A million thoughts in my head today.
This week I put my elbow into working on the long-form Book People article and it’s slowly and painfully coming along. The comments from my teacher Aish were SUPER helpful. I also had a friend read it (a second time) and her feedback was that it was still a bit ‘meh’. There’s still a lot of work to be done on it. The bulk of the comments I got were from my hubafriend the OG book person I know and his feedback was super DUPER helpful. Now I have to go back to it to edit, write, and edit again. What’d I say when I started this journey earlier this year? I have to learn to write, and then write and write and write some more.
In start-up parlance there’s a bit where you come off your initial high of something new and things feel like they are crashing down and you find yourself in this valley of “I’m putting a lot of effort but nothing is happening”. This is the trough of sorrow. I felt a bit of this this week because it feels like I am just making efforts but not much is happening. I just have to climb out of this trough of sorrow because the only thing I can control is the doing. The outcome is not guaranteed, only the effort is controllable.
My schedule was also really strange this week. I found the energy to work on Book People in the afternoons after I re-started my days post lunch/rest-nap. I suppose there’s nothing wrong with that but I’m used to doing my writing in the morning. When I think back on it though, I’ve always spent my morning handling emails, admin and doing less mentally taxing writing like my picture books and Harlem Row.
I keep thinking I am a morning writer but I suppose I should remain flexible and see how it all falls into place. I can’t seem to help myself in the morning when I want to get a bunch of admin tasks out of the way first. As a new experiment, I will give my undisturbed afternoon chunk to Book People and see how that goes. The consulting work is always in flux which is disruptive so I have to find a more sustainable way to build it in. That was always the part I hated the most about working at a law firm: having to go searching for work. There’s so much work everywhere and it feels like a total waste of time to have schedule some time for that work and then not have that work appear. All this to say I’m still fine tuning my system. I had a quick exchange with one of my former bosses this week and I told her that I’m cobbling together a writing career and that it’s a hot-mess. But it’s my hot-mess and I have never felt more aligned with myself and purpose.
Yesterday I caught an episode of Brene Brown’s podcast with Esther Perel and they talked about coming out of our corners and learning to live with uncertainty. Life happens in the gray, in the uncertainty. Then in a strange turn, my mom also sent me a short video about learning to dance with uncertainty. A friend’s therapist told her that “you can be right, or you can have a relationship”. It’s the linchpin in this whole damn thing: surrender, acceptance, resilience and centering. I can tell you that Welly 2.0 (as my friend called me) is definitely learning more to go with the flow. I am trying to raise my basal mental health level so that I can handle the things life throws at me better. Like all muscles, I just have to practice and it will get stronger. The pandemic has really triggered a lot of soul-searching, void-staring and confronting my demons.
The other major thread this week is to embracing feedback and asking for help. I used to hate feedback but now I actively seek it. I finally get why you can’t write alone and why art takes a village to make. Also, I realized that because I have never written anything that’s not from my perspective, I have a lot of road to travel to get to a point where I can write convincingly of other people’s experiences. I am also trying to not beat myself up about not being immediately amazing at this because it’s all a huge learning curve for me. To do interviews, to ask questions, to write someone else’s story in a very engaging way.
I started the self-directed course on getting a writing agent and realize there’s so much more of the gross bits that I need to just plunge into and face head on. To say I have my work cut out for me is an understatement. The weeks are passing so fast and every day I feel like I get so little done. But I have to remind myself that there’s no use in continually beating myself up over what I couldn’t get done. This is the start of the rest of my career, I don’t need to be so rushed all the time. The spaces are necessary to help me remain creative. That, and the fact that it will take me years - YEARS - to get something out. It is just how it goes.
There’s not time for being stuck the trough, I need to clamber out of it ASAP.