*** crickets ***
This is… hard.
And I don’t say that lightly; I feel like I’m allergic to that word sometimes. If someone says something is hard, I have a visceral reaction, like “no, it’s not,” or “well don’t do it then,” or “that means you’re going about it the wrong way.”
I don’t say this, of course. That would make me an asshole.
And like most of these kinds of invalidating reactions, it says more about me than it does about the person making the statement. If I concede something is hard, that means I’m in the process of failing at it. And I’m definitely allergic to failure.
Like many things, there is a grain of truth hidden in there somewhere. If I concede that something is hard, that means I’m not playing with it. I’m not having fun. I’m not in the flow, I’m not enjoying that part of my life, and I’m not successfully ignoring it, either. I mean, ignoring isn’t healthy, but I’m choosing to focus on the bad instead of on the good, and if we get what we focus on, then I’m doing it wrong, again.
Again and again, I confront the fact that I have to almost physically turn away from what’s not working and re-focus on the direction I do want to take. It’s the only way to get there.
You can make this as much or as little a metaphor for current events as you like.
* * *
Shortly after the last newsletter I sent out at the end of November, I had an inspiration for the next one. The November newsletter was *exuberantly optimistic* (and sub-titled so), but in between writing it and sending it out, I had to go into recovery mode, and I thought it might be useful to describe in my next newsletter what that looked like. But I didn’t allow time to feed my impulses when they happened. I waited for “the right time to do it,” and that time never came, because I didn’t create it.
I know from my daily Instagram diary over the past couple of years that I always get derailed by Christmas (and, like, I understand it’s not news to anyone that Christmas is a disruption of regular schedules, but I have a remarkable way of agreeing things are true without actually believing they will affect me). The first week back in January is just staring at the shambles of your inbox and trying to piece it back together — and that’s during a normal year, when we aren’t also dealing with homeschooling and other pandemic side-effects. There’s a reason this newsletter is finally hitting your inbox three weeks after the holidays.
See this twitter thread for hilarious perspective:
Acknowledging Christmas as a disruption means I can plan to be disrupted, but this year I didn’t just want to survive the black hole of Christmas — I wanted to remain present through it, creatively, to keep my pilot light burning.
Going through Jessica Abel’s book, Growing Gills: How to Find Creative Focus When You’re Drowning in Your Daily Life, helped me put this time demand into perspective. One of the exercises in Growing Gills is a time-tracking exercise. You track not only your work time, but also all of your other time as well — bills, meals, pre-pandemic commute, etc, to see exactly where your day is going. It means acknowledging we have obligations to other things in our lives that we have to account for, like running a family and organizing a massive annual holiday. Before I did this exercise, I thought I had a pretty good handle on my time. After all, I’ve been tracking my project (i.e. billable) work time for almost twenty years — and it’s true that, in a narrow set of circumstances, I can make a pretty accurate time estimate. But it’s still a continual reset for me to compare my expectations of what I can get done in a week to reality.
I’ve also been wondering about how to separate this wish to make creative work from a capitalistic notion of productivity = useful. This is not about seeing how efficient and productive I can be by getting more out of the time that I assign to others. If there’s one thing the pandemic and the political upheaval in the U.S. pointed out, it’s the productivity fetish we live with. I felt like a fish discovering water. What really drove the point home was seeing people on Twitter wondering if they were supposed to “just keep working” through January 6th’s attempted coup, or, in some cases, getting emails from their boss directing them to do so (!!!). EVERYTHING IS FINE, JUST KEEP WORKING :D
My wish to keep ‘working’ through things like Christmas is not about productivity. Rather, it’s a about a desire to have a daily practice, espoused by many professionals as the one thing that allows them to keep moving creatively. It’s about keeping that little pilot light inside burning — the one that you need to keep lit, because if it goes out, then so do you.
Externally, for me, this looks like is a commitment to meditation and journaling every day, either writing or drawing, ideally both. It takes time. But that’s it. That’s enough. It is nothing, and it is a glacial shift, and it is everything. It’s training my kids that mom needs fifteen minutes of “sit-down-quiet-time” in the morning, and putting a journal in front of myself when I’m having breakfast instead of a screen, and prioritizing that hour in the morning ahead of all other claims on my time.
Internally, for me, it sometimes sounds like shouting ME ME ME ME ME ME ME inside my head like a crazy person, because that phrase was a constant reminder to check in with whether I’d given my centre away, and if I needed to pull back to it. I felt like I needed to be louder in my own head than what was happening around me.
Because I’ve come to realize there are different kinds of giving it away. When I come across something happening in the outside world that is awful, or people shouting things I disagree with, or even, closer to home, when I have kids requesting things I can’t accommodate right this minute, in many cases I haven’t changed my actions, but I’ve given away my centre nonetheless. My concerns got derailed into someone else’s concerns. What I intended for that moment has disappeared. *I* disappear. What’s left is a feeling of upset, of destabilization. Over the course of a day, this can really add up.
(One of my theories is that this is particularly acute for autistic/ADHD and other neurodiverse people. Autistics don’t suffer from a lack of empathy — we often get flooded by it. It’s the same as loud noises or visual stimulations, and is a definite contributor to meltdowns. People with ADHD suffer from this as well, although from what I’ve read of their first-hand experiences it seems to manifest more as social anxiety than a general feeling of overwhelm. )
Pretend I’m sitting on a boulder in the middle of a river. I can observe things that I know are wrong with the world, and see them rowing down the river, without stepping off my boulder. Once I’ve stepped into the river, however, even though I’m not rowing in that other person’s boat, I’ve still given my emotions over to the river and it’s now carrying me farther and farther from where I intended to be.
The good news is, I can teleport back to the boulder, but only if I’ve realized I’m in the river. I never used to realize this. Every time I was around someone with a problem or an opinion, I dove into that river and started trying to swim against the current.
So this is a reminder to me, and maybe to you too, that taking care of yourself starts with being present with yourself no matter what is being demanded of you. It’s as simple as taking an hour for yourself in the morning to keep that little pilot light burning. If that seems like it’s too hard, or like a luxury you can’t afford, start with fifteen minutes, and use those fifteen minutes to find your centre in whatever way makes sense to you.
I absorbed so many messages about giving it away when I was growing up: about giving away time and attention and money, that I kept nothing for myself and became miserly. I was taught to guard my body but not my fierceness. I was taught to guard my modesty but not my surefootedness. I taught myself that if I give things away fast enough, no one would be jealous of me because I wouldn’t have anything for them to be jealous of. I wasn’t even very good at it! I’m, like, one of the worst friends I know.
Anyway. I’m in a post-Christmas funk and part of it is probably just because it’s, you know, January, so I’m not going to harp on too long about how this is… sigh… hard. I’m just going to hit SEND on the newsletter, and write another one in a couple of weeks, and send that out too. Getting started again is the hardest part.
In the next newsletter I’m going to explain my words for the year — Ambition and Appreciation — and some of my thoughts around them.
Cheers to the New Year. Drop a comment below and tell me what you’re working on!
Christi
Amazon.com links are affiliate, and I appreciate the support, but also please do support your local bookseller. Growing Gills is a self-published book so it may not be available for booksellers to order — it depends on the distribution method the author chose.
Great thoughts! Thanks for sharing this.