Attention Economics

“Congratulations on publishing your book,” they say.

I’m shadowing a server on my first day. I’ve been threatening myself with a second job for the past year, and now I’ve gone and done it.

We bop from table to table, getting happy hour orders when suddenly the flow of service is interrupted. I stand behind her trying to observe while being invisible, but the two women she greets recognize me. I stand in terror trying to place them. My long-term memory, an attic draped in dusty cobwebs, doesn’t give its secrets freely, so one of the women explains that all of our kids went to school together. All of our kids are now adults. I’m surprised when one of the women congratulates me on publishing my first book. In all of my imaginings of what would happen once I became a published author, there was never a moment where I’m talking about it while starting my first day at yet another restaurant.

I have a moment when I feel like I should feel sorry for myself and my book—that maybe the two of us should be skipping off to Mexico together with ten bathing suits in a roller bag. We should be doing that instead of missing sunsets because we are busy selling cocktails.

The morning after, I sit on the couch and feel sorry for myself for many minutes. It is an especially pronounced moment of self-pity because of where I am in my cycle, which since getting sober has become an especially potent and predictable series of emotions. I’m in the despair phase.

I thought writing would be different from waiting tables in that I wouldn’t have to put on a show. In my fantasies, and I will beat this dead horse until I’m good and done grieving it, but in my fantasy, I was a writer who never had to show her face or her voice to the world. I could just send out my words as though they were a salve to cure the boredom of the populace. Crows alighting on my porch with scrolls in their beaks demanding, ‘More! More!’

I must repeat that I’m not complaining, but I went to fill my gas tank this morning and the pump rejected both of the cards I tried. This phrase that my dad used to say keeps repeating. “I work too hard to be this poor. I work too hard to be this poor.”

But then the tiniest things happen that bolster me. They (whoever the hell they are) say you must find contentment within yourself, but that only gets you so far during the despair phase in the middle of Nanowrimo. I supplement my inner peace with whatever words and gifts the world wants to bestow upon me.

I get my tenth Amazon review, and it’s from someone who is not related to me and they call my story “beautiful.” I go for a walk across town with my sister, and the day feels like summer. My mom gives me a long hug. My daughter increases the font size on the Love is Blind: Habibi subtitles. Morticia offers her belly. Everything is going to be okay.