How career comparison stole my joy...

Help! I fear others success is turning me bitter.

Photo by Alice Donovan Rouse on Unsplash

Recently, I’ve been tying up my own tongue.* Breaking my own fingers. Editing my own words down to dust. 

To say I’ve had writer’s block wouldn’t be correct, I write every single day. Sometimes I feel as if I’m drowning in words: choking on verbs, nouns, adjectives.** I’m currently ghost-writing another book and I am back working full-time at Cosmo, so I write, I am writing.

I am writing now… despite my urge to do absolutely anything else. I’m in my window seat, the windows open full blast, the breeze-I’ve-been-wishing-for is causing the living room door to open and shut, its creak an irritating whine I must deal with but I won’t, for fear I’ll stand up, distract myself with my phone and, once again, stop. Stop writing this. Stop writing for myself.

Because, yes, I’ve been writing***  I haven’t been doing it for me. God, do I sound like an entitled prick? I fear yes. As writing for a wage, writing so that I can fill my kitchen with Diet Cokes, buy lace-edged mini skirts from Vinted and jump on over-priced Taylor Swift blasting spin bikes is writing for me. I guess, what I’m trying to say is, I haven’t been writing for happiness, for the reasons I began to write in the first place. 

My ego has been getting in the way. Comparison has been, as the saying goes, robbing my joy. As the numbers have got to me, the god-damn charts, the statistics, the follower counts, the page-views, the hits. I have been battering myself with the success of others, punching my ambition into submission. Humiliating myself for trying. And I’m only just beginning to unpick why. 

And ugh. I always thought I didn’t write for my ego. That I didn’t write books to become best-sellers, that I didn’t pen poems to go viral… That this newsletter was to help us all untangle our grief together. That was its mission. It didn’t matter how many subscribers I got, as long as some people read it, some people felt comforted by my words. I also wanted to use it as a way to figure myself out, to soothe my own soul. I’ve achieved that. 

But here I am, unable to write, because I’ve let my disgusting want/need for praise drown out all my sensible thoughts. My usual, happy-go-lucky brain has become a snakepit of hissing words of failure. And those snakes have been wrapping their powerful, vicious bodies around my wrists, stopping me from writing because… because… my ego hisses, I’ll never be them. The celebrated writers. The lauded ones. The ones dominating broadsheet best-seller lists, and pulled within the inner circle of writers who praise-quote each others’ books and interview each other on panels. 

I’m grossing myself out. Sorry. But I have to write all of this down. As I have a list of newsletters I really want to finish and publish, but I’ve been stopping myself. I need to purge the shame out, free myself of this blockage. I need to clean myself of comparison. 

Because while I know, I know, we need to redefine what success looks like. I need to STOP BEING SO SILLY and recognise that it’s not-so-great the top. But we’re living in a capitalist, numbers-obsessed (whether that’s salary or follower count) society. I’m also someone who, from a young age, could see the protection that comes with popularity. Bullied for my buck-teeth, I saw how - by being nice, sweet and yes, a little-bit-false - if I made friends with the popular girls, I was picked on less. I often wonder if it’s this strategy, formed around the age of eight, that drove me into my relentless pursuit of ‘making it’ in the mean-girl world of glossies.****

I’ve been working really hard at recognising all of this, making decisions based on my own desire, not what I think others want of me. But, as you can tell, it’s really hard at times. This shit has been sewn under my skin, the top of the ladder glitters as if it really is gold.

There’s also now, in our attention-based economy, so many different new ways to compare. It’s oh-so-easy to reduce my own worth, my own popularity to a number. I can see how many people read my articles online, I can watch my Instagram follow count go-up-go-down and I can study the charts Substack gives me, of how many people subscribe and how many people read.

I can then compare those numbers to the readily available numbers of someone else and then, tell myself, that because I fall short in that one, small way, I am worse than them. I am below them. My eight-year-old self, searching for that protection, comes out and says “you’re losing, you’re a loser. Retreat back inside. Stop trying. You’re safe there.” I recognise this in myself and I hate it. I tell myself not to let the numbers get to me… and then I see an influencer offered a six-figure book deal, based on her follower count… It’s an ongoing struggle.*****

When I first began writing poetry, I didn’t realise they were poems. Short sequences of words appeared in my head, and urged for me to put them on paper. I wasn’t particularly happy at the time and putting these little snippets of my struggles out there helped me, I could figure a few things out by doing so. People began to ‘like’ them, share them and, with that, they became something else. A yardstick for me to measure my own popularity with. And once I realised that, I then started to measure their merit on the thoughts of others, instead of how I felt about each piece. I watched as other people’s poems went ‘viral’ and wondered why mine weren’t. Feeling the pressure, they stopped appearing in my mind, the way they once had. I stopped being able to write them. 

The same happened with my fiction writing. My book, which I’m very proud of and which people liked, did not ‘take off.’ It did not become ‘a word of mouth best-seller.’ It is not currently circulating BookTok. Every six months or so I receive an email breaking down my sales. I think I made about 50p last time. In the months that followed its release I’d see peers’ books get their own tube posters, climb the charts. Meanwhile, I had people say to me, “I couldn’t find your book in the shop” and I struggled to get fifty people to review it on amazon (something publishers told me would help sales.) Again, I didn’t write the book for this kind of success. I wanted to put the complexities of grief into an easy-read, make these thoughts and feelings accessible. Or, so I thought. As when I didn’t achieve how society expects us to achieve, I felt a failure and struggled to even come up with an idea for a second one, never mind write it. 

I realised, this morning, in the shower, I’m repeating this pattern again, with this Substack. It’s a very recent revelation, so excuse me if these thoughts aren’t particularly well shaped. But I’d just done the most ridiculous thing. I’d seen that the Observer had published their top Substacks and I’d checked to see if I’d made the list (?!?!?) Obviously I wasn’t going to make the list! I am not a big name and I do not have that many subscribers. It is not a failure that I did not make the Observer’s list of Substacks to follow. But, recently****** there’s been a lot in the press about Substack. Lists like the one in The Observer are being published, there’s articles detailing those who are making six-figures through the platform, pulling in millions of pageviews each week. From these, that creep of comparison has wormed its way back inside of me, it’s made me feel like a failure for not achieving what those people have achieved.

And that has - once again - stopped me from trying. Pushed me back into pouring my energy into editing other people’s articles, writing other people’s books. I can pretend to myself I don’t write for ego all I like, then give myself (OK, I’ll call it that) writer’s block, when I don’t achieve within the false narrative laid out for me. When I’m not praised enough. 

I’m being so honest here I’m beginning to really hate myself. I want to write some sort of uplifting conclusion. I could point out how I’ve begun to enjoy poetry again, by doing little free-writes on the Tube and letting my thoughts run away on the page. But I’m posting them on Instagram, injecting myself with the dopamine of their likes. I have almost finished a second book, but something within is stopping me from writing its ending. At least though, I have recognised the pattern in both of these things and I’m trying to learn from it.

So this splurge of words has helped, despite all the sludgy self-hatred it has brought with it. I have untangled something within and, what comes next, is figuring out what to do with that. Maybe it’s banning myself from looking at how this post performs? Maybe it’s analysing the people I feel most jealous of, and using their success as my alarm clock, the thing that pulls me out of bed and to my desk? Maybe it’s trying to bottle this feeling, as I sit, feeling happy typing away, and use that as the motivator. I don’t know yet. That last suggestion is the wisest, but is it the one I’ll adopt? I just hope, somehow, I’ll see you here, next week, with a newsletter written not out of agony, not out of bitterness, but out of joy. 

We shall see. 

What do you think? Do you have any advice for me? Oh and, as I said, I am proud of my book, so if you wanted to read it, it’s available here. And if you want to read my poems, I tend to post them here.

* When I’m in this state I tend to get very paranoid about how my words will be interpreted and I can use it as a way to stop myself from writing, so I’m going to write down all my caveats and disclaimers here as a way to stop this feeling. I don’t mean this line to be offensive to any adults with tongue-ties.

** I am so aware of how lucky I am to be paid to write and have the job I have. 

*** How many times am I going to use the word writing in this newsletter, gah. 

**** We’re actually all really nice at Cosmo

***** The really tough thing is because of how our attention-based economy impacts publishing if I want to, as I eventually do, write books and poetry full-time then I will have to play the game a bit. But the game is killing me! And so it goes…

****** This is not me insulting Substack or the Substackers who have made it onto the list. I want Substack as a business to do well. I am very aware of how easily comparison turns to jealousy which turns to bitterness and I don’t want to be that person. I just want to be honest as to how I internalise these things, that’s on me, not the people who write or appear on these lists.