Why I Burned My Own Book

Two weeks after my book came out, I could tell my obsessive stat checking was unhealthy.

As each media piece on the book went live, I looked up my web engagement metrics and book sales every couple of hours, trying to gauge whether anyone was paying attention.

I told myself I was new to marketing and just trying to get a sense of what kind of media was effective. Which was true.

But it was also true that a deep part of myself wanted to know: did that story matter?

The answer to that question is only within myself. Not in the data. Not in someone else’s opinion.

When I found myself checking metrics for the eleventh time in a single day, I knew I needed some way to break this addictive cycle of looking outside myself for validation. I needed to let go of my book.

I decided to burn it.

***

Before I was ready for this story to be a book, it began as a series of journal entries. The sloppy angry kind that I began writing between the lines but that slowly progressed to spiky, sprawling letters that I couldn’t read later.

Each time I finished a journaling session, I felt a little more free, having let some caged-up part of me out on the page. But I also felt ashamed.

Back then, I thought my job was to control my emotions, which to me meant not have the “bad” ones. To see them erupt in my own handwriting scared me. This anger is taking over the whole page—what if it takes over all of me?

I’ve since learned that my job—the job of every human—is to increase my capacity and flexibility. To learn how to feel more rather than less.

Because if I never let myself feel a particular emotion, I’ll never get practice with how to hold it, how to move it, how to care for myself through it.

The emotions I haven’t had practice with are the ones I feel most ashamed around.

I thought I’d “ruined” all those pages in my journal. That I’d locked my anger and shame in there somehow.

In the middle of the night, while my partner was sleeping, I slipped out of bed, grabbed my journal and a lighter, and went outside. I wanted those pages gone.

One by one I ripped each page out and lit it on fire, holding the corner of the page in my fingertips until I could feel the heat under my nails.

It was a full moon out. When the amber flames died the back yard was lit up in silver. As if the moon was saying, Be patient, honey. You’ll see your way in time.

Since this is where the book started, it seemed fitting to end it here.

***

The night I decided to burn my book, it was a harvest moon in Pisces. I don’t know anything about astrology, but since I’m a Pisces it seemed fitting. I’m trying to learn to trust the universe.

A dear friend came over with her own things to burn, and we built a little fire in the fire pit my partner had made from an old washing machine drum and some antique cast iron legs.

I peeled off the cover first, and the flames immediately bleached all the color out of it, so only the title Please Make Me Love Me was legible in black. The glowing edges slowly ate the paper from the outside in.

My friend had brought a book too, Facing Codependence by Pia Mellody, which had been pivotal in helping her understand a relationship she was letting go. She tore out the first chapter and threw it in the fire.

We traded off, tearing chunks out and tossing them in. My chapter on discovering I’d attached my sense of self-worth to my relationship went into the flames, next to the Five Core Symptoms of Codependence. The combination was so on the nose my friend and I laughed out loud.

As the pages burned, I said thanks to the people I’d written about, and thanks to the previous versions of myself that had lived this story and kept looking for compassion in every mistake she’d made.

I wasn’t always able to find it back then, but writing and sharing this story has given my compassion back to me.

Because of that, this story will always be worthy to me.

One thing I believe about this book—about any creation—is that once I offered it to others, it ceased to be mine. It has a life of its own now, in the hands of the people who choose to read it. I can’t control what happens next.

In fact, the fate of this book isn’t really even my business anymore.

That night, under the Pisces moon, I saved the author’s note to burn last. I read the last line aloud as I dropped it in: “By the time you read this, no one in this book will be as they are described here. Not even me.”

It felt good to watch the book I’d worked so long on dematerialize into smoke. As if it was returning back to the ether.

My job is to keep creating the next true thing.