Why does publishing your first book ruin your life?

Okay so this title is a little click-bait-y. But stay with me, because I’ve got a point, an interesting story—and it’s actually positive. This is also going to get personal.

Context: if you’ve been following me on Instagram, you probably have seen that my relationship of 13 years, and the life I’d been planning for about a decade, went up in flames. (I’m going with the flames metaphor because I’m determined to turn this into a phoenix moment.)

ANYWAY.

The point I’m getting to here is when things began to settle and my head cleared, I realized… this story is oddly familiar. Maybe I’m drawing conclusions, but several of my favorite authors have stories where, after their first book, their marriage falls apart. Or their life has a radical shift of some kind.

So it makes me wonder… mostly joking… what is it about publishing your first book?

I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s related with something very powerful: prioritizing the accomplishment of dreams.

In my own situation, I’d been writing Jagged Emerald City for over a decade; drafting, scrapping it, rewriting it, almost traditionally publishing it, scrapping and rewriting again—on and on.

But something shifted in me the year or so leading up to finally publishing, and not just related to writing. I stopped hesitating so much. I grew more confident in my actions and words. I also grew more fearful, oddly, because I realized how lucky and grateful I was for what I had. Writing has always been a core part of my identity, and something changed where I stopped playing around and started taking that seriously.

The shift was so gradual I can’t really pinpoint where it started. Maybe it was my horrible depressive episode the end of 2019, where I finally got help. Maybe it was COVID and the shattering of “normal.” Maybe it was the shift in my day job where I was actually enjoying my work and taken seriously.

Maybe it was simply approaching turning 30 years old, and getting too tired for b*llshit.

Whatever it was, this gradual shift led to my decision to stop waiting on other’s approval and publish my book myself.

I’m sure now that this shift in my confidence and focus destabilized coping mechanisms and patterns in my relationship with my then-partner. Unfortunately, I wasn’t really conscious of what was happening, or had the skills to navigate it. Distance grew. I didn’t know what to do. So I acted on faith that he appreciated our partnership as much as I did, and focused as hard as I could on my and our combined future.

Then came buying our first house on 5 acres, the remodel project that grew and grew, and the final straw: his infidelity. I found out about the cheating, moved alone into the house that was supposed to be our future, and continued the house remodeling project in the months leading up to my debut’s release.

Side note: anyone who has been cheated upon, my heart is with you. And I mean that. If you ever need to talk, my DMs are open, and my email address is on my contact page. No one should go through this alone. Ever.

To those of you who haven’t experienced this—and thank god; now go look up infidelity warning signs and practices to keep this from happening to you, because it can and will happen to anyone—I’m not sure I can accurately explain the devastation. But I will try.

When I was a teenager, I was groomed and basically had to claw my way out of a cult. When I was 19, my father committed suicide. In the year 2019, I fought every day not to kill myself, swallowed by a depth of self-hatred that still scares me.

Infidelity blows all of that out of the water as far as pain, confusion, self-doubt, trauma, physical dis-ease, and eradication of future.

My family kept me upright. My friends kept me sane.

My writing kept me walking.

I published my first book four months after discovering the infidelity and the end of the future I’d been building.

It’s now been a year since I found out. In infidelity-trauma-timeline-speak, I’m still on the road to recovery. But between a very intense amount of therapy and a single-minded determination to root out all my fears and trauma, I’m starting to see things clearer. Probably clearer than I ever have.

I’ve lost the property I thought would be home for a long time. My goats, the brilliant creatures I’ve raised for over a decade, all have new homes. The relationship I was so proud and grateful for is ashes. (It might not even have been what I thought it was in the first place.) I’m 30 years old, and living with my parents again.

And yet my life is also opening up around me. I am unattached, free, and more in synch with myself than I have ever been. The possibilities are endless.

Publishing my first book was not what burned my life down. It probably wasn’t even a catalyst. But it was a sign of something, a quiet but tectonic shift. I still have work to do—let’s be honest, self-work is never done—but I’ve built a new strength with tears, tenacity, and ink.

It makes my debut novel that much more special. It was the magnet that brought me onto the path of something more aligned with myself, and acted as my lifeline through the storm.

Maybe the other authors, the ones I mentioned at the beginning of this, didn’t have quite such a monumental change. Maybe I’m trying to make a garden out of weeds. But I can’t help but see a thread here, that the accomplishment of this powerful, heartfelt dream has ripple effects in every part of life.

So really, it’s probably more accurate to title this… how publishing your first book saves your life.