The glass half empty

Working for myself and living by myself, I find it extremely important to surround myself with positive, supportive people. I’m lucky to have a network of wonderful friends and fellow writers, who appreciate the sometimes difficult task of running your own creative business and we support and boost each other when the going gets tough. For the most part, I consider myself a “glass half full” kind of person, bordering on a Pollyanna, at times – there’s rarely a situation that I don’t feel I can at least learn something from, no matter how daunting or disheartening it might seem on the surface.

In recent years, however, a few outstanding “glass half empty moments” have come along, to remind me of the importance of staying positive, even if friends or random strangers are taking a different view.

In my 20s I developed a close friendship with a man roughly my own age and, even though we only briefly lived in the same country, we kept in touch for quite awhile, before losing contact, as you do. Some 20 years later, out of curiosity, I googled him, found his email and decided to get in touch to see how he was doing after all this time. He responded and in turn, of course asked me how I was doing. I, rather over-enthusiastically perhaps, gave him the lowdown of what I’d been up to the last 20 years; 91 countries visited, books published, life-threatening diseases survived. Exciting stuff! Or so I thought. My former friend, although commenting vaguely on my achievements, instead seemed to focus on just the one thing and his response was “well, I’m sorry to hear you haven’t found a lifetime partner”.

So, what’s wrong with this response? It is after all true and valid. BUT and it’s a big BUT, it makes the assumption that a) everybody wants and needs a lifetime partner and b) that you’ve somehow failed at life if you haven’t managed to get one. Essentially he was mixing up his own ambition with mine and because he had “achieved” this goal, he felt compelled to offer his condolences because I hadn’t. Needless to say our friendship didn’t really rekindle and having caught up with each other, we naturally drifted apart again.

My second “glass half empty” experience was more directly related to my work. As often happens, I was at a work function, an evening event hosted by a tourist board, at a pleasant venue in London’s Canary Wharf. There was food and drink to be enjoyed, with people milling about chatting and networking. Finding a table I took a seat outside and a woman I didn’t know joined me at my table. It turned out she was a (travel) writer as well, so of course we began to “talk shop” and she asked me what I’d been working on recently. I explained that I’d just finished a book on Uruguay, which was due out later in the year. “A book? Have you got a publisher for it?,” she proceeded to ask me and I confirmed that this was indeed the case. For some reason this woman then became quite cross and asked me if I had written any other books. When I told her this was the 20^th book I’d worked on the following conversation ensued.

Woman: 20 books? 20 books? But don’t you feel like a terrible failure?

Me (rather taken aback): Well, no, I wouldn’t have said I feel like a terrible failure. Why do you say that?

Woman: 20 books! Well, I’ve never heard of you!

During the course of our conversation that evening, it became painfully obvious that to this woman, the glass wasn’t even half empty, it only had a few drops left in it, and I didn’t even try mentioning the fact that glasses can always be refilled…

Luckily I decided not to measure my own failure or success rate on whether she (or anyone else) had heard of me or not.

Instances like these are generally funny in retrospect, especially if you’re happy with yourself and your work, but I strongly suspect they would seem less funny, if I didn’t have a good bunch of “glass half full people” in my everyday life. I cultivate those, because I know I need them. Writing can be a lonely task, support is important.