Reflections on Launching a Self-Help Book in the Middle of a Global Pandemic
The world has changed since I finished writing it, but the ideas feel more urgent than ever.
This article was originally published on Medium.
We all have to balance different aspects of who we are and what we do and how we spend our time. Sometimes, different parts of us — our responsibilities, our hobbies, our experiences, our identities, our areas of expertise — exist in different spheres. Maybe you work 9-5 to pay your bills and also have an unrelated side hustle outside of the office. Like every human being, you still have to make trade-offs in how you allocate your time and attention, but these two parts of your identity might remain pretty much distinct. Two separate worlds, neither collaborating nor colliding.
Other times, our priorities and passions seem to compete with one another. We constantly feel pulled in different directions, leaving us operating from a place of tension. That’s where I’ve found myself for much of the past two-plus years. Throughout the entire process of writing, publishing, and (so far) promoting my new book, Reframe the Day: Embracing the Craft of Life, One Day at a Time, which will be published on Tuesday, April 28th, I’ve felt a lingering sense of tension.
While this tension usually just hums quietly in the back of my mind, it’s grown louder over the past few months as I’ve tried to figure out how to publicize a book in the middle of a public health crisis. The tension isn’t new, though. I’ve felt it since I left the world of U.S. politics and started spending a lot of my free time writing.
Where does this tension come from? Pulling me in one direction is the craft of writing, an activity I love and from which I derive meaning and fulfillment. Pulling me in a different direction — or at least it feels like a different direction — are the activities I feel like I should be doing with the time and resources that I’m privileged to have. Volunteering. Campaigning for causes and candidates I believe in. Fighting the good fight. Performing some type of public service. Helping people.
When I worked in politics, I didn’t really feel the nagging pull of these “shoulds” because some element of service was built into my day-to-day experience. It wasn’t something I did in addition to the job; it was the job. That’s no longer the case. Leaving politics has given me actual work-life balance, a better understanding of what matters to me, the opportunity to live abroad (and write a book), greater financial stability, and more time and energy to devote to people I love. That’s a position of great privilege. But it’s also left me with a gnawing sense that I’m failing to contribute some form of service to the world.
I’ve written about this tension a lot. I haven’t resolved it. I doubt I ever will. In some ways, actually, I’m glad I feel it. These types of internal dilemmas, while uncomfortable and distracting, can also be pretty useful. Recognizing the tension between self-improvement and self-obsession, for instance, can keep us from veering too far toward either extreme.
Over the past few months, I’ve wondered incessantly whether I should be spending less time finishing and hyping a book, and more time volunteering and checking in with friends and family and using my fortunate circumstances to help others. Book-launch stress and coronavirus-related stress have me bouncing perpetually between “No one will ever read this vanity project!” and “Just think about how lucky you are to have the chance to publish a book and to be healthy, safe, and loved!”
Even as we wrestle with these tensions and trade-offs in our own lives, every now and then we stumble into circumstances that allow us not just to live with them but to resolve them, even just temporarily. Launching Reframe the Day in the middle of this crazy chapter in human history might be such a moment. It might be a chance to align two strands of my identity that are usually in pseudo-competition. It might be an opportunity to leverage something I’m passionate about to do a bit of good.
Levers of opportunity
In the introduction to Reframe the Day, I quote Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford professor who has spent decades studying how stress impacts our bodies and minds. “In a world of stressful lack of control,” Sapolsky writes in Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, “an amazing source of control we all have is the ability to make the world a better place, one act at a time.”
Publishing a book causes all sorts of stresses and anxieties. The coronavirus crisis has unleashed more than a little stress and anxiety of its own. Yet to paraphrase Sapolsky, in the middle of all of this stress and anxiety, in launching this book at this particular moment I’ve been lucky enough to encounter an amazing source of control. Two sources, actually. Two tiny levers with which I might be able to do a little good in the world.
Sales. The first lever is book sales. I’m pretty sure the next sentence goes without saying for a lot of writers, but I’ll say it anyway: Reframe the Day has never been about making money. Its original purpose was to get the thoughts careening around my head out of my head and onto the digital page so I could make some sense of them. It’s also become a vessel for sharing with others some activities and ways of thinking that I’ve found helpful and valuable. But that’s it.
In March, I released the first three chapters of the book for free because I think these chapters, which focus on finding stillness and building awareness, might be a helpful antidote to coronavirus anxiety and social isolation. I also announced that I’m donating all profits from pre-order sales to the coronavirus response efforts of Direct Relief. Each decision, while incredibly minor on the grand scale of a global crisis, represents an opportunity to align what I want to be doing with what I should be doing.
In that spirit, I’m making an additional commitment: For as long as people are willing to purchase Reframe the Day, all profits from all sales will go to charitable causes and organizations. I’m under no illusions that sales of this book will single-handedly sustain an NGO. Reframe the Day is not Harry Potter. But every little bit helps. At a time when many of us are struggling to find a way to make a contribution beyond just staying home and socially distancing, I hope this decision gives readers a small sense of having done a bit of good when they buy the book. And it’s far more important to share the practices and ideas that have been so valuable to me than it is to try to monetize them.
Ideas. That brings me to the second lever with which I hope Reframe the Day can do some good: the content. Even if a book’s proceeds are going to charity, we don’t buy a copy just to donate money. Nor do we buy it just to add it to the looming stack on the bedside table. We buy a book to read it. To grow from it. To learn, to empathize, to improve ourselves, to share insights, to understand the world, to connect with other people. We buy it for the ideas.
Through no action of my own, the ideas in Reframe the Day feel more timely and urgent than ever. At its core, the book argues that anyone, anywhere can build more fulfilling days by focusing on two things: how they see today, and how they spend today. “There is only one path to happiness,” Epictetus says in Discourses, “and that is in giving up all outside of your sphere of choice.” While most things in life are outside of our sphere of choice, we always retain at least a tiny bit of agency over our perspective and our actions. We can control how we interpret the world around us and how we respond to it.
For example, we can create moments of stillness that give us a chance to process the world. We can build an awareness practice that helps us recognize the thoughts and emotions bombarding us 24–7. We can consume a little less anxiety-inducing news and a little more of the content that inspires us. We can try to make a little more time for the people and activities that we care most about. We can reflect regularly on death and mortality to remind ourselves that our time is limited, and our number will almost certainly be called when we’re not ready for it.
What better reminder of how much we can’t control than a rapidly spreading global pandemic that has dramatically and unexpectedly canceled plans, disrupted routines, isolated families, caused countless job losses and furloughs, and generated untold amounts of pain, anxiety, and grief? At a time when we’re inundated by uncertainty and a lack of control, these types of practices can help us deal with both.
None of us has the power to do these things all of the time, of course, but we all have the power to think about these practices and explore how they might apply to our situation. We try them today. We can try them tomorrow. We can try them again the day after that, gradually building a more fulfilling life one day at a time. That’s what Reframe the Day is all about.
The coronavirus crisis has also created an opportunity for ideas like these to reach new audiences. There are a lot of people out there like me — people who might not have wanted (or felt they needed) to spare a minute to reflect on their obsession with being busy and productive all the time, or their willingness to let FOMO dictate their days, or their compulsion to strive relentlessly for future achievements, or their determination to consume news and content every minute of every day without taking a moment of stillness to pause or process any of it.
All of a sudden, all sorts of people are open to new ways of thinking and, potentially, living. This global shutdown has inspired a collective reevaluation of how we spend our time and who we spend it with. It’s also caused many of us to ask questions of ourselves that we hadn’t asked before, either because we didn’t know we needed to ask them, or because we were afraid of what the answers might reveal.
These questions were always there, lurking in our subconscious, popping into our minds fleetingly and unexpectedly. Suddenly, though, they’ve become a lot harder to avoid. That makes this moment an opportunity.
Practices, not solutions
As I’ve learned over the past few years, writing, publishing, and promoting a book can feel enormously selfish and self-serving. Writing is, almost by definition, a solitary activity. Meanwhile, the publishing process takes a huge amount of time, attention, and money — three scarce resources that, when spent on a book, can no longer be spent on anyone or anything else.
Unsurprisingly, the promotion part feels the most selfish and self-serving of them all. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last couple of months emailing book reviewers, messaging Instagram influencers, and urging my friends and family members to urge their friends and family members to pre-order Reframe the Day. I think I’d be pretty uncomfortable with these asks anytime, but under the current circumstances, all of the self-hype and self-promotion feels decidedly inappropriate. Being frustrated by the rejections and lack of responses feels even more shallow, given the suffering, grief, and hardship that the coronavirus has delivered to millions of people.
If that’s not enough, there’s more: During every single stage of the book-creation process, especially the publicity part, I have struggled mightily to follow the practices I write about in the book. It’s almost funny — if darkly so — how much I’ve struggled. It’s gotten to the point where I sometimes feel like I’m mocking the book by how overwhelmingly I’m failing to practice the practices that have helped me so much.
In the first chapter, for instance, I write about the importance of creating moments of stillness. Yet these days, from the second I wake up until the second I fall asleep, I’m racing around (metaphorically, at least), worrying about everything I need to do to finish the book and wondering how I’ll fit that work in between doing my day job and exercising and chatting with friends and reading and hanging with Erin.
I write about building awareness, but I’m being yanked around by anxiety and despair about this book even though the whole purpose of writing it was to make some sense of the thoughts bouncing around in my brain. Even though six months ago, if you’d promised me that I would someday get to hold a printed copy of the book in my hands, I would’ve been beyond ecstatic.
I write about making more time for the people and activities that matter to me, but I’m spending endless hours in front of a screen crafting promotional emails and tracking down social media personalities instead of calling my grandparents or signing up to volunteer to deliver groceries to our neighbors. (Literally as I was first typing these words, Erin asked if I wanted to work on a crossword puzzle with her, and I almost responded, “After I finish this article.”)
I write about resisting our collective obsession with being busy and productive all the time, but I’m still calibrating my self-regard by how much book-related work I “produce” on any given day. I continue to find my sense of self-worth contingent upon whether I’ve heard back from a publication I’ve submitted a book excerpt to, or whether I responded to all of the book-related emails in my inbox, or whether I did enough promotional outreach for the day.
I write about how no one can “do it all,” despite the tantalizing promises of so many life-hacks and productivity blogs and “hustle culture” mantras. Even so, as I try to balance launching a book with working a full-time job, I continue to set impossibly sky-high expectations for what I can accomplish in a single day. I continue to convince myself that I can find time to do it all, both personally and professionally.
I write about the importance of having a trajectory, not a plan, and how much I learned from realizing that there isn’t a single prescribed path for any one of us. Yet I increasingly feel myself putting more emotional and mental weight on my identity as “writer” or “author,” leaving my well-being precariously dependent on professional success, much of which is out of my control.
I write about the power of thinking regularly about death and mortality to remind us of the privilege of being alive. These days, reminders of the fragility of life are swirling around us constantly, hitting us every time we read the news or put on a homemade face mask to go grocery shopping or substitute a Zoom happy hour for an actual happy hour. But I’m still crashing through each day in a to-do list-obsessed fog, focused entirely on what I have to do next, and what I have to do after that, and will I ever get it all done?
You get the idea. If I ever needed a reminder that the practices I’ve written about are just that — practices — launching this book in the middle of a global pandemic has delivered that reminder. Over and over and over and over again.
All I can do, I guess, is try to recognize it, forgive myself for it, and try to do a little better tomorrow. After all, they’re practices. Not prescriptions. And certainly not solutions.
Into the unknown
Some people, including me in the title of this article, describe Reframe the Day as “self-help.” On Amazon’s U.S. store, one of the book’s sub-sub-categories is “happiness self-help,” which is a little ironic since its introduction includes the sentence, “This book isn’t about finding perpetual happiness.”
I consider the book less “self-help” and more a “tool for self-reflection” because I’m not telling anyone what to do. I’m not suggesting people make radical changes to their lives. I’m not promising quick fixes or even fixes at all. I’m simply telling my story — what’s worked for me — in the hope that readers will hear echoes of their own experiences and find ideas and inspiration to think differently about their days.
Whatever you call it, what’s it like to launch a “happiness self-help” book or a “tool for self-reflection” book in the middle of this once-in-a-lifetime (we hope) crisis?
It’s urgent. It’s timely. It’s fortuitous. It’s unfortunate. It’s demoralizing. It’s selfish. It’s exciting. It’s self-indulgent. It’s a helpful distraction. It’s scary. It’s a privilege. It’s patronizing. It’s fun. It’s a way to support a good cause. It’s an opportunity to bring some solace and some new ideas to people who might benefit from them. It’s a reminder of my own shortcomings. It’s a chance to practice the ideas I’ve read and written and talked so much about.
Just like the crisis we’re living through, it’s all of these things and more, sometimes all at once. And that’s ok.
All we really control is how we see our time and how we choose to spend it. The same is true for this book. I can’t control what will happen with it, or what people will think of it, or whether they’ll even read it in the first place. All I can control is what I do with it. All I can control is whether I use the small levers this book has given me to support a good cause and to help people nudge their days in a more fulfilling direction.
I hope Reframe the Day helps you do a little of that today. And maybe a little tomorrow, too.
***
Reframe the Day: Embracing the Craft, One Day at a Time will be released Tuesday, April 28th, 2020. I’m making a donation equal to all profits from pre-order sales to the coronavirus response efforts of Direct Relief. For more information, visit www.reframetheday.com.