The mentally exhausting adventures of a self-publisher

 Trigger warning: Anxiety attacks.  

This week, I am supposed to be officially launching the cover and synopsis of the second book in The Kenryk Series. I've had a good week. I sold 4 books on Amazon, and my ranking went from 3,2 million to 120 000 in a matter of days. I finally understood how Amazon ads work and I watched with glee as every morning I refreshed my kdp page to find a purchase made of my book.

I should be excited right? Over the moon? Look at me, climbing up the charts. No, that isn't what happened. No. The exact opposite happened. The PTSD from being caught in the KZN Floods, studying for exams, trying to finish my manuscript in time to have it edited, living with hyper-vigilance in a new Covid world, and my car battery dying on me cracked me open like a raw egg.

What started as a normal day unfurled into one that ended spectacularly with an unwanted anxiety attack. For the first time in my life, I typed to a friend "I need help". I rode out the anxiety attack, fortunate to have been armed with years worth of therapy to know this was going to happen eventually. You see, my mind collects trauma before it unleashes it at the most inconvenient time. Nothing like tears and snort in front of a male friend. 

That has passed now. I was able to identify what my triggers were. It will happen again in the future. This is the life of someone with generalised anxiety disorder, however, I will ride that one out too. Then, I will grab my laptop and continue to write. I will use the world and characters I created to briefly escape from the mounting economic crisis we're facing. I will celebrate every single sale. And, more importantly, I will remind myself that sometimes my fear of success can also be a trigger. Climbing from 3,2m in ranking to 120 000 on Amazon was huge. I got scared. I made it bigger than me. Was this really me? Ranking at 120 000 in a sea of millions of writers? 

I survived my first panic attack of 2022 and I have a song that always calms me. There is a specific part in the song Lights by BTS where Jimin looks at the camera and smiles while singing his lines. It is towards the bridge. Whenever the dark clouds circle, I think of that smile, of that happiness and light that he radiates and I smile.

So, my song recommendation today is the song that helped me through a panic attack. BTS's Lights . This week, you truly were my light.