The Bearable Heaviness of Publishing

*Author note: This story was originally published over here on Medium.

I already had another story ready to share today, but this is the one that’s coming out instead.

It was a prose poem, which makes sense because usually what I write is more on the literary side. I realize that sometimes what I need most as a writer is to disengage and state my thoughts plainly, like in a journal entry, depressurizing the writing process.

The poem that I wanted to repost today was agonizing, which I didn’t realize until it was too late. When it was out. Published.

I felt it more keenly when I saw it in print, the weight of it. It covers various themes wrapped up in a childhood home: How I both loved and hated elements of growing up there, how much I miss Georgia and hate not seeing the house one last time, perhaps a tacit explanation of why that might be. Plus, you have some thoughts on young love, law enforcement, religion, drunkenness, medicine and other, you know, “homey” things. I’ll share it soon, once I’ve processed it.

In my head, it was unassuming: some mildly traumatized diatribes from an ordinary person with regular sadness. On the publication market: difficult to place before significant formatting edits as it originally had line breaks that weren’t working. On paper: the dream realized brought the emotions back until they became unbearable. I found myself weepy today, tired, a constant tear making its way to my eye-corner.

Because I got what I wanted from this poem, and now I can’t put it back in its case. So why this sad?

Post-publishing grief: Why, just why?

Not that I would ever want to put the metaphorical toothpaste back into the tube for this or anything else I’ve published, but I acknowledge today that a certain grief comes with any degree of success in publishing. The desolation has a sudden onset too, I’ve learned. You could be drinking mimosas to celebrate one day and ready to weep the next. (Yes, this is how I started my week.)

I’ve encountered the term “post-publication grief” recently after some fumbling Google searches and am starting to wonder if that’s where I’m sitting. Also wondering sometimes if it’s worth it.

Do I want to rapid-cycle my moods this much, risk my fight with mental illness (C-PTSD and possible major depressive disorder) for some silly poem or story? Probably. But why?

Saying the unsaid…or unsayable?

I consider myself a pretty risk-taking person, so now when I look back at my last year of writing, it feels more akin to yanking a sky-coaster cord and letting gravity take over than it does making one conscious decision after another. After all, I’ve been writing about things that I have long left unspoken — why am I suddenly brave? My brother’s death came out, plus my complex feelings about family, my mental health and all the writing that I used to literally lock up.

I had someone tell me once that I wrote to get things off my chest, though none of it was “actually good.” Someone I matched with on one of the apps — why would I listen to him?

That burn alone kept me from writing for a couple of years but looking back, I can see that even if that is true, that’s something I can live with. I’ve realized that just because what I wasn’t expressing before was unsaid, it was never meant to be unsayable. I have the words to use if I want or need to use them. Even if they end up in some dialectical behavioral therapy workbook. It will do me good either way.

Contending with any “mixed feelings” has been one of my steepest challenges in therapy. My neurodivergence doesn’t offer much allowance for it organically, and my trauma and upbringing only compound that effect.

Purpose finding a page

So, I wonder if this post-publication grief is how purpose feels when it wrangles with more difficult emotions. Maybe writing purposefully and showing it to the world will inevitably trigger some ambivalence that I have to cope with.

I’ve noticed too that I’ve never seen a bylined blog I wrote and had to recover from it. Not in the slightest.

It would make sense that poetry hits harder. After all, I’m pretty sure no B2B or B2C marketing job would praise my free-verse exploration of my multilayered, emotional experience on its WordPress platform. Too much sex and trauma, I’m sure. If I love my work, which I do, what’s so different about publishing outside of work that elicits this level of response?

Have I earned this privilege to feel sad? One I’ve worked for for the past decade and a half?

Whether or not I’ve accomplished enough to allow the “big sad” to feel justified, I have to allow myself to acknowledge that it’s there. And I want to identify why but only if the answer wants to be found.

The faceless feelings of others

I have to wonder if this grief grows more acute once it’s shared. I remember sobbing and lying on the couch after one of my first poetry wins, telling my husband that “All I’m doing is going around triggering people.” I meant that at the time. I’m taking responsibility for the reader’s feelings, though I have very few readers. I can’t help feeling bad for them. (I’m sorry!)

Then there’s the other issue of taking responsibility for others’ experiences — who am I going to offend? I sometimes want a third party with no knowledge of my life at all to screen my writing. Do I seem mad here? Do you think I hate my [insert person here], or am I just angry with them? If I am mad, am I holding a grudge, or does it seem this feeling will resolve by the poem’s end? But I have no such luxury and have to live as though I’m OK with the outcome either way, if …if… I’m going to write, that is.

At least, it’s not just ego, right?

I used to fear rejection more than anything. Now that I’m slowly scaling the basecamps of Cringe Mountain, I fear this odd and specific grief instead. It’s just as bad but a privileged bad — a bad at an elevation.

Sometimes I wonder if this pain stems from ego, but then I remember that ego’s form of grief feels more like disappointment, and I count that as a win. I’ll take one less thing to worry about in this odd, isolating passage through my poems.

But I now have new ego traps to consider: What if this person I respect never reads it? What if they read it and hate it? Or see a way to improve it but don’t want to tell me? Will I get any comments on this? Likes? Reposts?

Have I replaced one negative for another? Or are things going to start making sense?

What I’ve arrived at from writing this — it doesn’t matter. The process does because that’s the only part that makes sense once the emotions lift or dry up. I believe that after years of denying it because now I know the beautiful, delicate privilege that comes from seeing my writing in all four seasons — creating, submitting, publishing and grieving.

If you want the TL;DR version, here it is: Post-publication sadness has hit me, and I’ll learn with time what that means. And if I don’t, I can at least enjoy some bubbly wine when the occasion calls for it, as well as the levity it takes to write blogs like this that won’t make me cry the day after.