In a post last August, I wrote about a bottle of champagne that had been sitting in my fridge for almost a year. I had been close to a book deal when that bottle was gifted to us, I wrote, and so my husband and I decided we’d open it when we finally made the sale.
That sale never happened. Other sales didn’t happen. My agent and I parted ways. I became disillusioned with my book ideas, I stopped working on my novel. I tried desperately to move away from journalism and into things that might pay better and be more creatively fulfilling. I fell flat on my face every time. Meanwhile, my husband quit his job to explore what he might want to do next and found that finding the right role in the Indian media market was a lot more challenging than he’d originally anticipated mostly because the Indian media market is very different from the British market and he didn’t like it quite as much.
Everything started going downhill fairly quickly. We started a business that we weren’t passionately in love with even though we denied it at the time. We became a one-income family relying on my freelancing to pay the bills (easy some months, extremely difficult through others). We were surviving, but slowly, our collective confidence was wearing off.
And each time I opened the fridge, there was that bottle of champagne, mocking me, reminding me of how desperately I wanted to be writing books and how badly I was failing at it. I jokingly suggested to my husband that the bottle might be cursed. It was no longer the bottle that was to be opened when we sold a book but when we had any success. For a year now, we were waiting for that tiny bit of good news and nothing had happened. My husband had started applying for jobs and despite his immense qualifications, nothing stuck. Not only was there was no good news to celebrate, we were now really beginning to worry about our future.
Eventually, we decided that we needed to get rid of that damn bottle. Just drink it and throw it away. We asked a friend over (he’d had a pretty rotten time over the last year as well), ordered pepperoni pizza, toasted to better luck, and drank it within the span of half an hour.
Within two days, no exaggeration, Sam had received an invitation to fly to Dubai for a high-level executive position and was eventually offered the job. A few days later, he was guaranteed a position at a UK-based company at far more than his minimum asking rate. No sooner had we made the decision to accept that he received two even better job offers, one of them his dream role, and he’s since accepted it and moved to London.
I’m not a believer in the idea that you close your eyes, envision success and suddenly things come to you (I can’t stand The Secret), but I do think there’s merit to the idea of keeping the faith in yourself and making consistent efforts towards your goals. I’ve always been a positive thinker, I’ve always expected to achieve what I was told was impossible or improbable at best, and sometimes I have. I’ve believed in myself so long and so hard that the world had no option but to believe in me, too. But there’s hard work that is behind all that. You have to keep trying, to keep putting yourself out there, to keep falling flat on your face and somehow finding that will to get up one more time.
It is no secret that the last year has been trying and full of struggle, including in terms of health. The first, second, third, even sixth and seventh bits of bad news and bad luck didn’t faze us, but there came a point when we didn’t quite stop believing, but we did stop expecting. We stopped knowing that we were destined for greatness and started focusing on mere survival instead.
And perhaps that was the mistake.
That champagne, that raising our glasses to toast to better luck, was us affirming our will to move forward, to do better, to keep trying, and to never stop fighting. By raising those glasses and toasting to ourselves we were saying that we still—barely, but still—believed in ourselves and what we were and are capable of. And what do you know, it seems to have worked.
We’re often asked to believe in ourselves as writers but it’s not as simple as some people make it out to be. It’s easy to believe in yourself when you’re having successes (even if they come laced with rejections), but it’s harder to believe in your capabilities when you’re experiencing nothing but rejection and failure, a complete departure from the path you think you’re meant to be on. And ironically, that’s when you need that belief the most.
The solution, at least for us, was to never lose sight of the long-term goals, the books and movies we’d write, the awards we’d win and the millions we’d make someday in the future. In the week that we dipped into the last of our meager savings, we were talking about the investments we’d make when we had the money. Delusional, perhaps, but a reminder of what we hoped to achieve one day and the work we needed to put towards it.
Life as a writer will always come with new challenges as you grow into new roles and push your boundaries. You’ll need to convince other people to believe in you and your work. But to do that, you’ll need to believe in yourself first.
Do you?
Can you?
Will you?