The Creative Heartbreak I Never Saw Coming

My heart feels cracked open to even have to write this and my ego has taken the biggest hit of my entire career ...

I’ve been sitting here staring at my computer screen for fifteen minutes, trying to figure out how to begin this post. My heart feels cracked open to even have to write this and my ego has taken the biggest hit of my entire career.

Let me back up…

If you’re newer here or don’t know the full origin story of my cookbook, here’s the quick version: During the pandemic, my husband built a giant, incredible garden in our backyard. He grew up on a farm in Bosnia, so gardening is basically woven into his DNA. That first year, his harvest was shockingly bonkers.

Our kitchen counters were overflowing with tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuces, and herbs. The next year he added a chicken coop and a berry patch, and suddenly things went from plentiful to borderline unhinged. We had more veggies, berries, and eggs than we could ever possibly eat.

I started sharing what I was cooking with all of this homegrown abundance, and my DMs filled up with people asking what to do with their own carrots, basil, zucchini, etc. That’s when the idea hit me: a cookbook organized by vegetable, so anyone with a garden (or even a CSA haul) could flip to the ingredient they needed to use up and find inspiration instantly.

After I got that initial spark of an idea, I reached out to a friend who works in publishing to figure out what I actually needed to do to make this happen. She sent me a list of amazing cookbook agents, and I did what any self-respecting millennial with a would do: I stalked every single one of them until I found the perfect fit.

I emailed Sally and, to my shock, she wrote back within hours saying she was interested in my pitch! Mine! I couldn’t believe it.

From there, we spent six months writing the proposal, refining, reworking, and shaping this tiny seed of an idea into something real. Then she took it out into the world… and sold it.

My soon-to-be editor, Olivia, fell in love with the concept, and suddenly I had an advance in hand and six months to deliver a full cookbook: 108 recipes, plus gardening tips from my husband. NBD.

I poured everything into this book. My heart, my soul, my tears, my love, my frustration. All of it. I stayed up late writing and woke up early to recipe test for months on end. Then came ten full days in the kitchen styling and shooting images for all 108 recipes. It was the most creatively fulfilling, albeit exhausting, project of my life.

In May 2024, my book Garden Grown was published. And because I’m me, and because releasing something so personal into the world is basically an extreme sport for an anxious person, I ended up with such debilitating launch anxiety that I triggered Epstein Barr Virus (EBV).

If you’re not familiar with EBV, it’s the virus that causes mono, and once you have it, it just hangs out in your body forever. It usually stays dormant, but extreme stress, anxiety, or lack of sleep, can reactivate it. Fun!

And that’s exactly what happened to me. My nervous system was so frazzled from launching the book, trying to keep up with life, kids, content, and deadlines, that my immune system just tapped out.

For weeks, I felt like I had the flu and jet lag at the same time. Bone-deep exhaustion, swollen glands, brain fog so thick I thought I was losing it. Not exactly the glamorous debut author era I had imagined.

But even in that haze, I was so proud. I had written a book. A real, beautiful, heavy-in-your-hands cookbook full of the recipes that fed my family and the garden that brought us joy during one of the hardest chapters of our lives.

The next few months were a blur. My husband and I traveled around for our book tour, I signed what felt like thousands of books, took interviews, went on podcasts, and promoted the sh*t out of it online.

But between every event and piece of content I would have to lay down and, often, nap. My energy was at negative 100. I did not feel like a functioning human being. But I got through it and was so so so proud of myself. Not a feeling I feel often, I promise you that!

Since then sales have been steady but not great. I didn’t make any best seller lists and I constantly felt like I was disappointing my publisher.

Then, last month I received a devastating email. The one from my publisher letting me know that my cookbook was