The High School Feeling

AWP recap, chasing popularity, feeling like a fraud, and other fun stuff.

Last weekend I attended my first AWP conference. For those who don’t know, it’s a big annual industry event for writers. For at least seven years now, I’ve seen photos from the event pop up on Instagram and think, I should really get to that next year, and then I’d forget again. I would’ve missed it again had my friend Christie Tate not generously invited me to be on a panel about writing about addiction.

Going to events like AWP, teaching at places like FAWC, applying for a residence somewhere—these are all things I’ve felt I should or would do if I were a real writer. Scratch that; I do feel like a real writer, just not part of that society of writers. The literary ones. I don’t have an MFA. I never studied writing. I didn’t even start writing consistently or seriously (unless journaling counts, but it doesn’t) until I was thirty-five. My first book came out in 2020 when I was forty-three years old. I honestly still can’t tell you the difference between the second and third-person voice without looking it up (I just looked it up now, still confused), and I’ve been asked about my choice to use a certain device in my writing without knowing I’d used a device.

I do love learning about these things, and I make a point to, but when it comes down to actually applying these lessons on the page, I fall back on my instincts and intuition, or whatever my brain has cobbled together to create the very DIY “skillset” I have; any technique I apply is probably an accident.

I’m sure I’ve absorbed more knowledge and skills than I realize, and I do think my writing has improved over the years. I also believe there are many lessons that apply to fiction and not memoir, but again, I don’t actually know! I assume this is the stuff you learn if you get an English degree or an MFA! Most of what I know about writing comes from reading a lot, which means I have a good feel for what works but can’t really tell you why.

Anyway, I arrived late at AWP, on Friday afternoon. The conference kicked off on Wednesday night. So I already felt behind, and by the time I got into my hotel room, there was only one more session of panels left before the evening events started. Travel tanks me, no matter what; I slept most of the plane ride and still felt hungover and anti-social. But I told myself to go get my conference badge, get my bearings, and attend one session. Just one!

By the time I made it to registration and got my badge, I’d walked for a good forty minutes through halls and up escalators and down stairs and past gobs of people—so many people—I was already overwhelmed. I texted Christie about her plan for the afternoon and evening, scrolled through the AWP app, which was well organized and allowed you to build a personal calendar, and saw several panels and social events that looked like things I should want to go to because authors I admired would be there. I mean, this is what I was here to do, right? See friends and maybe make new ones? Learn something. Participate. Socialize. Be part of this community?

I was suddenly overcome with what I’ll call The High School Feeling: that racy, anxious, grabby, hustle-y feeling of not feeling “in.” It’s a whole-body thing— a sort of primal panic.

When I tell you I hated high school and most of the years leading up to it, I HATED IT. I cared so much; never felt cool or pretty or talented or special or chosen enough, and this feeling animated me completely. It owned me. It twisted me in knots, and eventually grew so consuming that it needed relief, which I found first in starving myself and then in drinking. I didn’t begin to grow out of it until after college, and by then, the coping mechanisms had grown roots and took on a life of their own. I’d built an entire personality around being fun, happy, wild, and extremely extroverted because those characteristics got me the best feedback; it’s what I thought made me safe and lovable and part of. I’m genuinely a little bit of all those things, but not remotely to the degree I presented—not even close.

It was like being stuck on a treadmill that never stopped.

Sobriety forced me to unplug the treadmill. In the beginning, I thought I’d just carry on like I always had before, joining in work happy hours, boozy dinner parties, loud bars, dates with men who loved to drink, and 8:00 pm dinner reservations. I’d do it all—just without the drinks!—because I was determined to stay cool and fun and to make sobriety look the same. This failed. I could stay sober sometimes, but it always felt miserable. At first, I thought the misery was a temporary discomfort that would abate once I got more comfortable not drinking, but as it turns out, those things were never comfortable or fun for me in the first place. I drank to make them comfortable and fun.

Letting go of that hustle and settling into who I actually am can only be described as bliss. Every “No, thanks” or “Not for me” or “Pass” or “I’m staying in tonight” or “I don’t share hotel rooms” or whatever it was were little slices of ecstasy, I tell you.

Over nine years of sobriety, I’ve grown extremely comfortable with who I am, what works for me, and what doesn’t. I don’t feel guilty doing what I want or need to do, even if it means disappointing others. If I do feel guilty, which happens sometimes, I’m able to choose the guilt instead of sacrificing myself. This may appear to some to be selfish, and that’s fine, because I know the truth is I’m able to show up for people in ways I was never able to when I was younger and drinking. My ways of showing up just look different.

This part of me is still there, though—the part that wants desperately to be liked, chosen, “in,” popular. The last time I remember feeling it to a painful degree was in 2017 at the first She Recovers conference in New York City. Though I’d been blogging and podcasting about sobriety for a couple of years and had built somewhat of a “platform,” I wasn’t an established author or speaker. Sitting in the audience while people like Glennon Doyle, Gabby Bernstein, and Elena Brower took the stage made me vibrate with The High School Feeling. Over the years, I’ve learned to avoid spaces where I feel this way, and I’m sure it doesn’t take a Ph.D. in psychology to see why I’m only comfortable in them when I’m leading or teaching.

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Back to AWP.

I stood there spinning with The High School Feeling for about three minutes, and then—as if my functional adult self suddenly came back online—I shut down the app, turned around, and started the walk back to my hotel room.

I ordered room service, got online to switch my flight to leave right after our panel the next day instead of on Sunday, and watched The Good Life until I fell asleep. On Saturday morning, I went to the hotel gym and then met up with Christie and the other panelists for breakfast, which was wonderful. The panel itself was meaningful and fun, Christie did a bang-up job leading it, and afterward, I got to Uber back to the airport and have dinner with Laura Cathcart Robbins, which was a treat. These parts were genuinely great.

L to R: Eilene Zimmerman, Jonathan Winston Jones, me, Christie Tate, Laura Cathcart Robbins.

Since I’ve been back, I’ve been thinking a lot about the whole thing. I didn’t spend much time at all in The High School Feeling because the trance broke as quickly as it came. I didn’t attend a single panel other than my own, didn’t reach out to the other writers I knew were there, and left a day early. I was in Kansas City for less than twenty-four hours. But I’ve been wrestling a little with why I can’t lean into things like this a little and stretch myself; why I’m so allergic to being even mildly uncomfortable. Is it because I feel like that much of an outsider? Is it going to cost me professionally if I don’t count myself into these things? Do I care enough to do differently? (I know the answer to that one: No.)

Where I’ve landed is that I’ve found my own way to make connections and build friendships with other writers. I’ve found my own ways to learn how to write, and I’m not interested or willing to go back to school and get an MFA, so if that’s going to keep me out of some circles, oh well? And I actually do stretch myself, often enough, in ways that are meaningful to me and towards things I’m genuinely interested in, even if they don’t make me more popular or “literary.”

I’m glad conferences like AWP exist and that there are folks who really enjoy going to them, just like I’m glad there are recovery festivals and other community events that people painstakingly put together and are enjoyable and important for those who attend. But I’m never going to like those kinds of things. I’m amazed there are people who can maintain a presence on four different social media platforms and write books at the same time. I’m never going to be one of them (I tried!). I’m glad writing residencies exist, but if I’m honest, I’ll never apply for one.

I don’t know if I have a final point here, I just wanted to share my thoughts. I think most of us feel like frauds in some way. Being popular in high school didn’t save me from The High School Feeling. In some ways, it only made it worse. I would love to have published pieces in places like The New Yorker or The Paris Review, but I’ve never even submitted anything, which tells me I like the idea of it more than anything. And, of course, I’d love to hit The New York Times bestseller list someday, but I know enough people for whom that’s only made them more miserable because it didn’t change a damn thing for them—least of all their insides—to know that it’s not going to change anything for me, either.

So we keep doing our thing in our own way and trusting it’s enough, because what’s the alternative? The High School Feeling? I’d rather quit.

Have a great week. More soon.

xo,
Laura

You are reading Love Story, a weekly newsletter about relationships, recovery, and writing from Laura McKowen. Laura is the founder of The Luckiest Club, an international sobriety support community, and the bestselling author of two books, We Are The Luckiest: The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life and Push Off from Here: 9 Essential Truths to Get You Through Sobriety (and Everything Else).

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