I resonate.
Arms spread wide I catch the wind and welcome it into my trembling bones like an endless echoing gong.
I am, in an infinite instant — stretched — larger than I know. I am spread across the moment that lingers between one breath’s finish and a fresh inhale.
I am breathless, thoughtless, open. I am lost and have never been more found; caught here, on the stillness of a half-forgotten heartbeat.
I resonate and I am lost.
I breathe and I am found.
When I first started on this writing/life-changing adventure, more than a year and a half ago I did it out of a feeling of desperation.
I was desperately unhappy with my work life. I was desperate to feel a sense of direction in my life again, a feeling that I hadn’t had in years. I wanted to feel like I was on a path again, in the way that I had been as kid, always taking one logical step after the next.
Because at age 23 I somehow impossibly reached the end of my road. I had always expected to go to grad school and get a PhD and do the academia thing — and then when the time came to apply to PhD programs during my senior year of undergraduate I discovered (much to my then-surprise!) that there was nothing I wanted to do less.
After four years of suffocating and suffering in the name of education, the thought of voluntarily requesting six more years of such torture ached in my body like a physical pain — telling me that there was simply nothing left of myself to give. The boundless energy that is generally the purview of youth seemed to have withered in me in a haze of panicked labor and sleep-wrecked nights.
I wound up with a Master’s degree, working a job I didn’t really like, and at the time I was pretty miserable. I felt stuck and lost and generally adrift on a somewhat random and malignant sea. I desperately wanted to find my way out, but I really had no idea what I was doing or where to start.
And then I started writing.
And something miraculous shifted somewhere along the way and the job that I hated became a job that (most days, at least) I actually rather like.
—
When I first started writing I never expected any of these things to happen. A year and a half ago I turned back to my writing in desperation, seeking a way out with no real expectation of finding one.
To look at me today you’d never know anything in particular had changed. I still work my job and even though I’ve started writing this blog and working on a book I can’t say that I’ve really taken action toward finding another career.
And yet, paradoxically, I’m beginning to think that I have.
In the past few weeks I’ve been astonishingly, perhaps even alarmingly happy. And there’s nothing in my external environment that has changed to prompt this, really. I still work my job. I still spend ten hours a week on the bus. I still wake up earlier than I’d like to.
But suddenly the misery that haunted my days two years ago is gone. In retrospect, it’s been shifting for a long time, sometimes so slowly I didn’t even realize it was happening.
And in that shifting I’ve discovered something that feels like magic.
The reason I’ve felt so stuck these past few years, both in my job and in getting my words out into the world, in jumping ship on all my old dreams and embarking on a new adventure, is simply that I was scared.
And I’m going to suggest that this is perhaps a reasonable and rational fear — I can’t imagine a universe in which it shouldn’t feel scary to leave behind everything that feels safe and secure and to leap into the unknown. This fear seems like a rational survival impulse.
But when it cropped up for me as I started to contemplate making big changes in my life, I found it became a paralytic. Unable to rationalize my way out of the fear, I became mired in it, unable to move forward in any way.
And for the last year and a half I’ve been searching for the way out of that paralysis. And I think I’ve finally figured it out.
Here’s the secret:
First be happy. Then be brave.
Because as my suffering and worry has transmuted into a kind of deep and peaceful joy in the past few weeks I’ve suddenly seen the way out. No longer am I terrified of doing the things I once found petrifying. No longer does the thought of my doing them strike fear into the core of my being.
Instead, I’m finding myself laughable. All those fears that kept me stuck now seem so absurd I can’t help but feel a kind of ceaseless delight as I think of them.
I’ve written before about some strategies for overcoming fear in which I suggested taking teeny tiny steps. I still think tiny steps add up to powerful progress and I used this strategy myself: I’ve been writing this blog that very few people read and sending out my weekly newsletter for more than a year now. And now I see that I wasn’t quite ready to really put myself out there, I wasn’t quite me enough to really feel safe in the outside world. But in writing here for the past year I’ve rediscovered those parts of myself and ultimately I’ve begun to feel safe.
And those were important steps for me to take along the way, but they were never going to be enough to take me all the way toward being the voice in the world that I dream of being or give me the kind of reach I would need to really take this book I’m writing and make it a success.
So turtle steps are a great place to start — but sometimes I think you also need to make big, scary leaps.
And if you find yourself needing to make a leap, I’d like to suggest you not try and blast your way out through the fear. In my experience this doesn’t work.
Instead, get happy first. Get ridiculously joyful and grateful.
And then I think you’ll find that suddenly the world just doesn’t seem so scary.
And then you might laugh at yourself a bit 🙂
Here’s a problem I’ve been pondering lately: when you have big dreams how do you make them come true?
There are obvious, unhelpful answers like “you pursue them!” or “you don’t give up!”. There are more practical, but still unhelpful answers like “you just write” and “you just do it”.
Because here’s the thing, often just wanting the dream isn’t enough to get it done. Lots of people want to write books, but very few of them ever do. You need more than just desire, you need systems.
At their most basic, I think that systems are just habits that help you make progress on what’s important. Ten minutes of journaling before bed is a system that might help you get clear and accountable on how your actions that day have furthered or hindered your goals. Turning off your email notifications is a system that helps you remain focused on what really matters.
Systems can also be more complicated, the structures and scaffolding from which your sculpt your life. They can be complex creations with moving parts that flow throughout your days and help keep you on track.
And the system I want to talk about today is like that. It’s your productivity system, your calendar, your to-do list, your inbox. It’s the clutter in your house and the mess in your closet.
I’ve been deeply engrossed in the work of Anna Kunnecke for a couple of months now, and she places a lot of emphasis on how clearing up and clearing out one’s physical environment can have a huge positive impact on one’s internal world. Having tried it out for myself, I find I couldn’t agree more.
And yet the change that has made the most significant impact on my life isn’t so much to do with my physical world; it has to do without I keep track of all the moving parts that make up a life.
And my system is based heavily on Anna Kunnecke’s recommendations and on David Allen’s suggestions in his book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
I’d have pointed to my two degrees from MIT and said “me?!”. But the truth is that MIT didn’t teach me good productivity habits — what MIT taught me was how to fight fires with incredible efficiency. At MIT every assignment was a crisis, every week was overloaded and I raced about in a kind of dazed panic from problem to paper to exam without a moment to gasp for air.
Which means that when I graduated I didn’t have any skills for getting things done in a less-stressful environment. In real life there aren’t so many deadlines. The book I’m writing doesn’t have due date. There’s no teacher leaning over my shoulder, fingers shifting restlessly in anticipation of each completed chapter. There’s really no reason to finish writing my book except that I want to.
This is a truth that so many writers seem to gloss over and so many aspiring writers can’t seem to move past. So much writing advice boils down to “just write” including the oft-cited quote from Neil Gaiman to “write one word and then another”, or this recent post from Chuck Wendig. And this advice is not untrue — it’s perhaps the truest advice there is — but my quibble with such advice is that it also doesn’t help.
It doesn’t help the aspiring writer finally start writing the novel they’ve always dreamed of. And it doesn’t help them keep putting down words every day, even when the story takes a left turn somewhere on page 50 and suddenly they haven’t got a clue what the story even is anymore.
I’ve spoken about some of the tricks I use to help make my writing feel effortless, but when we get down to the nitty gritty of it, no amount of desire or effortlessness is sufficient to help me prioritize my writing over all the other things that need to happen in my life. Should I do my writing or my cooking first? Well… I’d really rather not starve. Should I do my writing this morning or be on time at my job? Well… I’d really rather not be late.
So in order to actually get my writing done I need to find a way to hold myself accountable to actually doing it — otherwise, I can say I’m writing a book till I’m blue in the face but if I’m not actually putting words on the page then (as Anna Kunnecke would say) “it’s kind of bullshit, isn’t it?”
And the system I’ve found myself turning to with great efficacy is based on David Allen’s Getting Things Done.
It really boils down to just five steps:
As David Allen says, there’s really three kinds of work: the work we plan to do (the stuff that is on our to-do lists), the work that shows up (emails, bills, etc.), and the work we do to define our work. After MIT I was fantastic at doing work that shows up, but not so fantastic at doing the work I’d planned to do and I’d never really learned to do the work to define my work at all. My next actions had always been decided by due dates and professors.
In the past few weeks, as I’ve been increasingly thorough in implementing David Allen’s system, I can tell you that being able to take control of defining the work you do is one of the most powerful systems I know for making your dreams come true.
Suddenly I’m finding time to write because my lists keep me accountable and they help me understand everything else I might also need to be doing so that I know that if I sit down to write for 30 minutes or an hour on a Tuesday that I’m not suddenly going to find Wednesday morning I don’t have any food for breakfast. And it turns out simultaneous accountability, security, and a deep honoring of my priorities are just the things I need to make my dreams (and this book) come true.
I come back to my words.
Over and over again, I come back to the smooth glide of pen on paper or the rhythmic caress of fingers against the keys of my keyboard, worn smooth and soft with use.
I come back to my writing because it brings me back into myself, back into the person I have always been, but who I sometimes forget myself to be.
I come back because the words bloom in my chest like petals unfurling in the flustered warmth of my unsteady heartbeat.
I come back to my writing because when I was a girl I used to take my journal and sit under a tree and when my pen touches paper today I can sometimes still feel the rasp of tree bark pricking into the skin of my back.
I come back because my words feel sun-soaked and luscious as they reverberate in my head and their warmth tingles as the thoughts race each other down my arms toward where a miracle of biology transmutes the stuff of dreams into ink, slowly drying on paper.
I come back to my writing because writing was always the thing I did for me. It was the way I chased away the ghosts on lonely October nights and the way I passed my lunch breaks in high school. My writing was the way I busied myself in my efforts to feel less alone.
I come back because the words guide me ever closer to that hopeful and dreaming person I once knew myself to be.
I come back to my writing because every time I put pen to paper — it pushes me a little bit farther back into me.
I aspire to a life that feels effortless.
For this reason, “effortless” is the word I’ve put at the top of my to do list, as an often mocking reminder of how I would like to feel. Because in all the important ways I find I’ve lost the ease of flow.
It’s a problem that feels particularly acute right now; I moved last weekend and am coming off of twelve months of an unfortunate roommate situation which often cost me significant sleep. All of which is to say that I’m tired. Deeply, hopelessly, profoundly tired all the way down into the marrow of my bones.
I’ve felt like this off-and on (more on than off) since sometime during my junior year at MIT. I feel that around my twenty first birthday I tapped out and never really managed to find the way back in. And years later, I’m sick of feeling stuck because I’m too tired to manage more than my day-to-day — the cooking, cleaning, and working that eat up so many non-negotiable hours each day.
And yet I’m so tired that every necessary step feels awful. Every necessary step feels like it requires a Herculean effort, even when it’s as small as writing up a new blog post to share with you each week.
I’m still working on healing the exhaustion, but it’s been years now since I graduated from MIT and I’m done waiting until I feel less exhausted to move on.
When you’re tired, you only ever do the things that feel easy. If you want to get things done despite being tired, then each individual task has to feel absurdly easy — so easy you’d rather just have it over with. In order to get things done when you’re tired, those things have to feel effortless.
But here’s the secret about effortlessness — it’s not really about the difficulty of the task, it’s actually about the weight of resistance you have to doing the task. Which means that the problem I’ve really been tackling is the problem of resistance.
Whole books have been written on resistance (Stephen Pressfield’s The War of Art
I spent my “determined misery” allowance while I was at MIT. I bullied myself into powering through impossible mountains of homework, often staying up multiple days without sleep in a slap-dash effort to make the impossible possible. And for the most part, I demonstrated alarming success.
But this kind of energy is a finite resource — you only have so much to give and mine is all used up.
And what I’m learning is a whole new way of getting things done that feels easier and even (sometimes) effortless.
Disclaimer: This post contains Amazon affiliate links. I make a (very) small referral commission from purchases made using my links. This does not affect your price.