I Am Terrible at This, and It Cost Me Four Years

Here’s how one true conversation changed my life (and can change yours).

I am good at what I am good at. I’m a sound writer and thinker, a decent listener and interviewer, good enough onstage and being interviewed, fairly funny and quick off the cuff when needed. In other words, I have a highly developed interior life and a decent command of front of curtain work. My natural gifts excel on the page, on the stage, and in front of the camera. Which would all be well and good if this work didn’t have to be located inside a functional business that requires decisive leadership.

I am terrible at what I am terrible at. Without question, what I despise most about my patterns is conflict avoidance. It borders on pathological. It freezes me and robs me of sleep. Whatever conversation is needed grows into an outsized catastrophe in my mind. I have a disproportionate and unreasonable sense of loyalty, and staff changes feel like failure. I am MOST worried about hurting someone’s feelings and being experienced as a bitch. So instead, I am experienced as the absolute bottleneck in the business and the unfortunate rock in the river everyone else has to figure out how to flow around.

(This *might* have been a contributor to the breakdown of my marriage, but THAT IS A DIFFERENT ESSAY, BRENDA.)

A few years ago, it was very apparent that my publishing representative relationship was past its expiration date. Beyond past. I had become what the linguistic folks would call a thorn in everyone’s flesh. We were mismatched. We started together in the center of the evangelical bullseye, but I barreled through every conceivable boundary and became the reason they had staff meetings. I was the PR crisis. I was also a cash cow, thus my clienthood remained secured, if not enjoyed.

After making everyone cataclysmic over the gays, my publisher at the time suggested a drastic reduction in the signed, locked and loaded two-book contract I’d already written one book for, and my representative agreed and urged me to comply (when I told my current agent this story, she lost consciousness). Thus I made profoundly little money on the second book I wrote for them, because I fulfilled my side of the bargain even though they didn’t.

What I am trying to tell you is that this relationship had deteriorated, good reader. What I will also admit is that my friends, colleagues, and mentors advised me to bring a respectful, mature end to this working relationship…four years before I did. FOUR YEARS. Four years of feeling unwanted and problematic. Four years of endless queries “can you say this differently” and “would you be willing to soften this paragraph.” Four years of being out of step with the entire catalog and sales team and editorial staff knowing my representative was on their side, not mine. Four years of panic before every call and meeting.

And let me be fair: four years of a conservative agency and industry trying to figure out what to do with an author who had spiritually evolved right out of their established ecosystem, but who was unfortunately a bestseller so whatareyougonnado, amirite?

It took me three years of income loss, relational turmoil, and anxiety, then AN ADDITIONAL year of business coaching where we discussed this ad nauseum for twelve straight months (may God bless you, Mike) before I finally sent a kindhearted but clear certified letter ending our business relationship. And after years of dread about initiating this necessary ending, the email I got back said: “We had a good run.” The rest of the handoff went fairly gently. I completely catastrophized a result that didn’t even happen.

I wasted four years in conflict avoidance that cost so much.

It is painful to think how I might have thrived had I mustered the courage to broach this hard conversation when it was actually due. Also, I would have caused a lot less grief: to them, to the publisher, to my business team trying to manage a writer still in Christian publishing but a community leader using her bullhorn for social justice. Everything was a mess. Because I was unwilling to have ONE HARD CONVERSATION, I created endless headaches for my colleagues and endless anxiety for myself.

“Your silence will not protect you.” — Audre Lorde

I propose that silence is not better than necessary confrontation or change. It is worse. Silence is covering something up, and cover ups have never worked. Silence is a substitute for courage, for truth. And like I’ve said, truth is still true whether we face it or not. True shit wreaks havoc every day - relationally, emotionally, physically, psychologically - so not admitting it doesn’t make it less true. It just makes it last longer.

None of this will make sense to my healthy Enneagram 8s who race into conflict like their favorite meadow strewn with wildflowers, but for the rest of us who are garbage at this, may I give you some sentence starters? Some mental prompts if you need a little help moving into necessary engagement?

• What is the conversation you’ve rehearsed for years and never had?

• What friendship needs one honest sentence to survive, or to end?

• What apology do you owe, or the one you’re still waiting for?

• What’s the one true sentence you’d say to the person you’re thinking of? The truest sentence?

• What has the silence cost? In you, and in the space between you and someone else?

• What are you afraid will happen if you said it?

• Want to write this out? “The thing I never said to ___ is ___.” Start there and don’t stop for a page.

• Write the conversation you keep having in your head but never out loud.

• Have you said a hard, true thing to someone and had it go well? What did that teach you that you’ve forgotten?

I can tell you from experience (manyyyyyy experiences) that these moments when handled with maturity and honesty surprise me nearly every time. Because guess what? Usually that person also knows something is wrong; they are having their own experience of it on the other side. Also, we are generally bad at hiding our true feelings, so when we are too cowardly to say them out loud, they come out sideways, and everyone loves a passive aggressive person!

I can also tell you from experience that moving out of a mismatched relationship or environment, or improving it with honesty, is the super highway into flourishing like you might not believe. To return to my personal example, I published Awake with an entirely new publishing team in the general market, and I basically haven’t stopped blabbering about it since. It had been so long since I felt understood and welcomed, where my ideologies were not “managed” but embraced, I simply couldn’t believe my experience. I struck solid gold.

The only thing keeping me from that space was me. I was the roadblock, the bottleneck, the anxious rock in the river. Beloveds, you may not even be able to imagine what that one true sentence, that one true conversation can do for your life. The short tunnel of chaos you are envisioning, which may or may not be as disastrous as you think, is worth the wide open space on the other side.

Can you trust the future version of you to try? Can you do this one brave thing for her? She is waiting for you. Go to her.

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