Success: What It Means To Me

After I started blogging for the Huffington Post, several friends wrote to congratulate me on my success.  Which made me start thinking about what ‘success’ means to me.  And I was kind of surprised.  I wanted to demur, and not agree with their assessment.  This venture with my memoir “Little Nancy: The Journey Home” has been quite a ride. Learning the technical stuff, like how to write this blog, where to write it, and then how to get it to appear in the right place on my website has been torturous for me.  I am not a techie in any sense of the word; creating work that has meaning for me and others is my thing.  Every step after I published the book has been painful.  Liz, who taught me all these marketing tools, was patient and kind and great at what she does.  I liked what we were creating.  People started to come my way, including the editor from the Divorce page of the HuffPost.  I met a grandma at my grandson Gus’ soccer class, and she told me about The Transition Network.  Suddenly I’m doing a column, which should begin next month, for their newsletter.  Google them.  Their readership is over 6,000.  So far a few books have sold, though not many.  But I still feel ‘successful’.  My efforts are beginning to pay off.  I will have to keep plugging and then be patient, which is not my strong suit.  What surprises me is that I want to take back the sentence about being successful even here, because I have not ‘made money’ yet.  Societal norms still seem to rule, even if I say I don’t believe them.  So now I have something else to work on, which is OK.  It’s good to know.  And for those of you who read the last two blogs, my grandson is OK, just some minor artery blockage, which he will outgrow.  Life offers many miracles.