February 17, 2026

How to Stay Humble

(This essay was first published in my latest Pickle Me This Digest ENTHUSIASMS newsletter, along with a lot of other great stuff. If you’d like to receive the newsletter free to your inbox every month, sign up here!)

I went to a bookshop a couple of weeks ago, and brought along an advance copy of Definitely Thriving to pass to the bookseller behind the counter, which might not be the done thing, but why not, I thought? And so after buying a stack of books, I handed her mine, and said, “I’m an author. You’ve stocked my books in the past, and I wanted to let you know about my latest.” She visibly recoiled, and shouted, “NO!” “I mean, you don’t have to take it,” I said. “I just thought somebody here might like to read it.” This back and forth went on for what felt like 500 years, and then she seemed to realize that it was an advanced copy, and consented to accept it. “I can’t sell this in the shop though,” she said, and I replied, “Well, I kind of hope that you wouldn’t?”

“Wow, that was rough,” said my kids, once we were out of the shop and back in the car. “Are you okay?” my husband asked, but I’ve been an author long enough to know that being brought down to size on a regular basis is part of the job description. Authors are not special. Authors are a dime a dozen. Authors are basically an infestation, and booksellers have to contend with our demented desperate egos on the regular. That bookseller didn’t care about my ARC, and I know where she was coming from.

If you’ve ever had authorial dreams, I would advise you to not have these be the foundation of your self-esteem—and believe me, I’m speaking from experience.

I launched this newsletter just over two years ago during a disappointing season following the lacklustre reception of my third novel, and ever since I’ve been trying to figure out to be a creative person who will never be so tripped up and shattered by such an experience again. Initially I thought the key was to have zero hopes or expectations thereby bypassing the possibility of disappointment altogether, and then my therapist and I had to have yet another conversation about there in fact being no shortcut around having feelings, even tough ones. And then I started thinking about how important it was to want things, including success, and how to hold this balance (and not have said success be the foundation of my self-esteem). Another layer was trying to avoid the trick of convincing myself that by not hitching myself to meteoric dreams of success, such a thing would finally happen.

Most importantly, I am working hard to accept the forces that are within my control versus those which fall outside it—for example, I can indeed try to sell as many tickets as possible for my March 5 book launch, but making my novel a bestseller, say, in a way that requires buy-in by the nation’s big box bookseller entirely is outside of my purview and no amount of rearranging my books at those bookstores so the covers are facing out is going to change that. (If it could, I would have become a national bestseller a long time ago…)

It has helped that lots of lovely things are happening around the launch of Definitely Thriving, things that definitely assuage the humiliation of that bookstore accepting my ARC as though it were a used tampon. I have a packed couple of months ahead of me, and I’m grateful and excited. I’m so glad that my publisher and marketing/publicity team have worked so hard to push the book and support it. There is exciting buzz and possibility, and while I know that none of that is necessarily indicative of anything except the loveliness that it is, I have also been around enough to no that such buzz and possibility is never inevitable, it’s actually so hard to come by, and that I’m incredibly lucky to be where I am right now. (The me who was launching my previous book would have been aching with envy.)

Pema Chödrön writes about the challenge of “being big and small at the same time.” Is she a big deal? Is she small potatoes? “This was a painful experience because I was always being insulted and humiliated by my own expectations. As soon as I was sure how it should be, so I could feel secure, I would get a message that it should be the other way. Finally I said to [her teacher], “This is really hurting. I just don’t know who I’m supposed to be,” and he said, “Well, you have to learn to be big and small at the same time.”

But how does one do that exactly? Pema Chödrön has no answer, although it’s a process that all of us are ever undertaking in our own ways. As my personal fave Courtney R. Martin writes, “‘Big and small at the same time’ is a constant human condition, not an exceptional paradox.”