What are you most proud of in your life?

This is an interesting question because, for my brain type, pride is fleeting. It is a moment of accomplishment, a “look what I did” butterfly held timidly in cupped hands and that flies away as soon as I release it… and then I move on to the next mountain.

I wonder if having pride is something ingrained in childhood, similar to having a good memory. Is pride created by hanging up your child’s artwork? Here’s a patch of honesty — I’m so out of the loop when it comes to pride that I had to look up “what instills pride in a child” in order to get my three options that I would usually finish off that question with. And I’m still confused. Is it as simple as recognizing effort?

I actually ended up pausing this blog post for two weeks until I could chat with my psychologist friend about their experiences with pride. I expected it to be an emotion they struggled with as much as I do, and I was shocked about how easily they were able to identify things they are proud of and moments of pride in their life. In that conversation, I ended up learning quite a few things about pride:

• Pride is a single word with two meanings. The first is a positive emotion about an accomplishment you have achieved — the “feeling” of pride. The second is closer to hubris — the state of having too much pride (over-confidence)… it is more hierarchical and based on self-identification rather than an emotion.
• For someone with a religious background (me) — the two words are often confused. In that I’ve been taught the “sin of pride” but because the same word is used in both instances, the moment of pleasure in accomplishment also feels somehow “sinful”. The more religious one becomes, the more the sins creep into all aspects of pleasure. Gluttony creeps so much that enjoying food becomes wrong. Pride creeps so much that enjoying accomplishment becomes a sin.
• Many people have no problem feeling pride.
• My friend likened memories of accomplishment to perfume bottles that you can open and get a whiff of remembered pride… but over time the bottle empties, the pride related to that memory fades… and that’s completely natural (IE, it’s not necessarily an issue related to my poor memory).

Bookish Pride and the Realm of Boasting

Bringing pride into the bookish world, I feel like there’s a very fine line we are asked to walk as far as sharing our pride online, in writing groups, or with other writers. But at that point, we’re not even talking about pride or hubris (the internal emotions one feels about their accomplishments) but the external exhibition of pride, which can be a way to build connection or can fall into the realm of boasting.

Interestingly, I talked with another friend about pride, and rather than the experience of feeling pride and the different emotions that can be related to pride, our conversation almost immediately drifted into boasting. For her, the experience of pride (long-term vs. in a moment of accomplishment) was tied to boasting, which she saw as meaningless. She doesn’t care what someone did — she cares who they are. This got me thinking a lot about boasting in the writing world and how it’s intimately entwined with pride… especially on social media. Authors have to share their books on social media so readers can find them, but you can’t LOOK like you’re sharing your book for marketing purposes (because authenticity on social media — and the algorithm). So your “brand” has to become folded into your experiences, and then you can’t talk too much about your accomplishments because:

• some are just luck and circumstance
• some will make others feel bad
• some will come off as boasting

What you eventually get is a lot of writers talking about their writing process on social media but rarely sharing their books or stories except when they come out and during the awards period. But at the same time, social media drifts more and more into the commercial area as our very existence gets side-hustled capitalized. It’s exhausting.

I find it easier to navigate servers and forums where I’m building friendships with fewer people. It feels less like flipping up a peacock tail in the hopes I’ll attract some attention and more like I’m having an authentic interaction. (Honestly, if you all survived the fall of Twitter and were able to build community elsewhere, I am envious of you. For me, social media has gotten more depressing every year since 2022). But even in servers, walking that line can be difficult. I’ve felt my foot slide into my mouth more than once, and I’ve had to casually back away from the keyboard when I felt jealousy rising in me as others shared their accomplishments.

Enter the Humble Brag

What’s a writer to do? We are supposed to share our books on social media, but we can’t boast about them? Enter the humble brag. “Oh my god, writing is so hard! I wrote 10k words and now my brain hurts!”. “Transparency: I sold 1k copies this month”. “Having two agents fight over me is so hard, I wish this process was over.” Sometimes these posts are good-willed and authentic. Sometimes they are humble brags. The thing is, we can’t really tell, and a lot of how we react (or how I react) depends on my own situation in the moment. “Ugh… I wrote nothing for a week… look at them bragging!” vs. “Me too! Good job!”.

All of this is a long and convoluted way of saying: sharing pride is a complicated thing. But this post is supposed to be about pride. So how’s a writer supposed to share what they’re proud of? Over the past few weeks, these are the guidelines that have emerged that I want to use in my own exhibition of pride:

1. Connect my pride to things within my control. I can’t control whether I have 1 reader or 10,000. I can control whether I finish a story. I’m going to choose to connect my pride to the things I’ve done rather than the good things that I’ve made room for in my life. (I may still share those good things, but not as a point of pride… instead as a point of gratefulness).
2. Connect my pride to my values. I wrote a post about my writer values a few weeks ago. I’m still developing them. But I think pride is more meaningful and longer lasting when it is connected to me living my life the way I want to.
3. Own my pride. If pride’s a sin, the humble-brag is a bigger sin. In my world, lying has no place in my life. So out with the humble-brag. When I feel good about something I’ve done, I’ll share my joy, as opposed to emphasizing my pain to make it more palatable.
4. Celebrate successes. Life is long and lonely. It’s okay to take a breath and feel good.

My Favorite Writing Accomplishments

My three favorite writing accomplishments are the creation and publication of these three pieces:

It Comes Through Us

It Comes Through Us is a short piece that was published in Three-Lobed Burning Eye in 2023. I am particularly proud of it because it is plural-POV. I wanted to stretch my skills and work in a different medium than usual. (I mostly write tight first, present tense). For this piece I wanted to try plural, partly inspired by other plural stories I had read in the recent years, and because I just wanted to grow as a writer. I worked on this one for a few months, and I’m happy with how it turned out. I think I really did grow by writing it, and I think I was able to use the plural POV effectively. I’m also proud because I thought the material was too dark but still tried to get it published.

Casual

My next really major accomplishment is my full-length novel, Casual, which was published by Tenebrous Press earlier this year. I wrote two books before Casual (neither of them published). One was a middle-grade fantasy and the second was a contemporary, dark YA. I’m proud that, although there was not interest in the first two, I kept going with Casual. I’m also proud of it because it really required to dig deep — it is heavily based on my personal life including my mental health struggles, pregnancy, and childhood. It was perhaps the most honest I’ve been in a book. But writing it was not as difficult as I expected — what was really hard was trying to get it published.

I sent Casual to less than ten agents before shelving it. (For context, I sent my first two books to around 100 agents each). I wasn’t new to rejection. I’d been writing short stories for a few years and had probably racked up over a thousand rejections between shorts and my novels. But I just couldn’t stand for this particular book to be rejected. When I realized Tenebrous would be a good fit for Casual, I almost lacked the nerve to send it in. But I did. And I could not be happier and more proud of that decision and how things turned out because of it.

Five Impossible Things

Five Impossible Things is a short story published by Clarkesworld this September. This short story (4000 words) took me three years to write. It’s had several iterations, including a noir mystery and one set in a high school. I knew I wanted to do a VR homage to Alice In Wonderland, but I didn’t know how to accomplish it. I am proud of myself for returning to the story year after year until it got to a point that it was emotionally vulnerable and resonated with others. I didn’t give up on this piece AND the piece shows how much I’ve grown as a writer over the years. I’m super proud of both of those things.

So — what are you proud of? I’m holding space. Go ahead and share.