Haven't Written Anything "Good" Lately? It's OK.
You could have had a "bad" writing month even without a global pandemic, right? So why beat yourself up about what you've written (or haven't written) now that you're in one?
Just before we started sheltering in place—and I remember this distinctly, because I got to swing by the public library to return the book when I was done reading it—I read The Creativity Cure, a book that was billed as “a do-it-yourself prescription for happiness.” Carrie Barron and Alton Barron base some of their framework in the psychoanalytic theories of D.W. Winnicott, particularly his notion of the “false self,” that persona we create to deal with all the pressures of life, the version of ourselves that we show to others in order to convince them that we’re exactly as they expect us to be so they won’t harm us, as opposed to the “true self,” the most authentic, uninhibited expression of our desires, without trepidation or fear of how others might see us. Happiness, in this model, comes from acting from your true self as much as possible, and “the Creative Self is the happiest, healthiest, and most productive form of the True Self.”
The bulk of the book concerns itself with how to cultivate that Creative Self—the technique the Barrons outline is an interesting, if not surprising, blend of cultivating personal insight and going out and doing stuff, the craftier the better. (It makes even more sense when you know Carrie’s a psychiatrist and Alton’s a hand surgeon.) I don’t mean that to be reductive… well, okay, I am being reductive, but not in a negative way. Their advice is, as far as I can tell, pretty sound—the sort of common-sense advice that many of us just never take the time to actually follow up on because we can’t tear ourselves away from all the responsibilities and obligations that fill up our lives and make some real changes. Or, sometimes, we half-ass it, and maybe we feel a little bit better about ourselves, or maybe we don’t get anywhere and we go back to the way things were.
But you’re reading this because you want to be one of the people who actually follows through, who creates a sincere expression of your most powerful passions—and then, perhaps, takes the next step of not keeping it to yourself.
I’m still not going to dive too deeply into the technique in this newsletter, though. (If you’re interested, track down the book! It’s an easy, perhaps deceptively easy, read.) Instead, I want to focus on one sentence that leapt out at me at the time and is coming back to me a month later:
“Process, not product, is what we need to feel alive and well.”
I’ve been sheltering in place for nearly one month now; you’ve probably been at it for about the same time, or not that much less. If you’re like me, you might have told yourself it would be okay to be stuck at home for a while: You’d get stuff done! You’d have so many words under your belt! And they’d be great words, or just about!
And now I’m like, what the heck was I thinking? I’m nowhere near that.
You know what, though? It’s okay. It’s true that I’ve made absolutely minimal progress on my novel in the last four weeks. But I’ve taken some notes, I’ve got ideas for scenes when I can write them. It’s still there, ready when I’m ready, and I have to believe it will be better for this extended gestation period. In the meantime, I’ve done some editing work that’s kept me engaged, and I even accepted an out-of-the-blue assignment for a newspaper feature about a new book on the story behind Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, which was a lot of fun. (Although my wife might possibly have gotten tired of me walking in on her and telling her all the best anecdotes out loud.)
Plus I learned how to cook tofu, along with a bunch of other small victories.
So I might not have the “product” that I anticipated, but I do have some things to show for the last month, but more importantly, I’ve managed to be engaged, one way or another, a good chunk of the time. I’m not saying it’s been perfect—there have been days when I couldn’t drag myself out of bed before noon, and evenings where I get caught up in unproductive spirals of rage at the people who have made things so much worse than they had to be, which lead to unproductive binges of Two Dots, until I look up and it’s three in the morning. (Which, despite what you might be thinking, aren’t the nights I sleep until noon.) And it gets to be Wednesday night, and I realize I haven’t written the newsletter… and then, because that’s a process I want to honor, I sit down and write.
And it feels good to sort these thoughts out, to be able to explain to myself clearly what I’m feeling and what I can do with those feelings—and, especially, to remind myself that I’ve managed to do a lot more than I tell myself, and that while I can do more, and will certainly try to do more, I’ve also done enough.
You’ve done enough, too. You’ve gotten to this point, and you’ll keep going, and you should feel good about putting in the effort, whatever comes out of it. And if you don’t think you’re putting in as much effort as you could… well, you might be right about that, and maybe you can work on that. Under the circumstances, though, it’s pretty impressive that you’re putting in any effort at all.
(And, for the purposes of this discussion, even thinking about writing counts, as far as I’m concerned, as an effort, a conscious choice to apply your mental energy to something beyond your immediate circumstances.)
So don’t worry about whether you’re getting anything “good” out of whatever writing you’ve been doing these last few weeks. Heck, you could have a “bad” writing month even if we weren’t in the middle of a global pandemic, right? Then why be upset if you’re coming up with less than perfect “product” now? When you get a chance, whatever the world’s like then, you’ll sit down and work on making it better. For now, just embrace the process, to whatever extent you can around keeping yourself afloat.
And feel free to talk about how it’s going for you by commenting on this newsletter! I’d be glad to hear from you, and I imagine some other readers might be glad to hear that they aren’t alone in what they’re experiencing.