Winning A Vocal-Challenge Forced Me To Confront My Neurosis and Impostor-Syndrome

Who, Me?

My desktop computer sits on a dark oak table next to the living room window, which stretches most of the wall and affords a view of pine forest, rolling hills, and the San Francisco Peaks.

Not a bad place to plop down on a summer morning with a cup of coffee to check yer email.

On the morning of July 27th, I took a sip of coffee and opened my email. Among the smattering of new messages were two from Vocal.

The subject line of the first read, “You’ve received a $5,000.00 Vocal bonus!” The second read, “Congrats! You’re our first place winner.”

For the first few seconds, the part of my brain trained to ignore spam emails filed this one away as “give me a break.” But then, still a bit sleepily, I thought about it for a few seconds. The decimal places are a nice touch. Also, clever, coming from a website that hasn’t lied to me before. Hmm…

The caffeine kicked in. Some important neuron connected with another. I clicked on the email.

“Congratulations! We're happy to let you know you've been chosen as our first place winner in the SFS 1: Old Barn Challenge for your story, "Van Gogh In A Field, In the Rain.”

Reaction

Here are the ways I reacted to this news, in order.

1. Dopamine dump. My body was physiologically congratulating me for the win by giving me a lil' shot of happy neurochemicals.
2. Stress related to neurosis. Good things don’t happen to me. There must be some mistake. The website is a scam. The money is in my Vocal “wallet?” So what? Something’s probably wrong with my Stripe account setup. The money will get lost in the ether. It’ll be worse than if I never won anything at all.
3. Reread the story to see how bad it is. This won? How could this win? This story isn’t very good. It only got first place because people dig Van Gogh. I essentially cheated. Vincent won the money, not me. I just stuck him in a barn and hoped for the best. Oh Jesus, look at this stupid line. How could they have picked my story as first with such a bad line? Other people are reading my winning story right now and raging. “How could this loser win? Look at these clumsy sentences!” they're probably thinking. I need to do a “quick edit” to fix these dud lines. But wait, am I allowed to? Will they take the money back because I changed the story? Isn’t it somehow fraudulent to edit the story after it won? Well, even if I do change it to make it better, and even if it is a good story, there’s no way I can ever duplicate this success. This is a one-off thing. I don't deserve it. I'm an impostor.

Introspect.

For me, losing and winning result in the same question: "Why the hell am I doing this?”

Losing is no fun, obviously. But it is a known, familiar state. Even a very successful writer “loses” 90% of the time or more. A story doesn’t pan out. A paragraph is no good. A magazine rejects a submission. You don’t have the Twitter followers you wish you had. Et cetera.

I can process loss easier than victory, simply because I have more experience losing. Losing doesn’t faze me.

But victory: how do I process that?

First, I have to look at my reaction.

When I found out I won The Old Barn Challenge, I definitely did feel that lovely dopamine rush for the first minute or so. “Holy shit! I won a thing. Cool!” It was similar to the feeling when the first person arrives at your birthday party and wishes you a happy birthday. “Hey, I am the center of attention at this moment, and I like it!”

But after that, I felt no positive emotion. My self-regard did not improve. I did not feel even an inch closer to where I want to be as a writer.

When the money dropped in my account, it was without a doubt a source of stress relief. I’ve been unemployed for months and $5,000 is a game-changer. I don’t have to stress about rent for at least three or four months and that is a huge thing. I can even buy one or two luxuries like a nice new shirt and a good dinner at local restaurant. But the money hasn’t made me feel anything. Stress-relief isn't an emotion.

Maybe I could find emotion elsewhere? After I learned I won the Challenge, I soon went over to my “Stats” page to see how many “reads” the story had.

Seven. Wtf?

Of course it was only a few minutes after I received the email, and I don’t think Vocal even refreshes your “Stats” continually. I'm pretty sure it updates once daily.

I checked back the following day and saw that 538 people had read my story.

Holy shit. 538?? That’s more readers than I’d ever had before. I had written a non-fiction piece on mask-wearing last year which I published on Medium.com (am I allowed to use the “M” word here?)—that one got about 350 reads. But everything else I’ve ever written has had readers in the double digits at best.

Now, about a week and a half after having won, “Van Gogh In A Field, In the Rain” has 2,008 readers.

This might be the biggest readership I will ever attain. Obviously I dream big, just like you do, but if I’m being real it wouldn’t be so bad if 2,008 were my high-water mark.

2,008. How does that number make me feel?

Community

2,008 people read something I wrote. 2,008 people and I shared an experience. Together we traveled to southern France. It was 1890. We sat silently beside a small boy and watched Vincent Van Gogh take shelter from the rain in an old barn. For a few minutes, we were together in a different world.

When I wrote the story I assumed, as with everything I write, that it would lose the contest and maybe 8 or 9 people would read the submission. But I liked writing it, and again, “losing” is a state that I have come to pretty good terms with, so that possible fate didn’t faze me.

But instead of anonymity, I got connection.

I talk a lot of talk about the idea of connection and community. Whenever I’m asked why I write I always respond with “community.” My mental health is tightly bound up with my sense of community. I truly believe that having a place in your both your local community and your chosen creative community (digital or physical) is the greatest source of potential joy for a human being.

For this reason, connecting with 2,008 readers has proven far more meaningful to me than the money or the fact I got first place. I’ve won contests before, even won prize money, but those pieces didn’t draw any significant readership, so the victories were hollow.

And yet I still feel little more than vague anxiety, vague loneliness, and vague discontent. 2,008 people? Why not 20,000? Why can’t I have a book published? Why can’t I have an article go viral? Why do I still only have 600 Twitter followers? Why can’t I meet any of these 2,008 people? Why can’t they tell me what they thought about the story, what they liked about it? I don’t even know that they did like it.

I’ll never go viral. I have no voice individual enough or outlook on the world idiosyncratic enough to find a niche audience or even to sustain a body of work. I’ll have to give up soon when I run out of things to say. I’ll never go viral. And if I don’t go viral, Putnam and Bloomsbury won’t give me a book deal. And then I won’t be able to write on a trendy TV show like Glow or something. My work-in-progress novel is crappy. If I move to LA to try to break into writing or performing it’ll be a waste of time and money. I should do it anyways just so I can receive the failure I deserve for even considering the possibility of success. I will never, ever, in a million years, go viral. And if I do, it won’t be because I wrote some story about Van Gogh in a fucking barn.

Hold Up, Downward Spiral of Self-Loathing!

Why do I want the things I want? Do I even want these things I think I want?

Why do I keep writing if writing only brings me anxiety even when I win?

For the same reason stand-up comedians keep going up on stage, the same reason event coordinators keep organizing in coffee shops, the same reason dancers keeping pulling on their tap shoes and actors keep auditioning. I keep writing through the discomfort and the fear and the neurosis because I desperately, gravely, intensely need to connect with people.

Whether you win $5,000 or $50,000, get 2,000 readers or 200,000 or 2,000,000, your reaction is still going to be exactly what mine was on July 27. A fun burst of dopamine, then anxiety, then neurosis. You’ll think, “I may be connecting with people here in some fashion, but humans are still ultimately, fatally lonely beings.”

Here's What I Learned

So here’s what winning the Vocal challenge means to me: no amount of success great or small is going to change the way I feel about myself. And it's not supposed to.

All it promises is the possibility of connection.

And that’s what makes Vocal.media a special place. It facilitates human interaction by removing the vast gate-keeping system that is "traditional publishing." It give you a place to directly connect with thousands of other readers. I have felt far more plugged into the human social sphere on Vocal than I ever have with any other publisher or platform.

I’m still going to be hopelessly neurotic. I probably won’t attain my dream of publishing a book. But once, in the summer of 2021, I got to connect with 2,008 people.

That's why it's worth submitting to a Vocal challenge.