This week, I posted a quote (ok, fine, a tweet) by author and editor Anna Gazmarian and my Instagram went mad. I received messages upon messages from people saying, “omg!!! me too!!!” and “I NEEDED TO HEAR THIS,” which is the only reminder I needed that social media is evil but it’s also really, really great.
What Anna wrote was: I’m learning that my best writing comes from when writing isn’t the center of my life. I need my community. I need burpees. I need reality tv. I need novels. I need my daughter chasing dogs. I need my husband reminding me that I have a full life outside of what I put on the page.
It’s a simple truth, but a reminder I desperately needed.
As we attempt to re-enter the world with all the good intentions that a new year brings, it’s easy to feel tempted to overdo it, to bite off more than we can chew and forget what we know works for us. Away from the chaos and noise of societal pressures and external structures, we often know exactly what balance looks like, and how to strive for it. Still, it’s easy to forget and get knotted up in a tight rope of overwhelm two weeks into January ––which, I’ll admit, is how this week felt like for me.
Something that my writing group and I talk about so often is how art cannot exist in a vacuum, because neither can we; how creativity comes in phases, because so does life, and both call for space and breath and freedom of movement; how both will wait for us, should we need to take a moment or two and come back to them. Which I often do.
I started the year off with a solitary writing retreat, which sounds fancy but really just means: I went to the mountains and locked myself in and put my phone in a drawer and threw away the post-it with the wifi code. For a week, I only stopped writing to eat, sleep, hike, read, and think about more writing, which, okay, holy hell.
I’m so proud of myself for actually going through with it even when it seemed ridiculous and felt heavier than it should have, and of course, I’m proud as hell of the words I did write ––the good, the bad, and the very-in-need-of-editing-ugly. Plus, it felt like the week-long therapy session I did not know I needed (love a full moon realization! love a Jan1st breakdown!) but the more I think about it, the more I realize it’s not the kind of structure that works best for me.
Here’s a better way to do it: incorporate the things you love into the life you’re building.
Make sure all the elements within can coexist —peacefully, gracefully— and even bounce off of each other. Community, music, food, dogs, sitcoms, fresh air, silence.
Softness, ambition, purpose, play.
All of it at once, that’s the energy I’m starting 2023 with.
That’s what I’m focusing on right now: how to build something durable, how to make sure this thing is solid and we’re in it for the long run. Not just for my creativity but also for ME, as a person in the world ––as an introvert who loves nothing more than her own company and could happily live like a hermit in a cabin for as long as she needs, but also, as someone who knows that’s not necessarily a constructive long-term plan.
My idol, Esther Perel, says that balancing predictability and newness is essential for children: it’s how they learn, grow, and make connections. Then we grow up and we realize we’re all out of balance but can’t figure out why, and it’s because we’re stuck in one of the following:
too little structure = high chaos
too much structure = rigidity
too much spontaneity = dysregulation
too little spontaneity = fossilization and deadness
She explains it like this: relationships that are all structure and no spontaneity leave little room for mystery or happenstance, erotic qualities that are essential to aliveness and energy between partners. All spontaneity and no structure, on the other hand—no titles or concrete plans—can leave us anxious. Think of your friendships. Old friends remind us of who we’ve been. New friends remind us of who we can be. Think of a company. Businesses need structure and spontaneity, too. They need legacy, accountability, and boundaries, as much as they need flexibility, creativity, and innovation.
She asks, what area of your life could use more structure? What area of your life could use more spontaneity? How do you ensure the two can bounce off of each other?
It’s a mindset shift, really. Forget “what gets me from A to B” and replace it with “how can I make sure all the right elements are in harmony?”
My friend Jamie Varon, who’s very smart and wrote a book exactly on this topic (Radically Content: Being Satisfied in an Endlessly Dissatisfied World), says: For me, setting myself up for success also means, setting myself up to enjoy the process, too. I don’t believe in investing my current suffering in some future payoff. I want to enjoy my life right now, not later, not one day. I don’t put my happiness on layaway.
I’m currently leaning into a very lucky, very creative season of life with renewed joy. With the solid belief that it joy’s not at the heart of it, it’s not worth doing. That if you’re starting at the end point and working back from there, you’ll lose the fire and miss the point of the whole thing.
Up in the mountains, locked away in my solitary cabin, it finally hit me. Yes, life goes in seasons and we’d better learn to go with our own body’s flow, fuck yeah, absolutely. Sure, we could devote six months every year to living like a monk and the other six to partying like there’s no tomorrow (is anyone else’s algorithm pushing these kinds of videos?? I see them all the time and it’s getting weird) but personally, I’d rather just love as much of my life as I can. As long as I have it, I want to fall in love it.
On January 1st, my horoscope from Chani Nicholas asked: are you ready for your personal renaissance?
On January 6th I wrote: I don’t know when I stopped breathing but I remember the day I started again. I wrote: What you’ve learned to say, all these years later, is that you’re not willing to sacrifice a single thing at the altar of your own supposed glory. The only future reward you’re interested in is knowing you did it all in the name of creativity, which is to say joy, which might turn out to be the only purpose of both life and art. You’re awake, you’re alive, you’re game for anything.
The means are the ends, the means are the ends, the means are the ends. I keep coming back to that, and I keep needing the reminder. Maybe you do, too, so this is for you.
Recs for your weekend:
The Year Celebrity Wellness Brands Abandoned Aspiration
Stop taking billionaires at their word
The End of Infinite Data Storage Can Set You Free
Eat, Pray, Love-ing My Way Around The World Absolutely Did Not Help Me Get Over My Divorce
Could Mushrooms Be the Drug to Finally Cure Eating Disorders?
Life snapshots
playlist: it’s a very Exile On Main St kinda weekend
book: When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress by Gabor Maté, whose work I’m obsessed with
learning from: the core inspiration for this newsletter was this workshop by Esther Perel: Spontaneity and Structure: How to Find Balance This New Year
cooking: my own version of this apple, speck and radicchio tart recipe
looking forward to: rewatching Sleepless in Seattle tonight
This is wonderful, Anna! I adore when people put into cohesive words all the random post-its in my head and I basically highlight the entire musing, nodding in agreement and “You get it; you get me.”
Your reflection made me think of a light bulb moment I had recently —
Upon seeing everyone's social media and newsletter shares December 26th to January 1st about loving the slowness, the decreased if any communication and responsibilities, the time to read and yoga and Netflix and sleep and paint, the lack of noise and disruptions, the long coffeehouse dates, the not knowing or caring what day or time it is, the laziness, the quiet, I paused. Because everyone was SO grateful mostly over what I term tiny joys — waking up without an alarm clock; going to the post office of the gym or Trader Joe’s Tuesdays at 10AM; people asking how the weekend was and me responding, “Oh it was the weekend?” The pause was me realizing with an amount of appreciation I cannot textualize that what most people crave and only get in that short time frame is what I've designed my life to provide me all the time.
It made me really proud of my 18 years of not perfect or without challenges but pretty close to blissful self-employment. And made me sad so many experience their ideal a tiny fraction of time. Which is probably why guiding others to believing that they can design and live their ideal life, and transforming that belief into action, is the main backbone of what I do.
Your writing also touched me as I’m one of those “trying to write a book for too damn long” people. One who knew the reason it hadn’t happened was because I didn’t get this residency or that writing retreat. So your personal a-ha that your mountain getaway while nice was not best underlined for me that I don’t need any of that “success” or “proof.”
“…incorporate the things you love into the life you’re building. Make sure all the elements within can coexist —peacefully, gracefully— and even bounce off of each other. Community, music, food, dogs, sitcoms, fresh air, silence. Softness, ambition, purpose, play.”
“It’s a mindset shift, really. Forget “what gets me from A to B” and replace it with “how can I make sure all the right elements are in harmony?”
That is what I need. And I already have it. Thus if my math maths, I should have the book.
Happy to say I’m making fabulous feeling progress in both word count and light at end of tunnel’ness. Finally.
“I’d rather just love as much of my life as I can.”
Amen, sister. Amen.
And the simple yet complex crux? We can, if we choose to.