Is the universe telling me to stop writing?

Hello from the long weekend 🇺🇸

Listen. I love a long weekend. I love the luxury I feel on Saturday morning, knowing that it’s not my only chill day for the weekend. I love how the Sunday scaries don’t come on Sunday. And I love that there’s a random Monday where I can do whatever I like.

I especially love a long weekend when I can get. things. done. That’s been the plan for this Memorial Day weekend. I’ve got short stories to finish, books to review, classes to catch up on, an apartment to clean, and simply so many other things I want to accomplish. In addition to catching up on things like cleaning, I want to get ahead on things like reading.

The chances that I’ll actually accomplish everything I want to this week are, admittedly, slim (considering I slept in til 1 pm yesterday…). But I love a good to-do list, a plan of action, an ambitious goal. I’ve just learned to hold them a little loosely in my fist.

What are y’all looking forward to this long weekend, if you’re in the States and/or able to celebrate it?

From the heart 💗

Let’s talk about being special, shall we?

I wasn’t raised in America, and to my knowledge during my elementary and middle school days the Italian schools I went to didn’t have “gifted & talented” programs, so I can’t say with confidence that I was a gifted and/or talented child.

What I can say is that the adults in my life, both in my family and in my school and in my social circles, poured into me the belief that I was gifted and I was talented. That I was precocious, special, smart, able to do anything I put my mind to. When I told people in second grade that I was going to be a published author someday, I wasn’t met with doubt and scorn.

How lucky! To be raised with such firm belief in oneself! You’d think it would have made me overconfident to an obscene degree.

Unfortunately, I am nothing if not ornery and skilled at turning anything good into a negative1. So what did I do with all that belief? I decided that it was the baseline.

Essentially, I internalized the idea that succeeding meant getting effusive, never-ending praise. I set the bar in the stratosphere, too, convincing myself that if I didn’t reach a certain “level” of effusive praise, it meant I wasn’t up to snuff. I had failed, or worse, exhibited mediocrity.

This belief has followed me into adulthood and, in fact, somehow gotten worse in my late 20s and early 30s.

If a friend reads my book and says, “it’s good,” the lack of exclamation points, effusive over-the-top praise, and concrete examples of what, specifically, stood out to them, will send me spiraling.

If I put on a new dress and show it off to my roommate and she says, “looks nice” without clapping her hands and jumping up and down and squealing, I’ll be convinced she thinks I’m ugly, and also, she’s moving out tomorrow2.

Basically, unless people react to me with the same level of awe and excitement they did when I was like 10 and wrote my first poem, I am convinced that it means I didn’t succeed.

To me, “success” means “excelling.” It means not just being good enough, but being the best. It’s not just a positive review in a trade magazine, it’s a star. It’s not just being a finalist for an award, it’s winning the award. It’s not just being accepted to a presitigious writing program, it’s being awarded a merit scholarship as well.

This is, I’m sure you also know, incredibly toxic. Not just for me, but for everyone around me. How am I supposed to have healthy relationships with others if I’m constantly comparing our work and output and trying to be at the top??? How can anyone trust me?3

I don’t have an easy solution for this, or even the ability to say, “I realized this and then did xyz and now I’m fixed!” Something tells me that unlearning this way of thinking is going to take just as long if not longer as it took to establish it in the first place. I’ve spent the past 31 years believing this way, and behaving accordingly. I can’t undo all of that conditioning in one newsletter.

What I can do, however, is promise that I will strive to unravel this thorny mental load. I will not just seek to be happy with the validation I do receive; I will actively speak back to the voice in my mind that says I didn’t get more validation because I wasn’t good enough. I will work to lean on my own sense of satisfaction with a project more than I do someone else’s validation. I will try to stop believing that success is only measured in extremes, understanding instead that it’s a spectrum (like literally everything else, I swear).

The first step to healing is often recognizing the problem, so that’s what I’m doing here. Hi, my name is Karis, and I think that if I’m not number one by a mile, I’m a failure. That’s not okay. I’m working to fix it 🤝.

From the camera roll 📸

From the page ✍️

I suppose it’s time to get painfully honest in here, huh? Listen — I’m on sub for Nat & Cami’s Guide to Running an Undercover GSA, and sometimes I don’t know how to keep going because of it.

Being on sub is thrilling and exciting and devastating and mind-numbing and disheartening. It’s all the horrors of querying minus the control of it all, with fewer editors as options. It’s kind of like hell, I’d bet.

And the more time passes on sub, the more I begin to wonder whether the universe isn’t trying to send me a simple message: give up.

The thing is, I’ve been sensing the universe sending me that message for at least five years now. After I queried four books with nary a full request between them, and after I wrote seven novels and none of them got me an agent, and after I had spent more than eight years in the trenches, the message rattling through my head was insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

Was I insane?

Possibly.

But I kept going. I queried that fifth book, and I signed with my agent for it. And now we’re on sub. And I’m wondering — is the universe trying to speak to me, again? Because I’m not willing to listen.

Here’s the thing: the universe might be telling me to give up. It might be telling me that there isn’t a place for my voice on the world’s stage, or that publishing books isn’t for me, or that I should quit now and pursue something else. Unfortunately, for the universe, I do not care to do that.

I have longed to publish books since I was in the second fucking grade, and I’ll be damned if anything short of my own death gets in the way of that goal.

So the universe can say what it will, and do what it wants, but I’m going to keep writing, and I’m going to keep trying. This is my calling. Try and stop me.

Alla prossima 👋

On Friday, the ICJ ordered Israel to stop its invasion of Rafah, and Isarel has continued to bomb it. The territory where it told all Palestinians to seek refuge as a “safe zone.” I don’t understand how anyone can spend more than one minute reading the news coming out of Palestine and not recognize that Israel is intent on committing a genocide. It has been seven and a half months of this. Tens of thousands of people have been killed. Enough.

I’ve been following this account on Instagram, which has a broadcast channel and posts daily actions to take. I recommend it.

That’s all for today, friends. Love y’all.

— Karis xoxo