Friends, it’s been a minute. I make no excuses. 2021 is the year I stop pretending this space is anything other than a more professional, less coming-of-age-angst-y incarnation of my early-2000s LiveJournal.
Blogs felt so different then. They allowed us to step into the writer’s mind and process life through their lens. Terms like SEO, monetization, and content had no connection to blogging.
Not that I ever intended to monetize this blog. Still, there’s this sense, even with an informal blog, that you’re supposed to have a content strategy. A publication calendar. Polish. As I conclude this third paragraph of my post, you should know exactly what you’re going to get.
Let’s just be friends, okay? It’s simpler that way.
Speaking of friends…
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a certain kind of friend, one I’ve only appreciated more as the pandemic drags on: the accountability partner. The work friend. The person who keeps me productive.
I do realize one of 2020’s lessons was, we’re worth more than our productivity. Trust me, I’ve forgiven myself for failing to repaint the living room. I’ve had more trouble swallowing the loss of creative time. In-the-zone, dig-deep time. I miss attending conferences and retreats, immersing myself in conversation with people who share my passion for this work. I miss having space to be productive.
I’ve been incredibly fortunate to live where I do during this pandemic. My neighbors and I have passed many hours outside (safely, with masks!) drinking beers and chewing the fat, staving off the social isolation so many have suffered.
It hasn’t always been enough. Call me weird, but I started to wish people would talk more about work. Not about how to fit it into the day or get our kids to stop interrupting it, but about the work itself. What were people working on? Struggling with? What had they accomplished recently? What should we toast (or drown) with those afternoon beers?
I wanted work friends. Or, at the very least, people who knew me in the context of my work more than they did my home and family. Otherwise, how could I summon the motivation to keep going?
It’s hard to fight for your work every day.
Before I complain, allow me to say: my family is very supportive and accommodating. Before the pandemic, my husband thought nothing of taking a few days off from work while I did a writing retreat at the beach. My kid thinks it’s very cool that I’m both an author and his mom. No one hinted that I stop or even pause my work this year.
And yet, I’ve thought many times: it would be so much easier not to do this. My life would feel so much simpler if I let go of all my ambitions for myself and focused exclusively on supporting my home and family. No matter how much people admire my work, no matter how much I love to do it, I get tired of fighting to make space for it every day.
Not only that, even when I do make the space, I’m often so distracted and drained by [gestures at general situation] I don’t feel like I’m making good use of my time. That’s frustrating and demoralizing on its own, but it can also make me hesitant to demand accommodations for my work. I fear I’ll have nothing to show for myself.
At the same time, I know I can’t give up. I’ve established too much of a place for myself in my niche. I couldn’t bear to desert my readers. Even more, writing is the one pursuit I’ve never managed to give up. I’ve been writing since childhood. At some point I realized: I just am a writer. It’s part of my identity, and not something I can shrug off as easily as submitting my resignation.
My “work friends” have kept me going.
That’s where my buddies come in. If I can’t quit, but I don’t know how to keep going, I need support.
Fortuitously, my best friend and I had already started a mutual accountability habit before the pandemic. Every Thursday, we hopped on FaceTime for a quick check-in. We’d catch up as friends, but also talk about what we planned to work on over the next couple hours. Then we’d exchange some texts later in the day to report on our progress. We didn’t keep a video stream open the whole time or anything, but the knowledge someone would text in two hours to ask after our progress helped us get unstuck.
We maintained this habit when the pandemic hit. Even on days when I didn’t feel I had it in me, I forced myself to think of something to work on during our time “together.” It helped that we’ve been at this for close to three decades. We’ve been writing together since long before we could imagine ourselves as adults with our own homes and families — and that’s the wavelength we operate on most of the time.
I’ve also leaned hard on my monthly critique group. We’re a small crew, which keeps us all in pretty frequent rotation. We’ve also been around awhile — since 2014 — and founded our group on the principles of mutual commitment to each other and our work.
We’ve all had life stuff come up in that time, and we’ve all asked for the group’s understanding as we sat on the bench for a month or two. However, doing so feels like a weighty thing. I didn’t want to tell my critique partners, nothing catastrophic happened but I still failed to make time for my writing for two months. I feel responsible to them, and expect them to feel equally responsible to me.
Even if I did fail to make time for writing for two months, I put everything else aside and wrote like crazy for one afternoon, just to have something to submit when it was my turn.
Productivity — the right kind — is a sustaining force.
People talk a lot about self-care and self-compassion. I admit I need more of both. At the same time, all productivity, all work, is not created equal.
I tangle with this idea often in my other writing life, where I write for adults with ADHD. Some people blame capitalist society for “pathologizing” ADHD traits. By this token, medication and other coping strategies are only necessary when we see productivity as a measure of worth. I always counter this with my own lived experience: sure, many of us feel pressure to do things we need, but don’t inherently want, to do. But what of those of us who also yearn to feel successful at the things we most want to do? What of those of us who want to write a new book? To take pride in our creative work?
Creative work is difficult. Most of us must fight to make space for it, and then fight to do it, even when we’re so lost we feel we can’t go on. Some people seem gifted with an innate ability to push through this hardship. To show up every day and do the work on the good days and the bad. We mortals often let our creative habits slip, then mourn this fact while still doing everything we can to avoid the writing desk.
The pandemic has only intensified this struggle. While I didn’t write as much as I wanted to in 2020, I am acutely aware of how easily I could’ve written nothing at all. That I didn’t, that I finished a rather grueling rewrite of a manuscript I’d previously abandoned, is not because I found the strength within myself. It’s because I had people to lean on. We gave each other collective strength from without.
What they provided was so simple: a weekly phone call. A text to ask how my writing session had gone. A deadline to upload new chapters for critique group. But it made all the difference. It reminded me my work was still important, even in a year that tried nearly every day to convince me otherwise.
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