I subscribe to a newsletter called “Astrology for Writers.” I should mention that I don’t particularly believe in astrology—but then again I don’t particularly believe in enneagrams, or in the Myers-Briggs test, either, and frankly I’ve got a healthy skeptical attitude about much of modern psychology, while I’m at it.
I do believe in useful metaphors, though, and some other day we’ll have a fun conversation about tarot cards. For now, though, I’ll stick to astrology, and tell you that Jeanna Kadlec pulls together some very helpful advice for writers, and if “the new moon entering into Scorpio” is the hook she uses to get people to think about things that are holding their creative life back they might do well to shed, I’m down with that.
In fact, Kadlec recently sent out a newsletter about Mars coming out of retrograde that was filled with specific advice and reading recommendations for each of the zodiac signs, but of course I ignored the framework and clicked on all the links that seemed interesting and/or potentially useful. Like an essay by a writer I know, Melissa Febos, about carving out time and space for yourself as a writer.
This was so good, y’all, starting from the title’s framing question: “Do you want to be known for your writing, or for your swift email responses?” Melissa’s advice is specifically aimed at women, who have particular expectations placed on them by the patriarchal organization of our personal and professional spheres, but there is a degree to which, for example, the following is true of everyone laboring in a capitalist system:
“We are conditioned to ever prove ourselves, as if our value is contingent on our ability to meet the expectations of others. As if our worth is a tank forever draining that we must fill and fill. We complete tasks and in some half-buried way believe that if we don’t, we will be discredited.”
Ideally, one of the things you will discover through a steady writing practice is that you do not have to live that way. You can prioritize your own expectations, your own creative ambitions, and derive a fulfillment from that beyond the reward of doing a job for someone else. If you’re lucky, other people might find value in that creative work, and you might secure acclaim or financial reward for it, but lack of those traditional markers of success does not negate your accomplishment.
Yes, you should keep promises; yes, you should try to be a good friend—but you don’t need to be a perfect friend, and you should stop trying to be, and one way to do that is to make fewer promises, which can not only help you carve out more time for yourself and your writing, it can invest the promises you choose to make with greater meaning.
That’s not selfishness, it’s self-care—and it reminds me of another great resource I learned about a few months back, the Nap Ministry’s Instagram account. In the same way that Melissa is challenging capitalism’s patriarchal underpinnings, Tricia Hersey has been calling attention to its white supremacist aspects, such as the way that people of color are particularly overworked in order to keep the wheels of capitalism turning. “We believe rest is a form of resistance and name sleep deprivation as a racial and social justice issue,” Hersey writes—at the same time, she’s very clear that even though it may be predominantly a racial social justice issue, it’s not exclusively one… because we all need to be liberated from grind culture.
So think about your own life. Think about the ways you’ve been made to feel guilty or inadequate for not doing “enough.” Enough for whom? And to what end? What are you being kept from accomplishing, not just as a writer but also as a person?
And what can you do about it?