On why you still haven't written that thing

Do you have a creative goal—write an op-ed, a poem, get back to drawing, singing, painting—that is endlessly pushed to the end of your to do list?

First, you are not alone. So many people are with you—feeling mystified as to why they have such trouble realizing their dreams of self-expression.

Second, it is not your fault.

We live in a grind culture that operates on the foundational assumption that things that make money are worth prioritizing and things that don’t—even if just on a short-term basis—are not. This has been said many ways by many wise people (Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Angela Garbes), most recently Tricia Hersey whose Nap Ministry shouts loud and defiantly that REST IS RESISTANCE! She’s not just talking about taking a nap (though yes, do that).

You’d sleep this hard, too, if your cheeks were built-in pillows.

Hersey is also arguing that we have to recognize that our pace is a political issue. We are part of systems that were built on the foundations of neoliberal capitalistic exploitation. Even if you work in the nonprofit sector—where the content is supposedly “good”—the pace at which we move, the assumptions about what our bodies can take, the neglect of families, villages, creative dreams, are not in line with how whole humans actually thrive.

James Clear, who wrote Atomic Habits, writes:

Bad habits repeat themselves again and again, not because you don’t want to change, but because you have the wrong systems to change.

In other words, you are not uniquely broken. You are operating within a system that doesn’t support your allegiance to your dreams. Your “failure” to stick to your writing or art practices are equal to your “success” to stick to the system’s myriad incentives for producing ego-enhancing and money-making widgets (power points, emails, deliverables…).

What would it look like to wake up within this culture, these systems, and prioritize your wellness and your dreams for expression? 

One of the things you might do to work towards honoring your desire to create an essay, an audio tour, a book—is to slow down production in some other realm of your life (meetings!), to say no to something…

Thanks BetterUp.

…to recognize your own limitations and prioritize, to let yourself rest so you can actually feel creative (sitting in an afternoon autumn breeze or gardening or drawing weird shit instead of meetings!). 

The single most important practice that has allowed me to write five books is that I periodically disconnect from the internet. I put a little pad of paper next to my keyboard and write down anything I would have googled. At the end of the session, so little of it seems necessary after all.

In other words, to be creatively alive we need to have boundaries. We need to say no—sometimes to others, sometimes to ourselves. Somatic expert and podcast host Prentis Hempill says:

Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.

Building on this, perhaps boundaries are the distance at which we can love those around us and ourselves enough to do the creative work that we were meant to do in this life.

Breaking away from systems that weren’t designed for your dreams requires living into a new identity. On this, too, Clear has some good insight: “To change your behavior for good, you have to start believing new things about yourself.”

So rather than thinking about the goal you’ve been neglecting for months on end, think about the person you would be if you felt like time and energy were abundant enough that you didn’t even need to write that goal down. Who is the person that is you that has the spaciousness to play with that creative dream? What do they eat for breakfast? What communities are they are a part of? What movies do they watch? What books do they read? What supplies do they have on hand?

Maybe there are things that this version of you has that you structurally cannot have. You can’t abandon a caretaking responsibility. You can’t be independently wealthy. You can’t have three meals a day cooked for you by a sexy, organic farmer/chef. Okay, grieve that this is not—in this moment—available to you.

What is available to you?

Clear says you don’t even need to do the thing you want to do every day in order to be successful; you just need to build the muscle memory and neural pathways to begin to trust yourself as a person who does that thing every day. So if you want to be a person that writes a book, write one sentence every day for 30 days, and your body/mind/heart/spirit will learn that you are a person who sits down at a computer or in front of a notebook and writes every day. Now all you have to do is expand duration and output.

Hopefully, the single richest resource of all available to you is: community. Aside from getting my ass off the internet, my other superpower is surrounding myself with other people with creative dreams and formalizing our support of one another. Writing groups are magic when people are really ready to put themselves on the line, to show up with pages, to give and receive feedback. Same goes for other mediums, I’m sure. (And no, I’m not talking about MFA workshop cruelty where people destroy one another out of their own insecure desperation. Fuck that.)

Perhaps Thomas Merton said it best:

There is a pervasive form of modern violence to which the idealist...most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his (or her) work... It destroys the fruitfulness of his (or her) work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

Be less accountable to the system that doesn’t love your inner wisdom. Be more accountable to your body, to your dreams, to your co-conspirators in living a beautiful, weird, creative life.