The Waiting is the Hardest Part

Patience has never been one of my strong suits.

I have a tendency to want what I want, when I want it....NOW. "All things in good time" has never been a mantra of mine. Maybe that's why I became an ER doc.  But I will admit am getting (slightly) more proficient at this waiting thing. Miraculously, I was able to write 500 words a day for the better part of a year, then  go back and revise, edit, and revamp for another six months, and finally submit my work for a time-consuming review...without my head exploding. This is a testament to my "one day at a time" recovery program. However, when my book's production company recently told me to push back the book's release date by a whole month, into October...well, somehow I'm having a problem with this.

Maybe it's because my book's journey is in the homestretch; perhaps I am just strongly Jonesing to get my story "out there." The closer I get to the finish line with this release, the antsier I become. I need to remind myself that listening to others- particularly smart, experienced ones, is healthy; running half-cocked on emotion is not. My production peeps want me to get the best reviews possible from comparable authors once the ARCs (advance review copies) are ready in another two weeks or so. I know getting a few good "praise quotes" from established authors could make a big difference in book sales, and these people need time to receive the manuscript, digest it, and write something nice (or not so nice) about it. This is a good thing. So...I sit on my hands.

These "down times," after my part of the project is essentially finished, are rough for me. I hate waiting. 
Hate is too strong; maybe intensely dislike. But I will...because it's good for the project, and more importantly, it is good for my personal growth in recovery. Patient people...I am desperately learning how to be one of them, but why is it taking so fucking long?!




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Intubating Alcoholics

Image
In the past week I have put three alcoholics on life support. The first one was 39 years old. He arrived to the emergency department by EMS unconscious with almost no blood pressure. I placed my ultrasound probe on his heart and saw it was beating alright,  just very little blood was entering his ventricles. This is because he was bleeding to death. When I intubated him I saw pooled blood in the back of his throat. His liver was so far gone, so cirrhotic, that blood could not easily pass through it, and the backup and created high vein pressures on sensitive areas like his esophagus and stomach, whose linings themselves were eroded from the caustic effects of constant boozing. He was literally hemorrhaging internally, and it took many units of blood to even get a pressure back. He made it to the ICU, and later that night, died. We later learned from family that he had moved back to town "to get sober." Case two was  a 53 year old chronic alcoholic who came to me con...
Read more

Whiskey on the Walls

Image
Alcoholics in long-term recovery maintain a keen awareness  of any booze in our immediate vicinity. Whether sober a week or twenty years, we keep a heightened sensitivity to its presence in a room. So when my hospital chose to line the hallways with it, needless to say the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. These days hand sanitizer has become as ubiquitous as cellphones, face masks, and Bradley Cooper; you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a dispenser. Companies simply cannot keep up with the demand. This being the case, a local valley distillery came up with the brilliant idea to temporarily convert its operations from whiskey to full-time sanitizer production, and began to supply local medical facilities. My hospital has been buying the stuff in bulk, restocking its depleted stores,  and filling all its dispensers with it. Here's the problem. Distilleries using equipment which had been continuously producing hard liquor for years can't magically c...
Read more

Baby Soul

Image
It’s  Baby Soul Day! In my younger teen years, I worshipped the iconic band Rush. At age 14 I was small, nerdy, intellectual, and afraid of my own shadow. Geddy Lee's voice, Alex Lifeson's guitar, and Neal Peart's lyrics encapsulated perfectly how I felt growing up in 1980s suburban North Jersey surrounded by big studly Italian boys and athletic Irish kids.  Neither the albums  Moving Pictures nor  Signals left my turntable *ever* unless I was simply swapping out one for the other. I hid in my room, pretending how I was going to somehow be cool, be accepted, break out. 30 years later, as I felt myself inevitably sinking in alcoholic quicksand, I read Neal Peart's memoir  Ghost Rider . Having lost his daughter to a car crash and wife to cancer within the same year, the legendary drummer one morning mounted his motorcycle and embarked on a two-year tour of the Americas, riding wherever the wind (his HP?) took him. While journaling his geographic advent...
Read more