Politics | Recovery | Current Obsessions
I’m trying to get out of the habit of guessing what my life looks like from the outside. I’ve just been proven wrong too many times. I’ve always tried to be honest about it but I also know what I try to say and what you believe are not quite the same thing. So I don’t know what you—dear newsletter reader—think my life is like. I don’t know if you think I’m as lazy as I am in the habit of telling myself.
Anyway, here’s a peek at my process as a workaholic in recovery.
This newsletter has been somewhat stop-start, because my life has been stop-start. And for the past year and a half or so, I have leaned into accepting that I cannot work the way I used to work.
I’ve sometimes described what happened to me about three years ago as a psychic and emotional stroke. A lot of things happened at once, and the way I used to function just... stopped working. I used to rely on perfectionism and sheer willpower to make myself produce what I needed to produce. And that system failed.
So I’ve had to relearn how to walk—writing-wise, professionally, and in some personal ways too. Part of that relearning has been treating rest not as something I do when I feel tired, but as something I do before I get tired. Rest and nourishment aren’t rewards. They’re medicine.
I have dutifully taken my psych meds for years—with such diligence that it actually almost drove me crazy once (antidepressant dosage change, story for another time). I’ve come to understand that I need to take time away from what exhausts me with the same kind of intentionality. I need to eat on a regular basis. I need to have fun. I don’t think of it as self-care but maintenance, as important as gassing up the car or taking out the trash, and sometimes just as sexy.
Eating, drinking, and even just a set-aside “zone out” time are on my to-do list now. I approach taking care of myself just as I do taking care of the pets (who have always somehow ranked higher than me), paying bills, and—most of the time—meeting deadlines.
Somewhat shockingly, I’ve written more in the past six months than I did in the two years before—maybe because I’m less fixated on publishing. Not publishing doesn’t mean the work is not real or worthy. In fact, I’ve got a few pieces in progress for this newsletter (including one about Mountainhead, which I promise is still coming). I’m practicing having faith in the gestation of these pieces. That what doesn’t appear yet isn’t lost.
This whole approach got tested just this week. I was set to start some new projects. I recently re-upped as a contributing editor at The New Republic, and I’m genuinely excited to be writing bigger pieces there regularly. But then my editor reached out and said they’d like a medium-sized piece about the protest this weekend.
I said yes. And almost at the exact same time, I started coming down with a summer cold.
I panicked: What if I’m not healthy enough to cover the protest? And that’s when I had to take my medicine. Not antibiotics. Stillness.
I had to stop everything and just sit. Do the bare minimum. Feed myself. Hydrate. Rest. Really rest. Because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to do the thing I wanted to do.
My experiment in intentional rest under deadline pressure seems to be working. As far as I can tell, I’ll be attending the protest at the Texas State Capitol tomorrow. (Find your protest here.)
I wanted to pass that lesson along in case you’re not going. In case you can’t go. In case you’re tired.
Resting is part of the work.
Reminding yourself of why we do the work is part of the work.
So: See you there. Or don’t.
You can be part of this fight no matter where you are tomorrow.
Come back when you can.
And then rest again.
In other news…
🎙 Past Due continues to dive into the problem of precarity in the creative economy. Catch up with recent episodes featuring newsletter mogul Parker Malloy, actor and video essayist Maggie Mae Fish, and content anthropologist Taylor Lorenz. We’re talking about surviving platforms, public life, and the myth of creative stability in late capitalism.
🚀 Over on Space the Nation, we wrapped up Andor and talked through Thunderbolts and Sinners. New episodes drop Mondays for everyone and Fridays for our Patreon crew, where you can also find our Rogue One rewatch.
P.S. This is exactly the kind of thing I talk about in my workshop on sustainable writing practice, The Slow Burn. I just wrapped up the spring session, but it’ll be back in the fall or winter. If you’re someone who writes—or wants to—without burning out, stay tuned.
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