#63: january writer's note
relaxing into our chosen practices (through structured investment)
Good morning,
Having arrived at 2024 feels like a strange accomplishment because as a child writer, I remember picking 2024 to make something feel far, far in the future. And here we are.
Until now, I’d mostly been looking at the 2020’s very close up. Year after year has been packed with life-changing events. I never imagined I would grow up to witness pandemic and genocide back-to-back. I never imagined I would enter an industry on the precipice of democratization (journalism in the 2010’s) and see it falter so spectacularly in the same breath. And I certainly never anticipated how rapid the shifts could be in how we communicate with each other through it all.
4 years ago, video chats replaced entire human relationships. 4 months ago, an AI chatbot became a fixture in my correspondence. I never anticipated my Google habit could begin to feel slow and curmudgeonly, now replaced by Tiktok’s algorithm which, in a world of speed, personalization and unfiltered access, often provides me with all the service journalism I need.
All this said, I’ve been feeling like it’s time to take a step back. Rather than seeing life evolve in days or weeks or the fear-laden anniversaries perpetuated by a tired news cycle, I’ve become rather interested in generations and centuries. From that perspective, we’ve made quite a lot of progress in health, communication and human development and much of the innovation to come is heartening.
2024 is roughly 100 years since the decade of my grandparents’ births. And it’s about 100 years until my own children will approach their 100’s. From this view, I find myself in the middle of a much slower, much more important, much more powerful set of generational shifts. As a writer, I want to spend this year reflecting on those shifts, and specifically on how culture, work, family and communication has changed and will continue to do so.
So, same old Time Spent this year, but a little broader, and a little more on craft. Here’s what to expect.
2024 Programming Note:
Having now accumulated a fair bit of experience with my own research and writing practices, I’ve decided to incorporate a bit more on reading and writing itself, especially as I learn to juggle with the upcoming birth of my child. I also want these letters to continue to feel like a place we can think aloud about our relationships with work, media and care, specifically through the lens of things we do outside of our formal jobs.
For those who are new here, each month, I’ll offer:
📝 A writer’s note about my own writing intentions for the month or what I’ve learned lately. If you’ve been thinking of refreshing or starting your writing practice, let’s do it together!
💡 A “how might we” prompt on making a small modification to some everyday behavior that might help us see things differently.
🌌 A constellation of resources or readings on a particular question I’ve recently asked or had answered.
📕 A reader’s note on something I’ve read that has helped me better understand why we have the relationships with time, home, work, and media that we currently do.
Let’s begin.
Shifting my own writing from the margins of the week into the center has been the heaviest burden of my career so far. For one reason or another, my own work always feels less important than the deadlines I’m paid to deliver on, more ambiguous that any project scope I’ve negotiated, and more discardable than the clickbait I’ve been paid to write as a journalist. I know I’m not alone. Why?
I’d say, for most of us, it’s 50% social conditioning (if someone isn’t paying you, it’s not “work”) and 50% imposter syndrome (if you don’t have a formal education, title or contract, is it really work)?
If you see yourself in this at all, I highly recommend Stephen Pressfield’s The War of Art as a new year refresher on overcoming resistance in creative work.
But more specifically, here are the antidotes I am self-administering for both roadblocks this month, based on lessons learned from a year of experimenting with my own writing practice.
Antidote 1: Utilizing Social Conditioning
Last year taught me that living under the tyranny of paid work as a measure of self-worth is the main way to ensure we’ll never value the unpaid labor that fills the ~8+ hours per day not spent working or sleeping. We’ll never invest true effort into our art, our food, our health, our relationships, or our sense of self (all of which require careful nurturing and tremendous labor to sustain) because no one is judging our execution in the privacy of our own home. In other words, I find that social feedback is often as important to getting good work out of me as pay is. It’s the evaluation, the judgment, the publicness of work that is motivating. (It’s also a reason I think so many unpaid caregivers struggle in private—because no one sees their work, there is no one to talk about it with, there’s no one paying top firms to carefully orchestrate incentives or work culture for us.)
Remarkably, I realized this through following social media content creators who film themselves doing non-work things in their homes. When we have to perform a task, we try harder at it simply because we care what other people think. This isn’t always a bad thing. One way our desire for social acceptance can create immense value is by inspiring other people through our journey. It’s why humans love exchanging stories. It’s why we scroll.
Watching ordinary people perform the minutiae of their day on social media—parents cooking dinner for the family, young moms cleaning their house on a Sunday afternoon, artists time-lapsing a daily doodle, out-of-shape adults doing a 20 minute workout in their pajamas—a niche I’ll call “people at home,” has convinced me that performance can be a brilliant motivator.
Unlike influencers trying to make things look better than they are, countless people are being fearless about doing people-things in front of the world, and getting out of the ruts of loneliness and laziness in the process. I’ve seen this transformation over and over, people learning to cook in public, battling disordered eating by publicizing their inch by inch recovery, training their unruly puppy by sharing the daily practice of it, getting through postpartum by sharing daily night-feeding updates, or finishing a manuscript by recording their routine and reporting word counts at the end.
Will I ever post such content myself? Probably not, but I do think there’s something to working with our social conditioning rather than against it. At the privacy of my desk, I’ve tried and failed to hit daily word counts on long projects again and again, but consistently delivering writing to someone who is expecting it, I can do that.
So, if you’re dusting off an old project or just thinking about starting to write, find someone who expects to hear from you (be it a corner of the internet or a specific mentor or editor, which can always be a friend) and then schedule in when and where you’ll do this work, even if it’s just for 1 tiny project and 1 clear day in January. It may sound simple, but I’ve heard from so many of you that you want to write and don’t know where to start. Let’s do it!
Antidote 2: Seeing Imposter Syndrome as Potential
For those who follow Adam Grant’s insights, here is one that continues to stay with me:
Imposter syndrome is not a clue that you’re unqualified. It’s a sign of hidden potential. When you think others are overestimating you, it’s more likely that you’re underestimating yourself. They have an outside view. They see capacity for growth that’s not yet visible to you.
Seeing imposter syndrome as a sign of potential was incredibly eye-opening for me because it helped me change a thought pattern that I suspect many writers experience.
Previous thought pattern: Who am I to write/say/do X? > I’m not qualified. > Qualifications look like a special degree, more life experience, more data or research by someone who is not me to back up what I am saying. > I’ll procrastinate this work to avoid feeling this way.
New thought pattern: Who am I to write/say/do X? > I must have the hidden potential to do it. > What specifically do I need to learn to unlock this potential? > How can I learn it? > I’m going to take the leap and invest time or money into learning it.
That last bit is the crucial part. Invest in learning it, whether that investment comes from your time or your actual money. In the world of paid work, utilizing employer-funded professional development, being trained by a manager or obtaining an advanced degree to qualify our potential to work is a no brainer. Why not the same for our more ambiguous spaces and roles? Why not invest in mentorship for parenthood, creativity or health, in those crevices of our lives outside of paid work that hold our most important time of all?
As a writer, last year held a lot of firsts for me in terms of investing in myself: my first writing retreat, my first cohort-based experience of doing The Artist’s Way, my first time paying writing mentors to learn specific aspects of craft or tools that I just wasn’t good at yet, and my first writer’s group.
Investing in learning doesn’t always require money or time out of the house either. I recall someone once explaining how mentorship can come simply from studying the life and work of someone who inspires you through their own words, biographies, interviews and more. For instance, many incredible craft podcasts exists for writers and as I gear up for my next career season, I’m immersing myself in one that features mothers of young children who are creatives, alongside reading biographies of women who have balanced art and parenthood in generations past.
I have found that at the beginning of a month, setting up even one of these structures, stolen from the world of “productive work” and reimagined in a way that nurtures that which we hold most dear but simply don’t dedicate the time to, is a way to relax into your chosen practice and truly enjoy it.
In this spirit, toward February we go!
For those who might still be feeling a little dreary or exhausted from the past year, I’ll leave you with these words from Eleanor Roosevelt on where she gets her energy at the age of 74, from a 1959 Harper’s Magazine essay.
She covers three points: 1) Common sense about health, 2) Keeping a routine and 3) Relaxing through change. This is how she ends.
“The ability to relax, recuperate, and enjoy, is, I suppose, partly an attitude of mind. Like most older people, I am constantly fighting the temptation to slip into self-absorption. If one loses interest in the people who tie one to life, then it is very easy to lose interest in the world as a whole. This, I think, is the beginning of death. For all of us, as we grow older, perhaps the most important thing is to keep alive our love for others and to believe that our love and interest are as vitally necessary to them as to us. This is what makes us keep on growing and refills the fountains of energy.
At present I look like Methuselah but I feel no older than my youngest friends. I am sure that I am no more exhausted at the end of a busy day than many who are half my age. When you know there is so much to be done that is not yet accomplished you are always looking forward instead of backward. This is one of the secrets of having strength and energy. As you grow older too, it becomes easier to think about other people and forget about yourself. Thus you have many interests and these, I think, give you the capacity to do whatever really needs to be done.”
The full essay is here:
Happy Monday!
Jihii