What do you do when you receive criticism and how do you move forward?

This is a question I've been sitting with over the past few days and it's not something that I feel like I have the ultimate answer to because there are a lot of different ways that that question can be answered.

But I have started to find language for

something over the past few days, and I just wanted to make an episode about it. So for context,

I received a few not so favorable reviews about my new book, and it was before it came out and I wasn't even looking

for the reviews. I was actually on Google trying to find an image of the book because I couldn't

I didn't have access to like my assets of the book. So I was like let me just Google and

get it. And then I googled it and it was showing the reviews.

I was like, whoa, why are there so many reviews before the book is even out? I'm so confused. And I

always forget that, you know, different books can get sent out to people before it comes out, actually

comes out. So I ended up reading these reviews and it was not so much reviews themselves, but it was what

was said in the reviews that just really caused me to pause. And I wanted to respond. And I did.

And I won't go through all of it. But there was one that came up that I don't even think I mentioned

this when I talked about it on

Instagram because I did a whole post by this on Instagram. So I'm not going to get into all of that.

And I will absolutely link you to that in the show notes if you would like to read it.

But in the meantime, there was something that someone said that really stood out to me.

And they said that I was disappointed in reading

this because this author had nothing to say. And immediately my mind went to a poem that I wrote in the

book that's relatively early on in the book. It's in the third section where I talk about my ancestors being hunted like animals and the complexities of going into deep waters and what that means to me.

And I said that, I said that directly in the point. I don't allude it to that. I say that directly. And it just made me think, I'm like, you know, they,

this person, they probably didn't read it or even if they did, you know, obviously it's not for them.

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