The Three Ds
To Stop Feeling Bad
Welcome to a Shelf Life that’s only kind of about writing. I mean, like many Shelf Lifes it’s as much about writing as you make it. I try to include, as much as possible, advice about writing, editing, publishing, and other stuff that’s also applicable to other areas of your life. Your non-shelf life, as it were. This is a Shelf Life like that, except the other way around, where it’s mostly for your non-shelf life but also applicable to your writing stuff.
I’m sorry, they can’t all be bangers, and by bangers I mean the hilarious but deeply informative publishing industry content you come here for.
Today’s Shelf Life is about my signature method for addressing the things in your life that make you feel bad. My brother always says, “heck feeling bad”—well, almost, but he doesn’t say “heck.” I agree with his sentiment, but I have found that I can’t always shrug off feeling bad because sometimes the source of the bad feeling is a presence in my life and I have to address that presence, whatever it is, before I can deal with the feeling bad part.
Eleanor Roosevelt famously said: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” For this process I adapt that sentiment to say: No presence in your life can make you feel bad if you resolve not to let it. You might reach a point in the process where you say, “Actually, I’ll allow this person to continue making me feel bad because I prefer that to distancing myself” and that’s okay. It’s still a pretty big milestone to figure out exactly why something or someone makes you feel bad, because then the ball’s in your court to do something about it or not.
Here are some presences in your life that may contribute to feeling bad and are writing-related:
The nagging belief that your idea or manuscript is not good enough for publication.
A rejection from an agent or publication you were really hopeful about.
Similarly, an editor’s or beta reader’s feedback that got under your skin.
A project or manuscript that is unfinished and hanging over you threateningly.
Looming deadlines.
I’m not going to bother with examples from the non-writing parts of life because I’m sure everyone can think of several of those immediately off the top of their head. Throughout this article I’ll use Facebook—as in, yes, the entire social media site—as an example. It was a presence in my life that was making me feel crummy but that I couldn’t shake for the longest time, until I did, using this method, and then I felt much better for it. I’ve used this for lots of other things including intrusive, nagging thoughts; broad concepts; interpersonal relationships; and all kinds of stuff. But Facebook is a nice neutral example that maybe some people can relate to.
I like giving these advice methods in fun little acronyms or abbreviations, similar to The Five Bs (of public speaking)—be brief, bro, be brief—or, for instance, the ABCs of capitalism (always be consuming). I think it helps people remember—certainly it helps me remember—and also it’s just catchy. For this method I employ three Ds:
Divest
Detach
Distance
Beginning with divest: It has a couple of meanings. We are not using it here in the sense of, like, selling off stocks or subsidiary businesses to get rid of them, but rather in the sense of deprivation. To divest someone, or something, of one of its qualities. Specifically, you are going to divest the thing that’s making you feel bad of its power to do that.
Easier said than done! First, because a lot of times you might know something (or someone) is making you feel bad but not why they make you feel that way. You might understand that they have the power to make you feel bad but not the source of that power. You have to figure out what that is first. Like, you have to actually figure out what that is and not just skip to the detach and distance stages or this will not work.
Sometimes it feels like the move when you’ve identified something that’s making you feel bad is to just punt it into outer space but that’s not always going to solve the problem. Sometimes you don’t need to punt the thing all the way to outer space; sometimes just punting it like two blocks away is enough space for its negative effects on you to wear off (more on this under distance). And also sometimes the reason you initially think something is making you feel bad isn’t the real or underlying reason it’s making you feel bad and if you try to skip steps you may end up detaching and distancing from the wrong thing accidentally.
As I said above, Facebook was making me feel really crummy but I didn’t understand why. I kept telling myself to just delete the account but I wasn’t really able to do it until I figured out why it had this power to make me feel bad. It’s just an application that lives in my phone, it should not have any power over me.
First I was like: “Well its power over me is I’m addicted to scrolling it” but that was a cop out. That didn’t get to what was compelling me to look at it all the time. I then evaluated whether I was dealing with “fear of missing out” (FOMO), which is a brand-new human experience developed in a lab at Meta in the last 20 years and describes the experience of being afraid to miss an opportunity for social interaction. Anyway, that did not really ring true, either.
After some soul searching I realized the problem had to do with the vast number of people I was connected with on Facebook (300+), most of whom were neutral or friendly acquaintances (plus, of course, a handful who were actually real friends). I had accumulated all these people over something like 15 years of having a Facebook account and they were all like “the girl who sat next to me at dinner at my ex-husband’s cousin’s wedding in 2007” and “a guy who was at the neighborhood bar one time and hung out with us for the evening.” And also a lot of people I had known in the hazy past but had no meaningful relationship with anymore.
I had a feeling that I had to maintain this application because it was my only link to a lot of these people who I had one or two or a handful of fond memories of and who, without Facebook, I would probably never see or hear from again. The other piece of the problem is that Facebook encourages you to consider all these folks “your friends,” which has given rise to the term Facebook friends as in “No we’re not friends, we’re just Facebook friends.”
I came to the conclusion that a person who could be deleted from my life just by deleting an application from my phone was actually not a friend and not someone I needed to feel bad about losing touch with.
Remember, heck feeling bad. You can’t set yourself on fire to keep somebody else warm. Remember the immortal words of Terry Pratchett: If you build a man a fire he’ll be warm for a day, but if you set a man on fire he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.
Once you have identified why something has this power in your life, you can divest it of that power. Just take the power off its hands. Pull the plug. No more power. In this case, once I got my mind around the concept that I simply did not need to maintain a connection to people just for the sake of being connected, Facebook lost all its power.
What if what’s making you feel bad is something you rely on, like your job? I’ve definitely been in the position of feeling crummy just from going to work every day, or even thinking about going to work the next day. Your job has power over you because it pays you money in exchange for your labor and you need that money to live. Like for food and shelter. You can’t do anything about your requirement to have money to secure food and shelter unless there’s a rich relative you can bump off and you’re sure you won’t get caught. You did not get that idea here. However, the job that is making you feel crummy is not the only job out there; if you secure a different job to pay you money that you can exchange for food and shelter, then the current job loses its leverage on you.
Also, job is a fairly amorphous concept and I think usually if someone hates their job, a little digging will turn up the specifics like
Boss is a jerk
Overwork causing stress
Tasks are tedious and mindnumbing
Physical office space is oppressive
And some of those are things you can address without getting a different job. This is an illustration of why you should always dig down to the root of why something is making you feel crummy; you might have unknowingly reduced the real problem to a more simple explanation.
Once you have cut off the power supply, your next step is to detach yourself from the person or thing that is making you feel bad. If something is close enough to you to make you feel bad, it probably has multiple hooks in your life. That is to say, it’s probably attached to you in multiple ways, or touching you at multiple points. The task now is to identify all the points where this person or thing or concept is grabbing on to you so you can detach each point—or as many as you want to detach.
The Facebook analogy makes it really easy to envision: I have this app on my phone, so I delete it. I delete the app from my tablet. I deactivate my account. I erase the URL from my bookmarks. Maybe I even clear my browser cache so it doesn’t pop up when I type F-A-C, like maybe if I were trying to go to the Federal Audit Clearinghouse or something.
When it’s a person or even a broad concept, it’s more difficult to find all the places you have to detach them from. Like a concept or a nagging intrusive thought: It’s living in your head rent-free, how do you detach it and get it out of there? You may have to identify what the triggers are that make you think about it and practice some brain redirection until you get the thought or idea well dug out of your brainspace.
Once you have completed detaching, you and the person or thing that makes you feel bad are now separate from each other but still in the same space. This is the point where you can say, “I’m done! You’re cut out of my life forever! Goodbye!” and punt them to outer space if you want to. However: Now the hard work of divesting and detaching is done, you may find you don’t need to punt them all the way to the moon.
Toward the end of Aliens, Ripley and Bishop and their (remaining) friends have a short amount of time to reach “minimum safe distance” from the cooling tower before it blows. They don’t have to get all the way to the other side of the galaxy or even back to the gunship Sulaco; they just have to get out of the blast radius. After that they can figure out what they want to do next.
Figuring out what is the minimum safe distance from the thing or person that was once or may still be harmful to you gives you the option to get clear of the damage radius but without necessarily going all scorched earth and burning every vestige out of your life and memory. Maybe distance looks like:
Moving that manuscript to a thumb drive (or other backup location) and deleting local copies so you’re not tempted to mess with it.
Limiting your contact with someone to once a month instead of every day, or to only group settings instead of one-on-one, et cetera.
Deciding not to submit content to specific editor or agent in the future and writing them off like they don’t exist.
It doesn’t hurt to reevaluate the distance from time to time. You might need a lot of space from something or someone at first and then less later. And then sometimes no amount of distance and time is enough, and that’s okay too.
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