I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about mental health and writing and publishing, but I really doubt anything I can say is going to be better than much of what’s been said by Anne Lamott.
All that I know about the relationship between publication and mental health was summed up in one line of the movie Cool Runnings, which is about the first Jamaican bobsled team…. The men on [the] team are desperate to win an Olympic medal…. But the coach says, “If you’re not enough before the gold medal, you won’t be enough with it.”
I’ve published two novellas and twenty-one short stories and I can testify to the truth of this really, really hard. I think I used to have this vague idea that publication would validate me, that it would make me happy and fulfilled and I would finally and at last stop feeling sort of inadequate and I would finally and at last stop feeling the need to prove myself to myself and to the world at large. And I really should have known better.
Publication does not fix that glaring personality flaw. It does not make you less lonely. It does not make you better understood. It does not make you more mentally healthy or less paranoid. If anything, it magnifies and intensifies all of your various issues in new and exciting ways. Only now you have a jones for the next acceptance, and the next, and the next. At least in my experience this is so: it’s never enough. You always want more.