I’ll be happy when…

and other lies we tell ourselves

Photo by todd kent on Unsplash

When I was preparing for The List of Suspicious Things to be published, I’m not ashamed to say I went a bit crazy. The part leading up to publication, once edits are done, and before the publicity campaign really begins, is ripe for madness. I swung between imagining what I would say at the Oscars (when I won best screenplay for the adaptation) and thinking no one but my friends would buy it. I make it sound amusing, but I definitely started obsessing over things I could no more control than the weather, not a healthy state.

One of the things I did to help was read

Emma Gannon

The Success Myth (which I highly recommend to anyone who is in the business of striving) and it was in this book I came across the term ‘the arrival fallacy.’

I hadn’t know there was a name for it. I’d always been afflicted by the condition I knew as the ‘I’ll be happy when’s’ (I’ll be happy when I’m thin, earn a certain amount, have a particular job title, get sober) and I associated it with addiction and recovery - both of which play a huge role in my experience. What I didn’t realise that so many other people have it too and that there is a proper name for it.

I learned via Emma, that the term had come from a Harvard psychology expert, Tal Ben-Shahar, and describes the illusion that we will be happy forever once we achieve our goals. Emma also writes beautifully and insightfully about her own experience of this.

Armed with this new knowledge and insight I decided that this time would be different. That when/if I achieved the goals I’d set for the book once it was published, I really WOULD be happy. Because this was different, this was a lifelong dream. This would truly make me happy.

And I was. Until I wasn’t again.

Because of course once I’d achieved one thing, I started to get itchy for the next, aware of a sense of lack, that maybe we should be going for more, bigger, faster. And I started to wonder if it was enough. If I was enough.

Alongside this I started to judge myself, and compare myself to others, and all the things I said I wouldn’t do this time. In short, I discovered, yet again, that I am an imperfect human being. But this time I recognised what I was up against.

So instead I shifted my focus away from ‘goals’ and onto the less tangible, yet more grounded things; The readers who contact me DAILY to tell me about the impact the book has had on them (including and especially the updates I’ve had from

Natasha Poliszczuk

this week whose 13 year old daughter is currently reading). The book bloggers who have not only supported the book but who have also become friends. The writers I’ve met who I now can’t imagine my life without. The books I get to read & shout about ahead of publication. The opportunities I’ve been given as a consequence of The List of Suspicious Things, like interviewing other authors at events. Most importantly I’ve also rediscovered the joy of writing in and of itself, helped ENORMOUSLY by a proof of the wonderful

Hattie Crisell

new book on writing ‘In Writing’ which has reinvigorated my creative brain (it’s out in November, I’d really recommend pre-ordering).

And suddenly I feel happy again The difference is that it’s not a happiness contingent on sales (I’ve even stopped checking my Amazon rating!) but something deeper and more fulfilling. That’s not to say I don’t care about the material/commercial success of the book. Of course I do, very much. More that my happiness and sense of self feels less contingent on it. And I know that is a far, far healthier place to be.