I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Monday Musings, I write freely and wanderingly about some topic that’s on my mind.
On Saturday when I was bustling about the house doing this and that my daughter said to me, “mom you are your own slave master.” This made me think of philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s idea of auto-exploitation, in which a person living in Han’s burnout society constantly drives themselves towards more and more achievement, especially the kinds of achievement cheered by the culture. But I’m not a slave to myself. I love my daily routines and getting things done. Most of what I do, I do only for myself, not for external validation or kudos.
Regularly during this 1000-day project and the year-long reinvention project that preceded it I wrote of wanting to develop a better daily routine. Gradually, over time, one has emerged. It varies slightly each day depending on whether I have errands, an appointment, or a social event on the calendar, what the season is; what project I’m working on. But each day feels full of happy habits.
It feels satisfying and yet I yearn for something more. What exactly is it? Am I looking for external markers of success, of talent, of skill?
No I don’t think it’s that.
I want more meaning. I want to contribute more to the world. I want to share my work on metaphors, my conceptual approach to art, and what I’ve discovered about living a creativity-first life with other people.
In A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction, author and writing teacher Elizabeth McCracken suggests maybe I need to cultivate a little self-loathing:
Self-loathing is a common commodity among writers. An uplifting craft book would tell you that you must forgive yourself before writing, that writing is hard, but I believe self-loathing has its uses, if you know how to angle it. Don’t think of days, but weeks or months, a period of time in which you want to get work done. Say it’s four months. You know that you have enough time in those four months to amass some pages, even if week to week you don’t know where you will find those hours or minutes. Decide what you’d like to accomplish. Make it wildly ambitious, more than you think is reasonable.
Think: How mad will I be if I don’t get this done? How much will I hate myself? Travel forward in time in your mind; make yourself really feel it. Put yourself into your body and take it on: the misery, the self-recrimination, the shame.
Travel back in time to the current moment. Realize that you can avoid these terrible feelings: all you have to do is work. [emphasis mine]
When I think about starting to write a short book on better living through better metaphors, one of my first thoughts is: “Anne, you’ll never finish it. Why even start another book manuscript?” That’s where the self-loathing begins.
Perhaps I might capture some motivation from that, turn it into fuel. Maybe I can do what McCracken says — create a wildly ambitious longer-term goal and drive myself to succeed at it, telling myself, “Show that you can do it this time, show that all those other efforts were just leading up to this!”
Ever since I had a book published in 2008, I’ve told myself, “some day I’m going to write a book I can really get behind, one which I feel I can promote out in the world because it’s ideas and the way it communicates are so powerful.”
Four months from now would take me to the middle of January. My goal is to complete the manuscript I started recently, format it as a downloadable eBook, and share it through my newsletter.
The goal is not to make it to develop a wide readership or make money. It is simply to take these ideas that I think are important and helpful and get them out in the world.