, I don’t need friends who keep reminding me to ‘be realistic’. I’ve never been realistic and if I was, half the ‘pipe dreams’ I had would have never become a reality. They aren’t a pipe dream once they come true!

You don’t just want someone who thinks you are alright, you want someone who adores you, is obsessed with you and will lift you up when you are down. In the two years where I had four proposals rejected before The Joy of Being Selfish, I continuously told my agent at the time that I understood if she wanted to drop me because after all, that’s a lot of time invested and they don’t earn money unless you do and every time she told me to stop being silly and she had no interest in dropping me. What I now know is that the people who truly are going to become your team can’t be fairweather people, if they are going to support your career, they need to do so not just when you are winning, but also when you are getting cancelled. Ok, maybe not literally. But at least through the lows!

So maybe I’m writing this love letter to myself more than anyone else but please please, when you are feeling down, remember it isn’t forever. Things are going to work out and looking back, in hindsight, you will be so grateful for how it worked out. Just because it isn’t working out according to your timescale doesn’t mean it won’t ever happen and just because you don’t know HOW it will work out, doesn’t mean it won’t work out. Every time you’ve received a no, something better has come along and you need to trust the timing of the universe and believe that if you aren’t getting what you want right now, you aren’t ready for it.

Keep the faith, you’ve got this and if it looks like everything is falling apart this week, it might start working out next week! If you have any great tips on how to keep the faith, fill up the comment section!

Sending you buckets of love!
M xx