This past week, one of the co-execs of the Editorial Freelancers Association, another professional organization of which I am a member, was killed in a tragic accident. Her name was Ruth Mullen.

Although I never knew Ruth in the flesh, this news saddened me deeply. It’s amazing how I can feel so connected to some people without ever having met them.

How can I?

For one, she posted on the EFA’s Discussion List and I read her posts. She shared a lot of wisdom. Of course, Ruth had been a freelance editor much longer than I have been, so I took her advice seriously.

Another reason that I felt connected to Ruth is that she was co-exec of the EFA. People who volunteer for unpaid leadership positions in their organizations always command my respect. I am certain that Ruth was very busy in her editing and with her client projects, and the fact that she sacrificed her time and energy to help steer the EFA gave me great respect for her.

A number of EFA members who knew Ruth personally have been posting about this tragedy and about Ruth this past week, and their posts make me wish I had been able to meet her. I am planning to attend EFA’s next conference in August 2022, and I am certain that she would have been there if not for her untimely death.

Her age at the time of her death? I don’t know, and it’s none of my business anyway. I just hope that she did not pass away too young. That is the worst thing–to have one’s life cut short.

The obituary on the EFA website did say that she had a husband and two adult daughters. My heart and prayers go out to them. I cannot even imagine dealing with the unexpected death of a loved one.

Rest in peace, Ruth Mullen. You have inspired many an editor.

I have been active on LinkedIn for a few years now–enough time to watch it evolve.

Or, should I say, devolve.

Don’t get me wrong–LinkedIn can be very useful for landing jobs or clients, and I believe it is still worth being a part of. I’m saying that it’s devolving because it’s looking more and more like Facebook. LinkedIn was created to be a professional tool, not the mess that Facebook is.

Back on February 28 of this year (I am well known for remembering obscure dates), one of my LinkedIn connections posted a video of a Croatian one-man band frenetically playing all of his instruments at once and making beautiful music as he did. Was the video appealing to me? Of course it was. Did it belong on Facebook? Of course it did. Did it belong on LinkedIn? Absolutely not.

A lot of people seem ignorant of the fact that potential employers look at LinkedIn all the time. When a young man posts on LinkedIn a photo of himself holding a sign that says “3 Years Sober Today!” that says to potential employers that he is a possible loose cannon who could relapse without warning any day. (I’m painfully aware that I am going to get all the hate in the social media world for saying this, but the truth hurts, people.) This kind of post, however, would be perfectly at home on Facebook, where people would congratulate the sober young man and share his victory with their friends (as they should).

Don’t get me started on the comments that people make on LinkedIn, either. One woman who identified herself as a nurse once made a comment which many thought was heartless on a post that I do not remember clearly. Along came a person who read the nurse’s comment and replied, “You’re a nurse? Crap, you need help.” [sic] This kind of reaction would be appropriate on Facebook but highly unprofessional on LinkedIn. People are just as nasty in comments on LinkedIn nowadays as they are on Facebook, and I think that is a great shame.

As for me, I left Facebook almost four years ago, deleting my profile and everything–not just deactivating it. I simply had had enough being attacked my total strangers just for having an opinion and losing friends through posts with which I did not agree or, even worse, having my friends attack me just for having an opinion. I am staying on LinkedIn, though, and being as professional as possible.

I wish to apologize to my readers for being absent a week ago. My blog was being glitchy and not allowing me to post. I resolved the issue by contacting NAIWE, who fixed the problem. Hooray for NAIWE!

My question for this week is: When you are self-employed and work at home, how do you handle things when you are sick? And I do not mean just having the sniffles or a mild cough. I mean completely-knocked-out sick.

I have to say now that I have literally spent half of this summer sick with one ailment or another. From mid-July until late August, I suffered from hand, foot, and mouth disease, which the nurse practitioner and my doctor both told me is common in children but rare in adults. I’m 47 years old, so leave it to me to get it! I was infected with it three times in a row, meaning I had it for weeks. However, having it did not stop me at all from working. With my sore throat and the subsequent open sores in my mouth, I continued to work on the website I’d been working on (EDITOR’S NOTE: I finally finished the site on August 26! Yaaaay!) even on the one day I felt badly enough that I stayed in my pajamas all day.

However, two weeks ago, I came down with another disease, whose symptoms mimicked those of COVID–hacking, uncontrollable cough, congestion to beat the band, loss of taste and smell. I scheduled a COVID test, which turned out negative (thank Heaven). My nurse practitioner diagnosed me with viral bronchitis, which I think morphed from a wicked summer cold (summer colds are the absolute worst kind). Meanwhile, I took three days off of working. I could easily do it because I get paid by the hour and only for the time that I am actually working. I hated to do this to my client and to my paycheck for the month of August, but I felt so drained, hot, and badly that there was no way I had the energy to edit during those three days.

Now, the website did not have a hard deadline. Had I been working on something with one, I would probably have had to bite the bullet, to use a tired cliche.

How about you, fellow editors? How do you handle it when you get sick while working on a project?

This past week, I began reading a self-help book called Facing Codependence, which was written by Pia Mellody. I was driven to read this book after searching online for books about codependence (or codependency) and this one popped up. I read its reviews and was sold.

At this moment, I am part of the way through chapter 2, a chapter which is quite long but quite fascinating. There is such a large amount of information in this chapter that I cannot possibly remember all of it, but please let me chat for a minute about what has struck me the most so far.

Everyone, for example, needs boundaries. Mellody writes that the boundaries of people who have dysfunctional ones fall into one of several categories: nonexistent boundaries, damaged boundaries, walls instead of boundaries, and moving back and forth between walls and no boundaries. As I read about people in each of these categories, I was able to recall people in my life who fit into each one. I was also able to figure out which of these categories my own boundaries fell into, and it didn’t take me long to do so. Mellody’s descriptions of people with these problems were vivid and spot-on.

Mellody also describes well the difference between what she refers to as “self-esteem” versus “other-esteem”–and right away I could tell which kind of “esteem” I had. Self-esteem, according to the author, is knowing that one is “valuable and precious” even when one is rejected, scolded, put down, or when one makes a mistake. Other-esteem is based on outward things: what kind of car one drives, what job one has, how one looks, and such. (Guess which kind of esteem most of the people in my life have?)

Now, I should warn you that I am only on page 37 of this book. I have a good feeling about it so far, however (with the exception of that fact that Mellody refers to God as “Higher Power”–not my own personal faith belief).

And so my journey through this book continues…

One of the best things about reading is that one constantly learns new words and adds them to one’s vocabulary. My personal favorite new word is dysphemism.

Merriam-Webster defines dysphemism as “the substitution of a disagreeable, offensive, or disparaging expression for an agreeable or inoffensive one.” I never before knew there was an actual word for such a substitution.

I believe many dysphemisms are uttered in anger and are meant to convey that anger. For example, a father who is ticked off at his daughter for living with her boyfriend out of wedlock might say, “I can’t believe you’re shacking up with him!” In this instance, “shacking up” is the dysphemism, replacing “living” or “cohabitating” or any other less offensive term.

Or perhaps a police officer might say to a man acting up in public, “We’re going to send you to the loony bin upstate,” when the police officer means a mental hospital. You guessed it–“loony bin” is the dysphemism here.

There is another kind of dysphemism–the word or expression that was coined as a euphemism (an agreeable or inoffensive one) but, through repeated use, became more negative than the word it replaced.

One of the best examples of this, in my opinion, is the word issues. Let’s face it–people don’t have problems anymore; they have issues. “She has abandonment issues.” “He has anger issues.” “Dude, you have issues!” See how negative the last example sounds?

Another is challenges, which is meant to replace “disabilities” or the antiquated “handicaps.” “He has physical challenges and that is why he has trouble walking.” Or “She has mental challenges, but IQ tests are so insignificant.” People have turned that expression into a joke: “I am technologically challenged,” quips a person who isn’t good at using computers. Ugh.

I could go on a long time with other examples, but I don’t want to bore you to death.

What are your favorite (or least favorite) examples of dysphemisms?

 

 

Olympic gymnast Simone Biles has gotten a lot of media attention lately. She certainly has captured my attention–and not because of her outstanding feats as a gymnast (although that was why I originally noticed her five years ago). She’s gotten my attention lately for dropping out of several Olympic events, citing her mental health.

I, for one, applaud Biles for taking care of her mental health. I love that she did not put her sport before it and bow to the pressure put on her by her country (especially her country’s media). She is taking care of her mind.

Biles’ attention to her mental health got me thinking. What’s happened to respect for mental health in our society?

During this pandemic in which we have been for almost a year and a half now, there’s been a lot of babble about preserving mental health during a pandemic. However, I have seen no good ideas or clear suggestions on how to do so. Everybody’s all talk and no action.

Mental illness, in particular, needs to be respected more in society. People with it are often labeled as “crazy,” “psycho,” or “schizo,” to use a sample of ableist terms. I remember being in a small group Bible study some 18 years ago and one young woman asking for prayer because she had just been diagnosed with depression. When she uttered the word “depression,” her voice dropped to a whisper, as if she were telling us she had committed a crime. Her shame at having depression was clearly evident, and I pitied her for kowtowing to the stigma that depression has (and other mental illnesses have).

Instead of ostracizing people with mental illness, we need to start accepting them–just as many are encouraging people to accept those on the autism spectrum. (Aside: Being on the autism spectrum is not the same as having a mental illness.) We need to accept the little eccentricities and idiosyncrasies of each mentally ill person. This does not mean that we should let them do things that are harmful to themselves or others (and not all of them do!), but we all need to remember that people with mental illness are not weird or odd. They want what the rest of us want–to be accepted. I saw a variation of this as a meme on social media and I could not have said it better myself.

Let’s talk about climate change for a minute.

Sure, we hear plenty about it. But many ask questions about it. Is it real? Is it manmade? Can we really do anything about it?

I believe climate change is 100 percent real. The earth is getting hotter. In June, Portland, Oregon recorded a temperature of 121 degrees F one day. Good grief! Oregon! I have never been to that state, but I’ve always imagined it as a cool (temperature-wise) place. I have never even been exposed to a temperature that hot, not even in my home state of Maryland, where things can get pretty steamy in the summer sometimes. What did those poor people do to survive that day?

This brings me to the wildfires in the western states. Horrific. Imagine having to leave your home because a fire was coming to devour it, and then losing everything except the clothes on your back and whatever you were able to take with you.

This kind of thing didn’t seem to exist when I was a child. For that matter, it seemed that winters had more snow when I was young, too.

I believe that climate change is mostly manmade. It would very gradually happen even if there were no humans on earth, but we are speeding it up big time. That isn’t a good thing for today’s children. (I myself have no children and my niece and nephew are grown, but I am concerned about their potential children, as well as the grandchildren of my cousins.)

Can we do anything about it?

I believe that it is too late to reverse climate change; however, we can help to slow it down. Many lists of things people can do to slow down climate change can be found by Googling, but this is one of my favorite ones. (Sadly, I live in a condo building and cannot install solar panels on my building’s roof. My aunt and uncle, however, made their Massachusetts home completely solar a number of years ago. Go them!)

One thing that I heard reduces the carbon footprint of a single person more than anything else: Have one less child.

Done.

It’s often said that everyone should find joy in what they do for a living. I find joy in editing (and also in writing, although I do only the former as my bread and butter).

I love refining an author’s writing. I like to stamp out typos, grammatical mistakes, and punctuation errors. I love suggesting to an author what would make a sentence or paragraph better. I am helping them. I am helping them get their scientific work published, get their grant funded, or sell their product.

When I was in high school, I tried out to be on the school newspaper staff my senior year and and succeeded. The newspaper’s faculty advisor assigned me the role of copy editor. Besides writing articles for the paper, I copy edited the articles that had already been written and laid out (aside: this was 1991 and the computer layout tools we had were quite primitive compared to those used today). In the middle of that semester, our advisor called me “one of the best [copy editors] we’ve ever had.” Copy editing for the newspaper gave me joy.

So did learning about science.

In college, I majored not in English or journalism but in biology. I wanted to work in a laboratory and do scientific experiments that would improve the health of society at large–in other words, I wanted to help people.

Years later, with a B.A. in biology (the small liberal arts college I attended did not give B.S. degrees at the time) and an M.S. in biochemistry, I ventured into the world of scientific research. I had a number of scientific jobs, and during them, found that not all bosses are nice. I also found that I do not work well when I am bullied. I also found that a few (though not most) people who work in science are ableist, whether they realize it or not. My last two scientific jobs chewed me up and spit me out, and I eventually joined the ranks of the long-term unemployed. Joy was definitely not something I was feeling.

I fell into editing as a profession pretty much unexpectedly. I began doing some editing for the church my husband and I attend, and was regularly complimented on it. (See how powerful words can be?) I also began doing some editing for a local nonprofit. Both of these editing jobs were pro bono. Years into doing this, I got up the nerve to ask my church if they would pay me a little per piece for editing for them. They said yes, and I began to make some money. A month and a half later, I thought, “Why can’t I make money doing this for a living for various clients?” and one month after that, my business was born.

Joy has been back in my life since. Now, I’m not saying there haven’t been a few setbacks. However, I love handing in a finished product and getting positive feedback on it. Of course, I like giving positive feedback as well; otherwise, I would not be a joyful editor.

What do you do professionally that brings you joy?

Hello, everyone. I took off from blogging on Independence Day weekend. I apologize for not announcing this in advance.

I have had my editing business for two and a half years now (it will be three years in October). How time flies! Still, I rather consider myself a newbie in this whole business thing, because I continue to learn new things about it. Well, everyone should be learning, no matter how long they have been in business and how much of an expert they are, but I digress. I have learned a number of important rules about having an editing business over the last almost-three years, and I would like to share them with you.

1. If you aren’t an organized person by nature, get more organized. This means investing in file folders, extra bookcases, and more cloud storage. I am not an organized person by nature, but I have definitely gotten better and am still improving.
2. Think twice before writing off that meal you had with a client friend as a “business meal.” Was the business the primary reason for the get-together? Was the business discussed the majority of the time? If the two of you mostly chit-chatted about your families, pets, and/or vacation plans, survey says…BZZZ! (I have scruples.)
3. Get a computer (laptop or desktop) that you will dedicate to your business. Don’t rely on the computer in the spare bedroom that the whole family shares, unless your business-dedicated computer breaks down. Even then, make the shared computer a temporary last resort. The last thing you want to do is lose your hard work–which bring me to the next rule…
4. Invest in cloud storage, such as Dropbox (my personal preference). What would happen if you were to lose your precious flash drive, or break it, or spill Diet Mountain Dew on it? Better not risk that.

These are, of course, rules which I learned that were not immediately obvious to me. There are countless other rules that I follow which are extremely obvious, such as “Keep your earnings/expenses records up to date.”

What rules have you learned since you began your editing business?

 

Does anyone out there ever have impostor syndrome?

Merriam-Webster defines impostor syndrome as: a psychological condition that is characterized by persistent doubt concerning one’s abilities or accomplishments accompanied by the fear of being exposed as a fraud despite evidence of one’s ongoing success.

I struggle with it on an almost daily basis.

I am an editor. A colleague from one of my professional editorial associations once wrote on a discussion board, “Anyone can call themselves an editor.”

I took this rather personally. What kinds of qualifications and affirmation from others do I then need in order to christen myself an editor?

When I add more of my credentials to my LinkedIn profile, I sometimes fret about whether they will make me look better than I actually am, even though the credentials are one hundred percent genuine and I would never falsify my profile in order to make myself look better. The same goes for my NAIWE profile and those affiliated with the other organizations to which I belong.

Perhaps I see myself as inferior to my editor colleagues because many of them tout their accomplishments and skills to the rest of the organization–some intentionally, others not–and I measure my own against theirs.

There have been whole webinars and discussions in the editorial field about impostor syndrome, so my writing about it here probably pales in comparison to them. (Ha! There I go again.)

So what do I personally do about my own impostor syndrome?

For starters, the bulletin board right above my desk contains some things which remind me of my accomplishments. I have two emails from clients praising the editing work that I did for them. I also have certificates from editing classes which I have taken and passed. This way I can look up from my computer anytime and see some of what I have accomplished.

I also have a yellow sticky note posted on my bookshelf to the right of my workstation, on which I wrote, “[dollar figure of last year’s profit] DOESN’T LIE!” I can also look at the books for my business (I’m having a good year financially so far) and see how the money is growing.

Finally, and most importantly, I listen to the compliments, not only of clients, but also of family and friends. They are proud of me and do not hesitate to tell me so. I certainly am lucky to have a supportive network of people.

The trick to combating impostor syndrome, I believe, is to focus, focus, focus. Focus on the positive.

If you struggle with impostor syndrome, what are your techniques for fighting it? I would love to hear them.