Notes on de-optimizing my life
Hello! I feel like a badger emerging from my burrow only to announce to the great open prairie that she’s been feeling quite happy down there in the cozy dark. I’ve been off social media, quietly re-plotting my novel and spending QT with my family, falling in love (see above image 🥰) and reveling in all my rich creative friendships.
These days I just laugh and shake my head whenever I see mention of “hustling” or “productivity systems” or “optimization”—as a wise person once said, some games you can win only by declining to play—although I have to admit up front that I am writing from a very privileged position as a result of the Bones and All adaptation. It is a lot easier to say “Nahhh, I don’t want to do that anymore” (e.g., stay visible and responsive online; finish a new manuscript as quickly as possible, knowing it won’t be my best work) when royalty checks are paying the rent. It is a luxury to opt out in the way that I have, AND I think it is possible to reorient oneself in relation to the “shoulds” and “have tos” regardless of one’s individual circumstances.
“De-optimizing my life” means doing things in my own time and for my own reasons. Here are some specific mindset alterations to that effect:
I don’t need a fancy website.
A conversation with my friend Forbes Graham (check out our three-part No Bones at All chat over on YouTube!) on the frustrating aspects of “maintaining an online presence” culminated in my declaring that I wanted a new website almost as minimal as Zen Habits, and Forbes offering to migrate my old website to Squarespace for me. (I knew I wanted Squarespace because my friend Heather has been happy using it for hers.) And here we are!
[Note: I’m still tidying up, so you may notice some wonky formatting and a broken link here and there. I’m working on it! Feel free to leave a comment if there’s something you’re looking for and can’t find.]
For anyone only just finding me, here is what my site used to look like:
It was pretty (thank you, Evan!) and it served me well for a full decade. And then I found myself yearning for something VERY simple.
I don’t care about digital marketing.
“Comet Party” is gone apart from the URL—for now, anyway—so I suppose you could say I’ve unbranded myself, since I’m not teaching or coaching or making videos and can’t say when I’ll get back to it. I’ve moved on from the preoccupations I outlined in a 2017 blog post called Email Marketing and “Authenticity.” I don’t have to send an email newsletter when I have little to say, I don’t have to sell you anything (not even my books), and I don’t have to be a “public figure.” The Bones and All film experience, though marvelous in SO many ways, made me realize that maintaining firm boundaries (like turning off Instagram DMs) and a certain level of remove is way better for my mental health than trying to be warm and responsive to everyone. Despite all the oversharing I’ve done on this blog over the years (ha!), I really am an introvert who is happiest either at home drafting a novel in her pajamas or out having real-life adventures with one or two or three dear friends.
Note: If you purchased one of my Teachable courses (THANK YOU!) or are missing my “office hours” videos on Instagram (bless you!), it’s all good—I will be back eventually!—and if you have any questions about the course you purchased, you can always email me.
Having said all this, let me assert that a choice to withdraw (temporarily or not) is not the same as “playing small,” which is a micro-aggressive judgment frequently employed to sell exorbitantly-priced coaching packages. After my main Bones and All event (YouTube link) at the Celsius 232 festival this past July, several young women came to the signing table to tell me how seen and understood my remarks on misogyny had made them feel, and I still feel VERY fired up about reflecting the real-world experience of women in this culture in my fiction. It’s just that a new story (not the time-travel novel, although it will certainly touch on these concerns) is going to take a considerable amount of time in solitude. I’m not going to try to fast-draft a new novel because somebody else on the internet says they can draft a 70,000-word manuscript in thirty days or less. And on that note…
Slowly, quietly, steadily.
As I knit another fingering-weight cardigan for my four-year-old niece, I think of how her great-grandfather used to razz me for choosing such tiny yarn and needles. “That’s going to take you forever to finish!,” he’d laugh, even though he understood that the point isn’t to finish something quickly. As an expression of love and care, there is nothing quite like a handmade garment that fits well and is designed with the recipient’s likes and needs in mind.
And the process of matching yarn to pattern, assembling your tools (needles, stitch markers, waste yarn, my tiny canister of tapestry needles), and casting on: this is a series of pleasurable tactile experiences in and of themselves, and to focus on completing a project in an expedient manner is to diminish that pleasure. There’s also the matter of creative hindsight: when I make something, be it a novel or a sweater, I don’t want to look back five or ten or more years from now and regret the corners I cut. (More on this in a future post.)
When I feel the need to slow down (or whenever I make a mistake), I say to myself (usually aloud), “I am not a robot!” I want to be effective (standard = mine), but I don’t necessarily need to be efficient (standard is external). These days I’m working with the cyclical nature of my own creativity, just as I make a point of taking it easy when my body is in winter mode. I’m hand-quilting a quilt for myself, and yes, we are at seven months and counting. In the kitchen, I put on a fun audiobook or podcast and let food prep and cleanup take however long it takes. And I don’t set my alarm unless I have an early train to catch.
But for anyone reading this post who doesn’t have that luxury, I want to offer a maxim my friend Sierra shared with me back when I did care about the digital-marketing stuff: Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Ever notice how you get more done when you first do the things you need to do to feel sane and centered?
I don’t have to finish what I start.
(You’d think this wouldn’t feel new to me given that I have so many unfinished manuscripts on my hard drive and feel no shame about it.) Recently I checked out a biography of Buckminster Fuller from the library (my protagonist is an inventor and I was hoping for inspiration). But the more I learned about Fuller, the more disgusted I felt. Turns out it is possible to be a visionary and a psychic-vampire-slash-con-artist. I’m well over a hundred pages in, but I don’t want to continue. So I won’t!
I am paying attention to my “completist” tendencies, which result in wasted time whenever I’m not truly enjoying a book or learning as much as I expected to. I couldn’t even tell you how many Libby audiobooks I’ve returned around the ten-minute mark in recent months, because LIFE IS SHORT and there are PLENTY OF BOOKS I WILL ACTUALLY SWOON OVER!
There are way fewer “have-tos” in life than we think.
As a self-employed person with no dependents, I can’t even imagine how much harder boundary-setting must be for folks with Constant Pressing Demands On Their Time and Energy. Because even for me, it is HARD.
If you were to make a list of all the things you think you “have to” do, how frequently would you find you are trying to live up to someone else’s (whether societal or individual) expectations?
I don’t have to cook dinner for anyone other than myself.
I don’t have to say yes to an interview request.
I don’t have to continue socializing once it’s occurred to me that I would rather be alone.
I don’t have to maintain a relationship with a toxic family member.
My time and energy are mine to do with as I please: that’s a hard thing to declare when women are socialized for (over)giving. Oftentimes we’re still seen as selfish for not putting someone else’s needs (or “needs”) ahead of our own. My people-pleasing tendencies loooove to masquerade as generosity, and let’s face it: I am going to spend the rest of my life observing which of those two motivations is in the driver’s seat in any given interaction.
A daily practice of “ruthless realism.”
Since turning forty (today is my 43rd birthday!) I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to have entered a more mature phase of my career/life and how I can best formulate what I’ve learned for the benefit of younger writers. And while it might sound depressing at first mention, it is actually the best thing for my mental health to be ruthlessly realistic about what I can and cannot, or probably will not, accomplish in this lifetime.
I am (probably) never going to read that book, so I’ll leave it in that Little Free Library around the corner.
I am (definitely) never going to write that novel about the burlesque dancer and the chocolatier. Time to recycle those notes!
I am (probably) never going to make that pile of fabric into a garment I will actually wear. Time to post it on Freecycle.
This person I’ve just met seems wonderful, but do I have the bandwidth for cultivating new friendships? Especially considering that I already have several dear friends I’ve been meaning to reconnect with for months?
I have lots more thoughts on this mindset as it pertains to my physical space (there is an “Aspirational Lightness of Being, part 4” in my drafts, LOLsob), but I’ll leave it here for now.
It’s okay to live for pleasure and connection.
I have next-door neighbors who sit out front chit-chatting all day (and evening) whenever the weather’s warm and fair enough. Though they are often annoying (blasting the radio, occasionally throwing a beer bottle over the fence, yelling at their dog), these goings-on leave me reflecting on a daily basis about what it means to live a “good” life. It is a timeless absurdity of the human experience that some folks—my neighbors and me—get to kick back and enjoy ourselves when people elsewhere in the world are living through war and famine.
What can we do beyond trying our best to be a positive presence in the lives of the people around us (and making a donation to humanitarian aid)? What if that is the sole criterion for a life well lived?
I’m not saying it is. Just something to think about.
I’ve been blogging so infrequently these past several years that I don’t know how many people are actually going to read this, but if you’re still here (thank you!), tell me in the comments if any of this resonates for you! 💗
