This is Where you Come to Meltdown
Accomplishing a dream does not transform you into a wise and ethereal being.
Before I get into my latest spiral, I must share with you this roundup I wrote for the wonderful Sober App Substack. If you haven’t subscribed to the newsletter yet, and are interested in any aspects of recovery, sobriety, meeting the best people on the Internet, you must go there now. Every contributor is a gritty well-worn angel, the kind who have seen some things!!
And now, This:
“Addiction is unquestionably destructive, yet it is also uncannily normal: an inevitable feature of the basic human design.” -Mark Lewis, The Biology of Desire
You’re using that quote again because you’re still an addict. Look at you making Tiktok videos and Instagram reels and checking for likes. How often are you checking for likes? How many likes? How many shares? How many restacks?
You check nothing. You check nothing. There’s nothing to check because nobody likes you.
You have no interviews, no real book reviews. Everyone hates you and doesn’t want to play, so there’s only one thing to do. You deep-fake yourself a friend and make your own damn podcast episode. You experiment with voice changers and filters, download an A.I. voice conversion app, and peruse through the different voices available. You don’t know the legalities of using real people’s voices. Did they license their voices to this? Would this work for phone banking?
“My voice is my password. Please verify me. I’m Tom Cruise and here for my millions.”
You ask a chatbot to make a list of questions to ask an author who wrote a book about quitting drinking. You feed the questions into the voice converter. The voice converter speaks them back to you in the voice of Winnie the Pooh. No one expected this. Not even you. You clip and record and create an entire conversation to share with your subscribers, and then you spend the entire day doing two things. You don’t even work out. You don’t even change out of your pajamas or take a shower.
No one tells you when you set out to publish a book that you will end up strung out in your pajamas, checking to see if anyone listened to the fake conversation that you made between yourself and Winnie the Pooh. It comes as a surprise and is alarming enough that when a friend calls and asks if you can sub for someone and play kickball, you say yes even though you don’t want to because all you want to do is stay and check if anyone listened to your conversation with Winnie the Pooh, which almost no one did, or maybe they did and they didn’t want to say anything. Maybe they’re all sick of your antics because you went from being the person who did no social media to a Tiktoking, Instagramming deep-fake bitch because marketing is weird and wild, and your boss is an addict. Your boss is yourself.
People say, “Congratulations on your book,” and you say, “Thank you.”
What you feel, though, is confused and like you’re defrauding the world. It almost feels like it was too easy even though you know it wasn’t. The only reason it feels easy is because it’s done. Because the work was spread across months and started with a sentence. The work is addictive because you never know who will see it, where it will take you. But all of it is just something done in bed in pajamas. THAT’S THE WHOLE THING! It’s like when you started kindergarten and left for school, and Trish got to stay home with mom while you went to this place that was full of kids who weren’t your sisters and adults who weren’t your parents. It felt cruel. It felt like you needed to get back into your pajamas.
You’re still not sure if it’s good or if people are just being nice. It’s funny, you just wanted to get here, to the place where it’s done and it’s set to come out. Now that you’re here, you just want to get to the place where you can relax and write again.
It’s not the making that you want to get past. It’s the checking. You want to make things and you want to share them, but you don’t want to keep checking if people like them. That’s the addiction. That’s the destructive part.
YOU DON’T HAVE TO CHECK ALL DAY! YOU DON’T HAVE TO CHECK ALL DAY!
The book is not even live yet. CALM DOWN.
Please respond directly to this email if you have any interest in doing a newsletter swap! Whether you have a subscriber list of 50 or 50,000, I’m seeking ways to expand my audience.
Thank you, Brittany, for getting me my first podcast interview. Also if anyone wants to point me in the direction of influencers/podcasters or perhaps a lockbox that’s large enough to fit my ipad pro, so I can have my mind and my pajamas too.
Also if you read this and don’t think it should be spread to anyone else’s audience, you should speak now or forever hold your peace. They never say that at weddings anymore. I’m going to start saying it if anyone complains about married couples. “You should have said something at the wedding. Now you have to shut-up forever.”
I love your writing Julie because it is so relatable! I should be receiving your book soon! Can’t wait!
“Your shipment is on its way!” I was excited to get this email from you this morning. Heading out on a trip next week and looking forward to having your book to read during that time.
I don’t understand how the dopamine thing works but it seems to be real. Even if I never posted anything on here and just commented on other peoples posts, I’d still be checking for those likes. I even wonder sometimes if I’m only commenting in order to get those likes.