Envy, Obsession, and Instagram: On My Mental Breakdown at an Esteemed Writing Conference

It’s the spring of 2021, and the pandemic is beginning to slide away from us in ways that still feel impossible. But there is work to do. There is lost time to make up for.

Even though I have a debut novel publishing this summer, I have been getting rejection after rejection for every literary conference I’ve applied to in the genre of Fiction. There is one esteemed conference left, and so I take a chance and apply for a Nonfiction Fellowship, with a haphazard collection of scenes and traumatic memory interspersed with potentially useless information about pigeons.

When I get the acceptance email for the conference, I am cooking dinner. I check my email after flipping the salmon in the pan and waiting for it to cook through. Our rental is small and the entire place will smell like fish for a good 24 hours.  I show my husband the email and it becomes real—that I will fly across the country, then drive two hours south, then attend a conference for two weeks.  It’ll be the longest we’ve been apart. But it’s for my career, I say aloud, mostly to convince myself. And my husband agrees, I should go.

When the book publishes, the month before the conference, there will be no in-person tour, only a virtual one that makes me feel “less than.” The weeks and months that follow are full of recording podcasts and writing essays for press and gathering marketing materials and promoting the book. All of this is done in a chaotic nauseous state: half-happy, half-terrified. I have so many Instagram stories that each one looks like a tiny dot on top of my story screen, and that’s how you know I’m mentally ill.

*

I have recently become obsessed with whales after watching a mediocre documentary called The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52. My husband bought me a little whale plush whom I simply call “Whale,” and he sweetly packs Whale for me in my carryon. I don’t see him until I’m dropped off at the Burbank airport and fish into my bag for snacks.

I cry, but like, a gentle cry, the cry of Oh, somebody loves me, and then I board the plane. When I land, my sister-in-law picks me up and we drive two hours south. The whole way, I have a feeling of wrongness, of going in the wrong direction, despite the Apple Maps telling us we’re on track. Still, I say nothing and hope the feeling is just nerves, nerves for what a glorious time lies ahead.

The conference takes place on a college campus where participants and workshops leaders all stay in dorms. This dorm is bigger than the one where I lived in college, and shares a bathroom with a dorm-mate.

My dorm-mate is out. I traverse the bathroom-hallway between us and find a guitar propped up against her bed. In her closet, she has some fashionable tops, a proper raincoat (I bought one on Amazon and it’s cheap and not even really waterproof), multiple pairs of jeans hung up nicely, hiking boots and sneakers and pretty sandals laid out neatly for her feet to easily slip into. On her desk is a notebook, which I open, and see that she’s working on edits for something. I see a note to call her agent, and cute drawings in the margins, too.

I already know that this other writer, with whom I will be sharing a bathroom for two weeks, is greater than I am. I go back to my room and look into my own suitcase. I’d only packed one pair of pants. How is this possible? It feels like a nightmare all of a sudden, the not being prepared, like someone else packed for me and I was supposed to report this at the airport. I have one pair of sneakers, a pair of Tevas that don’t even seem useful now, a handful of plain t-shirts, and ten pairs of socks, which isn’t enough! What was I thinking? Was I thinking? Why did I pack so stupidly!?

I change into my sole pair of jeans to head out for the Fellow meet and greet, when I hear my dorm-mates door open and close. She’s humming when she enters, a happy hum.

After a brief hello, we leave for the gathering. On the walk over, I find out that she’s a Fiction Fellow, and she tells me that she’s working on a collection of essays and simultaneously a novel, so she’ll be pretty busy during the conference alongside all the workshops. Upon Googling her, I find that she’d been on The Tonight Show a few years prior. Her collection of essays was published with great success.

At the meet and greet, everyone is either a Hodder Fellow or a Stegner Fellow. Or they just got back from Ucross or MacDowell. Everyone I encounter asks me who my agent is, then shrugs when I tell them because no one’s heard of him. But I love my agent. I’ve heard of him. Just a few weeks ago I’d traveled to Austin and we’d met in person for the first time and saw live music. But none of that matters here. I have not been awarded any awards. I am not a fellow elsewhere besides a fellow here, which makes me begin to doubt my fellow-worthy status.

I don’t drink, so I awkwardly hold a water bottle that quickly warms in my hands. We don’t have to wear our masks outside, only indoors, so my face is free and bare, although I sort of wish I could be masked for this. I don’t know anyone here and everyone seems to already know each other. Either from past years attending this conference, or simply because these writers are all famous writers who have entered into an elite circle of literary acclaim. My debut novel is about high school girls fighting and going to the mall. These other writers have Pushcart Prizes and Booker Prizes and are National Book award finalists. They are Rona Jaffe recipients. I don’t even really know what any of these things mean.

I could tell them that back in February, I’d been diagnosed as Bipolar. In 2024, I’d be re-diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder. (Why can’t these things be considered accolades?). I’m on medication, but still, I have my ups and downs. And right now is an up.

I leave the gathering early and sit in my room until dinner. This is when the mania begins. I need to go on Instagram and message writers that I know who have literary fame. I need to tell them that I’d love to chat soon, that we should connect, that I loved their thing in that lit mag and they’re so great and I admire them. I send out a dozen or so messages. I wait for replies.

*

At dinner, I put a spring mix on my plate and top it with tomatoes. I don’t like tomatoes, but I’m not really hungry and I need to give off the illusion of okayness. People who are okay eat salads. I’ve so far refrained from texting my husband how I’m feeling, that a shame, or a fear, has caught inside my body. That I have been mentally, and I guess physically, transported back to summers spent at sleepaway camp. I didn’t want to go to camp, but I stayed, in fact returned for three consecutive summers, because I felt like I had to be there, like it was a vital part of growing up and becoming an adult. People loved their sleepaway camps. People made lifelong friends and went canoeing. I should be friendly and canoe.

But I don’t want to bother my husband. I want to be the type of wife, the type of writer who goes to a conference and comes home with stories galore, with writer pals forged forever and ever. I want to buy a t-shirt from the conference and wear it to bed. I want to wear it so often that the laundry makes it soft and special. I want to someday give the shirt to my daughter, maybe also a writer, who will also attend this conference and be like “Hey, my mom went here in 2021,” and everyone will remember me and tell tales of my greatness. But I am crumbling, here, now.

I take a shower and discover that somehow a mosquito has bitten me right between my breasts.

*

That evening, there’s an opening reception with a few poetry readings. We all wear masks because we’re inside an auditorium. Certain people are asked to stand and wave so we know who they are. We are informed that one of the workshop leaders will have to leave for a few days for a stop on her book tour, but then she’ll be back.

I am instantly envious. I wasn’t able to do a book tour because of Covid. It wasn’t safe, so all I could do was go to bookstores, mask up, and sign copies of my book. I drove around Los Angeles and took pictures smiling with my book, but none of it felt real. I wanted to read in front of an audience, not on a Zoom screen. I wanted to meet readers, other writers. I wanted to celebrate my work, not sit in my house and do these readings and then get offline and go change the laundry. It was hard not to feel sorry for myself, despite being grateful that I was getting a novel published in the first place. Writing a book isn’t exactly easy, and when we do something that requires great effort, we have a hope that it will receive great praise. If you land on the moon and dig your flag into its crust, but then it sort of, like, whooshes away into a black hole, does it matter that you landed at all? Why does it even matter if anyone else sees? You still went to the moon.

A famous poet walks up to the podium and removes his mask. He reads a poem about bees. I am overcome by the reading, not by the words, but by the whole event. Everyone here in a room, happy to be here, crying maybe because the poem is beautiful (and it is) and I am crying because of something else.

When he leaves the stage and everyone applauds, I exit the auditorium. I am sobbing. I take my phone out of my shitty raincoat pocket and call my husband.

“I think I’m having a mental breakdown,” I say. “I think I need to leave.”

I haven’t even been here 24 hours. As I rush back to my dorm, I lay out possible exit strategies. “I can change my flight for free, because it’s Southwest, and I can see if your sister can pick me up, but then that’s 8 hours in the car total and that makes me feel horrible, no I can’t ask her to do that, I think I can get a car service, although it might be expensive, or maybe someone else is going to the airport, I don’t know, I don’t know, I just need to leave.”

My husband asks if maybe I should stick it out. Maybe my panic will subside and I’ll actually start to enjoy myself once the workshop starts. (The workshop hasn’t even started and won’t for another two days! These are just preliminary days…to…enjoy yourself and attend craft seminars and readings, that hopefully will make you cry but cry for good reasons and not manic-depressive reasons).

I go online. I check Instagram. I call a car service. I call Southwest. I email the director of the conference and tell her there’s been a family emergency. I change my flight for the following evening, the only direct flight available. All I have to do is make it through the night and the next morning. I go on Psychology Today and try to find a new therapist. I check Instagram. I check Instagram. I check Instagram.

*

The night is a blur because I know I will only sleep if I take an emergency ZzzQuil, but even with the medicine in my system, I toss and turn in the small dorm bed. I hold Whale close. He’s a totem of safety, of home.

The whale in the documentary emits a call whose frequency is unrecognized by other whales. The whale is believed to have lived its entire life in complete solitude, its calls forever unanswered by its own kind.

Why am I not comforted by these other writers? Do I emit a call too desperate, too foreign from the norm? Am I not good enough, or just not enough? Isn’t everyone supposed to be enough these days? Come as you are, there’s a space for you, we are holding space for you? I got accepted to this conference, but I don’t feel like it’s a space for me. I am in a space of psychosis. I check Instagram.

I am a part of the literary world, but I feel so separate from it.  I thought that if I published a book, if I got accepted to this conference, if I continued to prove myself as a real writer worthy of praise, that it would cure all of my ailments; the void would be filled. I am realizing the deep inner work on myself I need to do in order to truly heal, and maybe diving into the literary community where I thought I belonged is not the right medicine.

The literary world is so big, and it’s also so small. It feels like each essay, each story, might bring us closer to that golden spotlight. But arriving at that conference made me feel like I was back at square one, just picking up a pen for the first time, opening a blank document with nothing of worth to say.

*

I hold Whale through the restless night. The next day, I stay in my room until it’s time to leave. I head downstairs and see a writer on the couches in the main area working on something on her laptop. I recognize, by her nametag, that she is someone who is supposed to be in my workshop group that begins tomorrow that I won’t be attending. I look at her too long and have to speak to her. But she’s nice, and I wonder briefly if I’m making a mistake by leaving, if this kind woman is reason enough to stay, to take it all back and stay. I tell her I have a family emergency and that I’m leaving for the airport to head back.

“Already?” she asks.

The car pulls up and I head for the door.

“Your jacket!” she calls and I pick it up from where it fell.

I am given a ride to a bus stop where a shuttle service takes me to the airport.

*

A few days later, I meet up with two friends. One is a writer and one an avid reader. We meet at a favorite lunch spot, a typical LA hangout for celebrities and people who like to see celebrities. These celebrities don’t threaten me because they are actors, not writers.

Over a goat cheese salad, I tell my friends about what happened. Neither of them say anything. I mean, how do you comfort someone who didn’t really go through anything? I freaked out and left a conference. I had this wonderful, shining opportunity, and I kicked it to the curb because of a meltdown.

I try to laugh it off with them as we sit at the trendy café. Maybe it wasn’t a psychotic break (it was), and maybe it’ll be something I look back at laugh at (I won’t. I can’t). I look around at all the people who have no idea what I’ve just been through. I think about how I’m supposed to be at the conference right at this moment, sitting at a long table and talking about other people’s writing. Why is this so hard for me? Why can’t I stop comparing myself to other writers when I know it doesn’t matter? Why do I keep checking Instagram?

I never hear from the writers I haphazardly messaged, and I don’t blame them. They are responding to calls on their frequency, perhaps.

*

A few weeks later, my workshop leader and I Zoom so she can go over my essay. She’d emailed me that she felt bad I had to leave so suddenly and wanted to give me her notes. Apparently, the essay needs a lot of work—restructuring, a lot of rethinking. Such is life. I tell her honestly what happened to me at the conference. She nods her head like she understands, but I wonder if she’s holding her tongue, holding back the words that I know are true.

I’m my own worst enemy. Something like that.