You know that scene in Return of the King where Frodo is standing at the very edge of the Cracks of Doom, about to drop the Ring in to be destroyed? And the Ring makes one final, giant effort to dominate Frodo’s will, and he puts it on?
Sometimes the moment before a breakthrough is the most dangerous part. I plan to do my Amazon upload tonight. The files are ready, the notes are ready, the last proof has been inspected, corrected, and exported. And the last twenty-four hours have been a shitstorm of doubt and self-condemnation. The past weeks have been filled with on-and-off struggles with my compulsive eating.
I’m flailing through a last wave of accusations that I’m publishing independently out of laziness, fear, or impatience; a last wave of reminders that my audience will be tiny compared to what I might have had if I queried and hit the jackpot; a last wave of I-hate-my-book, you name it.
I need to take a moment for gratitude that I’m standing on this precipice, struggling with these doubts. I need to acknowledge the miracle that I, a dual diagnosis person, a category often written off as a poor prognosis, have survived and put in the years of work to change one nurse’s casual comment “You should write about it,” into a book.
Lori Lynne Armstrong 