Gone mental

Breadcrumbs of a different sort?

I recently told someone that her bf-ish was breadcrumbing her. I think I’m right, but it’s hard to see with snot the whole story and also different part of the world where how they speak is a little different anyway. Still.

I have this friend who I’ve been most off and less on again friends with for a very long time. She tried to get me to stay with her and remodel her house last year. She’s within driving distance, but not commuting distance. Like 3 hours away. I turned her down. She makes me a little uncomfortable. I’m pretty sure I’m her backup fantasy person. Emily is mine… maybe more on that some other day.

Anyway, she contacted me out of the blue and told me about some woman who works for an organization that buys mass children’s books and distributes throughout her quite large city and a few other very large cities. This woman is in charge of procuring books to provide less fortunate families quality books. It’s a great program. They were supposed to meet yesterday and I was supposed to hear if she liked my book and if she wanted to order any. Complete silence. I heard nothing. Went to sleep again feeling like an abject failure…

So what do YOU do when you are confronted with an uncomfortable situation? Me? I write a scathing something that is completely and totally self bashing and apologetic for myself and my failures…. I wallow in my ignorance and my lack of self worth. I step down off the ladder again where I thought I was about to make a difference… I get depressed and forget to brush my hair. I go through the motions and plug away and help my son brush his teeth. I go to bed amass and dejected.

Then I delete my note I never sent. I write a quick “How did the meeting go?” note and somewhere inside me harbors and nurtures all those negative thoughts. I hold them in and acknowledge their private truths.

The meeting was moved to Thursday. I still feel like shit though. I can’t just unthink all these thoughts.

I have about 500 books in my basement. I’d love to sell all of them. It would finance my next one. I do have an event where I’ll need to have about 100 books to potentially sell… but every time I go to an even like the one in April, I end up selling like 4. I’m no salesperson. I’m awful at marketing too. And obviously I’m losing confidence in myself. I averaged about a book a day on Amazon last month. I was finally able to keep advertising costs down some. So I actually made like… well not much at all… but I didn’t lose money for the first time. I had “help” setting up my Amazon ads. Well it cost me $1.80 to sell a $1. Over the holidays I opened up advertising to help sell, but what I did was lose my butt… and still didn’t sell even 100 books all December.

This is a very humbling job.