The author has no pants
A picture circulated of me doing yoga without any pants on.
A picture circulated of me doing yoga without any pants on.
I assure you no picture like that actually exists.
It was a dream, but my goodness, did it feel real, and that’s saying a lot coming from me. I’m the sort of person who remembers every single detail of my dreams, from the feel of the fabrics people are wearing to the second-to-second dialogue of bit players. Many nights, I can consciously make choices in my dreams and change the direction of what began as an unconscious story. I can rewrite the script while acting in the movie.
With this dream though, I was merely an observer, a theater goer. And though I was shocked and embarrassed for myself, everything seemed to be happening in the distance. I watched myself go into crisis mode and scramble to cover up the evidence—deleting the photos from websites I had access to and emailing people who posted the image to remove it. I sensed my panic, but I was also removed from it.
Do you think the fact that my book was less than two weeks out from launch had anything to do with it?
In some ways I was disappointed because the shame dream was so obvious. I mean, “Give me some layers subconscious!,” but then again, I appreciated the simplicity.
My brain was clearly stating, “You are putting yourself out there in the world and it is extremely vulnerable and exposing.”
As I write this I am eight days from the launch of my first book and I’m studying other authors who have had recent publication dates to see what they are experiencing. One of my writing heroes, Sara Petersen, absolutely nailed the process in her recent article, “Some truths about writing a book.” It was a post-mortem one month after her publication date of her must-read book, Momfluenced. The line that made me feel particularly seen given my pantsless nightmare was:
In the months leading up to pub day, I sent approximately 8,613 emails out to friends, professional contacts, people I talked to once in a buffet line at a writing workshop 3 years ago, people who follow me on Twitter, and people who have never heard of me or my little book, offering them galleys and (in some cases!) directly begging them to cover my book in any professional capacity.
When I was a little girl, if I needed something from a family friend or friend of my parents, my dad would always make me pick up the phone and ask them. I hated this practice. Nothing made me sweat or shift in my seat more than asking some adult I barely knew for concert tickets or whatever pre-teen me thought that I desperately needed from some aging rock star.
I can’t even ask my own husband, who’s alternate title is “partner,” to help me with shared responsibilities in our home.
Yet, like Petersen, I have had to email and DM every single person I have ever made eye contact with and push myself and my book upon them and then when they finally do respond, I have to follow up five more times, to a) make sure the book arrived and b) “gently” remind them to do some kind of coverage.
Maybe my dream wasn’t as clever as I thought it was. This isn’t just about being caught in public with my pants down.
This process has been the equivalent of arriving on people’s doorsteps, many whom I barely know on a personal level yet I look up to immensely, and asking them to sign my petition to make me a “real”author and buy my book and post about it on social media, all while I’m not wearing pants.
And then I go back to the same house two or three more times to remind them to do the latter items, because I’m “just checking in” (read: highly anxious).
Writing a book has truly been a lifelong dream, but I guess I never specified if I had pants in the dream. Maybe that’s what makes it so transformative?