Guest post by Isabel Joely Black

For the past two years, I’ve been trying to get the first of my many books published.

It’s been my dream since I was nine years old, and I wrote my very first story on an old BBC Master computer my father had bought.

I’ve been writing for my entire life, and have always wanted a traditional publishing deal. Self-publication wasn’t right for me.

Along the path, I’ve had a great deal of support from many people – often within the publishing world – who love how I write and can see the potential in my world.

But they can’t find a solution for me.

I had grown up within the world and I had come to believe that it was a slow, agonising process. A lot of people believe that. I’ve seen people say “He got two rejections so he gave up!”

Between myself and my best friend, we’ve sent off to over two hundred publishers and agents in the last two years.  We even had a large deal on the table at one point, which fell through.  I was given rejections that suggested which agents to approach, or where to go next. But much of the work was grueling and painful.

I felt this incredible resistance to the whole process. It felt unnatural to me. I’d set up my first business within a week, my second has just gone live within four days.

When I decide to do something, it just happens, and there’s no problem. I can find and buy a house in three days, an apartment in one.

But with this situation, the whole process of just considering sending off a submission was so agonising, not even the goal seemed worth it. To seriously think “I am just going to have to give up on this altogether because it’s too painful to even think about moving on” about a life-long dream is terribly sad.

I couldn’t take it any more.

Of course, I’m surrounded by coaches and the type of people who tell you to go through any kind of agony to get there.

I look over the last two years of my life and realize that I was in danger of losing my life to something so awful it wouldn’t even be worth the end result – if that ever came.

I felt like I was bashing my head against a brick wall. It wouldn’t be worth getting there if I hurt that deeply all that time – and even worse, if by the time I got there I couldn’t even stand writing anymore because of it.

Does it really have to be like that?

I think I believed that it did.

Last week, after years of helping people write informally, I made my writing coaching business a formal enterprise. It wasn’t an effort or a struggle, just a decision, a little light action and then I could relax. I enjoyed every minute of it.

I began to realise that the problem lay not in the gruelling nature of the submissions process itself, but the odd way I was approaching it.

I came to it with so much of my past, so much pain, so much expectation of rejection, of expectation, that it was agonising just searching for the right agent. It was like carrying a boulder around the moment I tried to start work. My head would scramble, and I’d feel lost.

I normally trust my instincts with everything, but now I would find myself in a maze, unable to work out the right thing to do, the right people to contact. And every contact was laden with the same painful expectation of what might or might not happen.

I suddenly understood that the reason why I resisted being published, why part of me didn’t even want to attempt it, was nothing to do with the end result, but with the process of getting there.

I also realized something else: I was getting trapped in a very limited way of thinking. A painful way of thinking that allowed for no openness to any less painful way of getting there.

It is also a matter of self-trust.

Everybody was stunned with the speed I took my business out into the world, and the way that I had come through university. Five years ago I recovered from fifteen years of severe anorexia in a single decision to change my life. My life had been falling apart completely, and I could see no way out at all. And then, one day, I realised I had to either ‘get busy dying, or get busy living’, and I picked the latter.

I walked into my doctor’s office and told him I would eat.

And in that moment, I trusted myself completely, and what I needed was there for me. I trusted myself, my choice to do what I loved, and I trusted life.

Since pursuing the dream of publication has caused me pain, and yet it still feels powerfully like my path,

I’ve decided to give up trying to push it so hard, to let go.

To find a space where I can heal the part of me feeling so battered and overwhelmed by the constant feeling that “I should be submitting more! And more! And more!” and come to a new sense of peace with myself.

I decided to stop submitting, to stop doing anything, and to just sit with the pain of the experience. There was no pressure for the fight to go away but merely to exist.

Suddenly, the battering stopped, and was replaced by an incredible sense of peace and possibility. I discovered what lay behind the need to submit with so much pain, and that was a driving feeling of limitedness, that I would never be able to do this no matter how hard I tried.

I felt as though I had been trapped in a tiny little prison. Now, I could relax.

Initially, I decided I would wait for inspiration to strike me, as it so often has in the past, for the right thing to do to come to me. However, since I chose to sit with the pain and the experience of what I was going through rather than fighting it with more useless doing, I’ve found myself more open to new possibilities. I’ve made contact with other authors, I’ve already been invited to my first major speaking appearance, and I began to feel for the first time as though it might actually be possible for me to be published, to approach my contacts without pain.

All the agony, the fight over whether it was possible, the fear of rejection, the sense of being limited, has simply flowed away.

My dream has once again become a dream, rather than a nightmare.

Isabel Joely Black is an author and writing coach, specializing in bringing the joy back into the written word. She has traveled all over the world and now works with writers struggling with a recalcitrant muse who want to find pleasure in their creative pursuit. She also produces Amnar: The Awakening, her series of fantasy novels, as a podcast released each week and writes a blog.

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