Anyone who knows me knows I like to engage in small social experiments from time to time. It’s part of how I deal with being #neurodiverse — I have a fascination with unspoken rules and organizing principles of different groups. If I come across a segment of humanity that seems interesting, I do a bit of research.
Because I was doing some heavy answer searching this past winter, one of the areas I’ve been poking around in is the lure of the Instagram guru. There’s the ‘get your life in order’ version, the ‘nurture your creative talent version’, and the ever-ubiquitous business guru version. They overlap and intersect; there’s also a big subset that is ‘women coaching women’. It’s also fascinating how these gurus are enabled and supported by social media networks — they use it not only to outreach but also to create their own interconnected guru networks. It’s no longer exclusively the big man on the stage with the microphone, spewing charisma. There’s plenty of introverts here too.
For a while I made an experiment of signing up to the mailing list of every Insta guru that crossed my feed — partly out of a genuine desire for ideas and new paradigms, partly from a morbid curiosity about how all of these “offers” translate into pitches or actual useful content. Some were instant unsubscribes; a few lasted a couple of weeks. Some I decided to just follow on Instagram. Some of them have podcasts I’ve checked out. These women are making good money from this, and probably genuinely supporting others in their life transitions. The way they decide to market themselves stems from a lot of positive choices about self-worth and agency, which is a cool part of this phenomenon that I think we don’t hear enough about.
But the flip side of the coin is… I haven’t come across anyone whose mailing list I wanted to be a permanent part of; to be honest, I probably can’t even recall most of their names off the top of my head. Which is fine; many of these programs are set up to provide people with support from an online community, and I find I just don’t make good use of that.
And while I don’t necessarily recommend my method, the upsell is that I can now more or less triangulate the end point of most of these offers and ignore them. It was part of a process I put myself through to sort of prove that I couldn’t outsource my answer seeking. Everyone can give you a different set of potentially useful tools, but figuring out if, when and how to use them is a big chunk of idea debt. Sometimes it becomes a way of avoiding the problem.
Kate Northrup is the latest Instagram guru to hook my curiosity, enough that I signed up for her freebie and checked out her e-book from the library. Kate’s content is only about 30% for me (a lot of it’s pretty woowoo — I’m ok with woowoo, but it has to be my brand of woowoo) – but that’s how those things work. You take what you need and leave the rest. The 30% of her stuff that resonates with me, resonates because it echoes some of the themes I’ve been noticing lately:
Manage your energy, rather than your time. Pay yourself first when it comes to self-care, so that you have the right energy to tackle other things.
Prune the things that aren’t bringing you joy.
Life and work comes in cycles.
Folks, we got a hard prune four weeks ago. It wasn’t just snipping off the tips of some wayward branches; those branches were cut almost down to the ground.
But that’s not always a bad thing. Any gardener will tell you that you have to be ruthless sometimes.
It’s taken me three weeks to adjust to our new schedule. And it’s kind of weird, but this week almost feels like we are on vacation. (Possibly because my husband actually is on vacation; it’s one of his scheduled weeks off.) But also because: the kids don’t have activities, aren’t playing with friends, there’s no school, and I haven’t even been pretending to work. At what other time of your life do you do nothing but hang out with family and cook giant meals and live off the leftovers for three days? It’s exactly like one of those weird family bonding vacations your parents dragged you to when you were a teenager.
My husband’s parents used to plan weekend getaways for everyone once or twice a summer, precisely for that kind of awkward family bonding time. (This was in the pre-grandkids phase; once you have kids of your own it all of a sudden becomes a lot higher priority to hang out with your parents.) They would rent a tiny cabin at a little provincial park, all of us kids would pitch a tent in the yard, and we’d basically do nothing but cook and eat and read trashy romance novels and maybe do a little dock fishing.
On one of these trips I vividly remember walking down a sandy path in the trees, and realizing how profound it felt not to be hurried or anxious or managing anything. There was this huge space I suddenly became aware of, and it felt so amazing to have it be empty that the memory imprinted on my mind and I used to wonder how I could have stayed there a little longer, or brought a piece of that back with me. It was a bit like taking a yoga class, or getting a really good massage, and all of a sudden realizing that your ‘normal’ was in fact not normal, that you thought you were relaxed but actually your shoulders were supposed to be able to move in several ways that they usually didn’t.
I almost feel like I’ve hit that spot again.
Now, I know the current situation doesn’t work that way for everyone. For a lot of people, myself included, it sure felt like someone said ‘Here, take the eighty or ninety things on your plate and squish them into your tiny box of a house and remove your privacy and oh, also entertain your children twenty-four hours a day.’
But I think the only healthy way to deal with that is to start pruning. There’s a lot of opportunity for experimenting here — like, what does your day look like if you manage your energy, rather than your time? That management right’s been given back to you, if you’re stuck at home — use it for all that it’s worth. For me, right now, that looks a lot like a nap. I had to hardcore cut out naps a while back because they messed with my sleep schedule. But now, if I lay down for an hour or two with the toddler after lunch while the 6yo has his precious screen time, it not only gives me a break from peopling during the day, it gives me an extra hour or two of quiet time at night. If I manage my energy this way, I’m even-keeled throughout the day and patient at bed time. That’s, like, the biggest goal that I have at this point.
And as much as it sort of galls me to say it, for me, ‘pruning’ looks a lot like being a house wife. There’s some history here and I don’t know how much of it you have the stomach for, but let’s just say that as a kid I simultaneously deeply resented any time I had to spend at the babysitter’s while Mom was working*, and at the same time lived with absolute fear and loathing of growing up and having to be a house wife – someone who was ‘not allowed’ to do anything but cook and clean and look after children all day. Give me barn chores or give me death; shovelling shit made me feel alive but I was morally and philosophically opposed to vacuuming of any kind.
* (Which was really hardly anything; Mom started doing the books at the family business when I was in middle school and we had to go to the neighbor’s after school for maybe a year or two before turning into latchkey kids.)
Well, life just… doesn’t work that way. We have the ability to reject expectations, but also to explore them in our own way. And I am not my mother. My version of house wifery looks a lot more, uh, hipster. We’re fairly relaxed with the house environment, for one thing — I need a certain amount of wabi-sabi around me to feel at home. (I found a quote in my sketchbook from some carver on the West Coast who lived a really simple life; a writer asked him if he didn’t want a nicer house and his reply was along the lines of, “If you get a rug, then you have to buy a vacuum cleaner, and pretty soon the dog can’t come in.”) And our family divides the cleaning chores equitably, because I wasn’t going to be married to anyone who wouldn’t clean their space — like, it was more of an actual requirement than any one person probably realizes.
Just before the pandemic locked everything down, we bought a load of meat from the local Hutterite colony and it included two frozen chickens. So I roasted a chicken for Easter — put my bare hand up its butt and inside a dead chicken’s body cavity, because you have to wash them and pat them dry (inside and out) if you want the skin to crisp. I didn’t eat it, being the world’s worst vegetarian, but I did douse my mashed potatoes down with gravy and it was delicious.
Also, it’s just about garden season. There’s another experiment happening in the garden this year — we’ll see what the weeds think of my no-till plans. It could be interesting. Prepare for newsletter garden spam, if anyone ever manages to kill the White Witch and end this never-ending winter.
I guess what I’m saying is, after starting to prune all the work I didn’t want to do any more, I’ve gone ahead and pruned all my work. As in, I’m not going to bother to hustle to bring any more in right now, to replace the stuff that got inadvertently pruned that I really did enjoy. It felt weird and very uncomfortable at first, which is why I was having an identity crisis a few weeks ago (‘work makes you worthy of being a person’ is one of those not-helpful ideas I have to let go of). I whole-heartedly acknowledge my privilege in being able to do so. Feel free to hate this edition of the newsletter if you’re struggling and this feels like rubbing it in your face. I’m sorry and I hope it gets better soon.
You know why gardeners prune? It opens up space for the light to get in. Taking out over-crowded branches gives diseases fewer sheltered, stagnant areas to take hold. And it diverts resources to the areas that need it most — to the fruit that we want to nurture.
So don’t feel guilty about pruning, about diverting your resources, about opening up space to let the light in. I’m waiting to see what a little bit of space and sunshine is going to grow.
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Hey friends — right now almost everyone on this list is someone I know either personally or through the internet. How are you doing? I would love to hear. Please let me know in the comments. Or, you know, give me a call. I’ll be home.
Also, in case you DO have work to do and are having trouble getting started, here is a method that’s worked well for me.
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Advisories from the Dept. of Sunshine & Sanitation
Today’s Advisory: How to get unstuck
Are you stuck? Have an overwhelming amount of work to do? Been avoiding it like the plague? (Ha ha. Sorry. Departmental humour.) Here is a little method we call “Tea and Toast” (alternative names include “Coffee & Croissant”, we won’t judge if you promise to share the croissants).
Pour tea. Make toast.
Sit down with tea and toast and a notebook you can scribble in and generally get messy with.
Make a list of all the things you need to do but are scared of doing.
Separate list into Large, Ongoing, Multi-Part Projects (write book, file taxes, edit podcast, design signage for dwarf dungeon) and checkbox tasks (phone pharmacy for refill, get milk, leave bowl of milk out for wraiths tonight, etc.).
Put checkbox tasks aside for later. (But realize they may require prep in order to make the task easier ¬– i.e. look up & write down phone numbers to call when it’s convenient, find the silver bowl you packed away that the wraiths need to drink out of, do the thing where you send out an email request and then wait to hear back, in order to have the stuff you need to actually do the thing – but don’t do that right now. Tackle the big thing first.)
Take the most hair-on-fire largest thing on your Large Project list. Write down one small piece of it you could do this morning.
Not small enough; go smaller.
Smaller.
Can you do it in five minutes without any prep work? Does it sound like this? “open up an email to Becky” // “write a five-point outline” // “find that email with instructions from five days ago.”
Go do it. Tea is forever, but finish your toast. You don’t want crumbs in your keyboard.