The Unexpected Joy of Being a Nobody

On status, and where to find it

Today’s email was meant to be about your questions, and I will do that soon, I promise, but as the week has gone on I have found myself coming back over and over to a question of my own. It’s about status, specifically what losing it has meant to me and why. My grandmother died two days ago, which has brought a lot of things into focus. Seeing the people who came to her bedside and thinking about the values she held dear.

I hope that my answer might provide an answer some of your own questions. I hope you’ll forgive me for going so quickly off-piste.

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There’s a moment, one of those that life pivots around, that your mind keeps worrying at.

The day I found out I’d won the editor of the year award. I had been crying for hours, the kind of tears that feel more like vomiting, or bleeding. I pulled myself together to receive the video call with the Bookseller team. This was pandemic times, and I had so much work to do that the call was just another stressor. I had a sense I was in a spiral that would end with my own death, so everything else felt dim in comparison. The Bookseller team had told me they were just going to interview me for a soundbite for the event, which was two months away. I was at my kitchen table. They asked me a few questions, then told me I’d won. I felt mostly an anger that had nowhere to go but into myself. After that I got on with my day, with all the crying. Two months later, when the award ceremony was aired, I was on sick leave. I never went back. The award, when it came in the post, was put in a box. 

Shortly after, another package arrived, full of all the books I had published over my career. Shipped from my old desk in London to a house in Bristol where they reminded me of all I’d thrown away. They joined the award in the box.

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One of the things that beckons us up the career ladder is status. It’s not simply a power trip, it’s an evolutionary trait that makes us see high status as a place of safety. I remember hearing early on in my career about a woman who’d published one of the biggest books of the decade, and that the company’s management team met every month to decide what they could do for her. Aiming for the top of my chosen industry looked, I realise now, a lot like reversing the trope of my childhood; no more being the girl who used to hide in school corridors hoping nobody would notice her friendlessness. To be at the top would mean being liked, admired, looked after. Unassailable.

I climbed for years. I worked hard, and I learnt what it meant to climb further. Clever career moves, adjustments to my public persona, conscious and unconscious.

It paid off. I was making a lot of money for the company, winning auctions, publishing bestsellers. I earnt more money and fancier job titles. But having a winner means also having a loser. Being a successful publisher in a corporate publishing house - at least the commercial end of it - means making choices that can hurt people, including yourself.

I learnt that there is always further to climb: you’ve made it here, but here doesn’t feel as good as you thought it would, so instead you aim there.  

When I got there - when I reached that moment of winning the award - the fantasy I had been chasing finally came to an end. A story as old as time. The golden prize is a thing that burns. 

I realised that I would never feel safe, however high I climbed. That, in fact, the reverse would happen. 

Still, it took me six months of sick leave to quit, so deep was my fear, and my conditioning about that fear, which said that I should see the employment I had as the solution.

The truth is, there was no moment of strength, no moment of glory. I simply decided to quit when the worst case scenario, losing it all, seemed preferable to how I was feeling. 

After leaving, I thought I’d never go back to the book world. I vaguely thought I might retrain. This didn’t feel triumphant though, it felt like defeat. It felt like that girl in the corridor.

I entered new worlds. A farm in Scotland where I volunteered on the land, a decrepit yoga shala in post-pandemic Bali where I learnt to teach, biscuit-crumbed Bristolian church halls where I looked after my nieces. I realised that each of these worlds has its own hierarchy with its own status values that you could buy into if you chose. 

The sale of my flat fell through, and I had no money or energy to retrain, so I started editing again. It felt like an ignoble return. I hoped no one would notice. 

A turning point was having a call with an unagented author, who said reading my editorial notes was the first time they understood what they needed to do with their book after years of trying.

A second turning point was working with an indie publisher whose staff wowed me with their original minds and creative brilliance.

A third turning point was saying no to a series of job offers. I’d courted them because I thought I wanted them, I should want them. But at the final hurdle, I just couldn’t. Didn’t. The status they offered felt less appealing than a new kind of value system I was discovering.

When you set up your own company, you have the chance to create your own values. Your own idea of worth. It might not make you wealthy in monetary terms. But every heartfelt decision you make will shore up a sense of pride that feels richer than any number of zeros on a pay check. 

I have learnt so much in this year of being a nobody - about publishing, about myself, and most wonderfully about the craft of writing fiction. 

I have learnt to be wary of status. Or rather, to be wary of the status I have been told to want.

I’d like to say I have learnt to create my own sense of deep inner worth, impervious to the outside world, like the Buddhist gurus I’ve read about. But my belief is we need other people to reflect ourselves back at us. We are a social species, after all. The important thing we often miss is this: we need to make sure they’re the right people, and that they value us for the qualities we truly think are important. These people are, in fact, the key.

Now my award is on a shelf, freed from the box. I occasionally look at it, but it doesn’t elicit much of a response. The books around it, on the other hand - they each tell a story. Of the people who wrote them, who I got to know so intimately. Of the lives within the stories, each one now walking about the world independent of its creator, meaning a different thing to each reader. Of the people who helped convey them to those readers alongside me. They are stories I am proud to have lived, and they say everything about who I am and who I want to be.

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