On Not Whole-Assing Anything
This Includes But is Not About More Things I Learned While Writing My First Novel
TEH UPDATE
Huh, let’s see. The world is on fire, but:
We have a new house.
We have a chinchilla.
We’re gonna have a baby.
Yeah, that’s big news. Jenna’s about 9 weeks now. COVID-19 will be a fascinating shadow for this kid to grow up under. One thing’s for sure, I will be showing my runt these videos of my good friend Grant—a fellow Loyola grad—doing actual research on the virus. (And Grant is a really great guy to boot. He doesn’t have enough views. Go fix that.)
But for real, I’m excited. Things are pretty good. Work keeps me very busy. I’ve also got two upcoming pieces of writing that I don’t have to worry about being rejected: one for Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal which responds to philosopher Giorgio Agamben re: the pandemic, and a co-written chapter in an upcoming volume on H. P. Lovecraft and Theology. There, my friend Nick and I will be talking about how Lovecraft helped define modernity as “the time when it became impossible to think transcendence and goodness together.”
… And yet I haven’t posted anything but a (literally) half-assed Top-10 list since the bell-end of February and I actually wanna talk about that.
On Not Whole-Assing
I have not ass’d with my whole heart. It’s impossible to half-ass something as hard and as half as I’ve ass’d this newsletter without giving some sort of explanation.
When I sit down to write, February 29 stares back, a distant breadcrumb at the end of a bird-pecked trail. It’s a placard around my neck, inviting a barrage of rotten tomatoes. During a nearly 10-week stretch since the world went to shit and nobody expected a thing from me, I let myself down.
There are some embarrassing implications embedded in my hiatus:
That it took me 10 weeks to think of five more things I learned while writing a novel.
That I somehow choked after only thinking of the first five because I didn’t learn anything after all.
That among the “top 10 things I learned while writing my first novel,” consistency and persistence were evidently not among them.
As I type this out, there sits below me a bulleted list of excuses for my long delay. Those excuses are both out of date and unnecessary. Instead, I want to call myself out and put it out in the open, but not because I somehow need the humiliation to put me back on track. Like my friend Sarah says, “You can’t punish yourself into being okay.”
I want to put this in focus precisely because I’m one more victim of a common feeling that so many of us share. If I brushed that off, I would do a disservice to every other writer. I personally have googled “writer burnout” and its ancillaries a more-than-healthy number of times. Had all those writers saved face by glossing over their own embarrassments, I would be in an even more miserable spot right now, lacking any compass or strategy no matter how jerry-rigged. I don’t want to deny myself the same opportunity to think through my whiffs in a meaningful way, and I don’t want to deny my potential readers the encouraging sight of someone else dusting his ass off and getting back on the horse.
Why it matters that it be my ass is a different question entirely, but whatever. While transforming these insights into advice will be difficult, I want to try and do two things here:
I want to try and think self criticism and self care together.
I want to try and think activity and productivity separately.
If I can do those two things in any meaningful way, it’ll more than make up for the missing half of a Top-10 list.
Care, Criticism, and Accountability
What happened, exactly? At the beginning of this year, I budgeted an average of 1000 words of writing a night. That’s impressive, even by my standards. Yet I wrote vastly more than this in this newsletter…but I never counted any of it. Certain entries here exceed 2000 or even 3000 words, some of them written all at once in a fevered sprint while doing the laundry. But at the same time, I was thinking things like, “Shit, I still have to work on my novel after this.”
Now, there’s a lot of wisdom in saying that you should stop doing something when you no longer enjoy the process. So I did. Was this healthy? Yes, unarguably… If lack of focus and feeling overwhelmed were the Big Problems.
But I hadn’t set myself up to enjoy it, either. I didn’t count my work as work, didn’t count it as “being a writer.” As a result, I failed to manage it, and in failing to manage it I got overwhelmed. Honestly, publicness was part of the reason. I spent as much time tracking views and “open rates” as I did writing. I became a perfectionist on every piece thinking it would maximize reach. Somewhere along the road, I began valuing the ends of instant gratification over my long view of the skillful life which this newsletter could represent.
This, I’ve realized, is where care must become critical.
Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
Those immortal words from Frank Herbert’s Dune tell us something subtle about fear: fear kills the mind and totally obliterates. In other words, it gets us to avoid facing it for what it is.
This is also where my experience of quarantine has perhaps been different from that of many others. For many, it’s been a genuine opportunity to rest and disentangle themselves from the crisis. For me, it proved a convenient cover for my quitting. While I told myself (and no one else) that I was just “taking a break,” that no one was reading anything anyway, a two-week hiatus turned into three weeks, and then three weeks turned into a number too embarrassing to face. I was afraid to come back to this because it meant facing down tangible proof that I had not practiced the consistence and persistence I know are integral to my craft. For a long time, I felt I’d rather abandon my mailing list altogether than really face that down.
That fear is the real reason I’m being so hard on myself right now. That fear made me a disingenuous supporter within my cohort. Every note of support was also an unconscious shield against my own sense of personal responsibility—a sense that’s hyper-active even on its best days. But today, I’m deciding it was in the right.
There’s a fine balance in being accountable, to working out your goals in a community. In one hand rest the supreme virtues of patience and compassion—of unconditional support, and the reminder that you are more than what you made this week. But in the other hand, we seek out accountability to be, well, held accountable. Showing up in my own accountability requires a commitment: know thyself. In one of his end-of-life lectures Michel Foucault demonstrates that we don’t appreciate the rich context packed into this simple phrase:
The gnothi seauton (“know yourself”) appears, quite clearly again and again [in Western classical literature]…as a sort of concrete, precise, and particular application of the general rule: You must attend to yourself, you must not forget yourself, you must take care of yourself. [In this context,] Socrates appears as the person whose essential, fundamental, and original function, job, and position is to encourage others to attend to themselves, take care of themselves, and not neglect themselves. (The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 5)
From this, I hazard: self-care and self-knowledge (including self-criticism) go hand-in-hand: knowing when to take a break, when the break is over—or when the break you’ve justified isn’t doing the job you think it’s doing. That’s where real partnership and accountability comes in; in some sense, we should all want to “be Socrates” to one another. What better “original function” can we have than to encourage others not to neglect themselves?
So I wish I’d listened closer to the instincts saying my “break” might be a way of “neglecting myself.” I was a victim of overwork and poor habits, for sure, but I needed to disentangle that from the fact that I was also a victim of fears and selfishness that needed real dealing with. I wish that I’d been more proactive about seeking my inner sage and setting myself up to work smarter and harder. I wish I’d been told a little more often not to miss twice.
After all, the Liturgy of the Bene Gesserit is hard work:
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
Consistency and Persistence
If self-criticism can ever be a part of self-care, it requires the crucial step of separating self from productivity. It demands thinking in terms of a lifestyle, not the style of your results. It means thinking of life as means without ends. What Giorgio Agamben calls “form-of-life,” Cal Newport gets kind of close to when he talks about the “Craftsman Mindset.”
I call my present, public self-criticism a form of self care because I am being critical of the fact that, up until now, my form of life has not pursued the consistency or the persistence that I want to be part of my lifestyle; products of that lifestyle be damned.
“Consistency” has been a part of every piece of writing advice I’ve ever read, and for that reason it easily slips under the radar. On some level, its assumed: you’re a writer, and so you write. What doesn’t get mentioned that much is the role of consistency in building an audience, or its affect on traffic to your content. Both technology and social perception favor the creation of timely content, of a certain size, on a regular schedule.
But given that such a return takes time, let’s define “Consistency” as the more business-y, outward-facing facet of a deeper writerly value: Persistence. Persistence, or “girt,” is the willingness to keep going with something even though it’s hard or isn’t returning what you’d like. It’s the secret sauce behind every writer who aims for 100 rejections a year, and behind ever blogger with hundreds of thousands of followers who at one point had no one on their mailing list and had to write into thin air until the whole thing took. I want to suggest that such people are not wildly productive; rather, they’ve beaten the productivity mindset, or close to it, by learning to separate their means from their ends and find meaning in the former.
This might just sound like, “Oh, just learn to enjoy the process,” but if that’s never resonated with you—like it never has for me—I hope I’m making the point differently enough to make a difference. Consistency requires a lot of front-end work, especially if you want a higher quality pay-off. It requires a lot of small, present efforts that feel disconnected from the results that follow (hardly a marketable definition of “productivity”). I’d argue that, far more than confidence, it requires a lifestyle of hope: hope in your continually improving talent to one day equal your task; hope not in your ends, but in your “calling.” You don’t have to spiritualize “calling” over-much; Gabe Weinberg’s “North Star” will do just fine. Point is, we all need some kind of long-term commitment to a form-of-life that we have genuine hope of achieving, motivating us to take action towards unforeseeable results. That sort of hope is perhaps best described as “faith” (cf. the anonymous author of Hebrews 11:1).
Still, it’s a pretty universal rule that healthy things feel like they’re killing you when you first start on them. Reality will temper that faith, which is why it’s equally important to not invest too much mental energy in anticipating our ends: celebrating after “just 100 more followers,” or, “if I can just crack this pub” or “get more publications than that person…” Award-winning author Kameron Hurley (also repped by the ever-lovely Hannah Bowman) recently wrote a widely-read and soul-crushing article on the topic of persistence, and how our anticipation of success rarely prepares us for the comparatively bleak reality. Make no mistake, Hurley has made it, by a lot of metrics, but to read her article is to feel for yourself that deep chasm cut between your ambition and the will to live it out. This is what’s at stake in a life divided from itself into all these different “ends.”
This is why “attending to ourselves, taking care of ourselves, and not neglecting ourselves” is so important. Almost anything you will ever want will be hard to get, and you will have to question whether it is worth it to continue. You will never, ever escape the nebulous but necessary—if counter-intuitive—realities of faith, hope, calling, and lifestyle when answering that question. Which is why I’m deciding, from here on out, that the self-critical maintenance of hope and/or faith is the ultimate expression of self-care, and it’s something that can never quite be captured by “productivity” even when it looks hella similar.
On Not Whole-Assing; Once More, With Feeling
My work often leads me deep into the “cult of productivity.” Lately I’ve gone through such books as James Clear’s Atomic Habits, Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets, and most recently Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You. I’ve learned a lot from this material, but it took a long time for me to start seeing ways that I could follow this advice without letting it eat me alive through all sorts of metrics that made me feel like a failure. In the end, I’ve started learning the helpful lesson that I am neither exempt from nor alone in the need for “Persistence”—but neither am I necessarily persisting towards anything. I am persisting into a form-of-life that I want to live. Within the “cult of productivity,” I believe there may be real, heretical potential in that crucial distinction.
Up to this point, I’ve really been pouring on steam about consistency, accountability, and productivity. I’ve been giving myself a hard time, and maybe giving you a hard time while doing so. But it really is in service of considering the quality and vibrancy of my own life: a life detached from the regrets and rewards of any specific work or form I might achieve. I do regret that I let this newsletter go for this long. I regret what it said about my stamina, my consistency, my willpower. I regret that I hid my embarrassment and hid behind it for so long before starting over. But while I worried about my lack of consistency and perseverance as ingredients for “success,” I neglected that they are also integral to the form-of-life I’m pursuing—a life in which work and play and contemplation overlap by another 1% every day. When I started down that path, I ended up here to give it all another shot.
I want you to take your life that seriously, too. Maybe you’re at the opposite place I’m at, your life so swallowed up in productivity that you must take a break in order to realign with the life you want. (That’s my usual temptation, too.) But the more I think on it—and the more I try to live a life of doing things I think are valuable—the more convinced I become that there is an art to living an active life that isn’t automatically caught up in being a productive one. I’ll defer to Agamben to try and get at what I mean here:
While for the ancients it was labor—negotium—that was defined negatively with respect to contemplative life—otium—moderns seem unable to conceive of contemplation, inoperativity, and feast otherwise than as rest or the negation of labor. (The Fire and The Tale, 53)
In other words, there was a time when “work” was a necessary interruption in the higher task of just being alive, which was itself a “joyous rupture with eternity” experienced simply as “enjoyment of the passage of time” (Guy Debord, quoted in Agamben, HS IV.2, 1024-25). Today, we’ve reversed that entirely. Most likely, you’ve been one of those people spending quarantine just wishing you could be more productive with all the time you have. Elsewhere, people (probably not you) are literally rioting in an attempt to go back to work. The rest of us are staying home, but still out of a sense of staying safe and “doing our duty” to those around us. Duty, too, puts an ethical obligation on us at all times,subjecting us to a rule that says we ought to be doing something. I’m writing all this down, being so hard on myself, because I really am trying to take a little more of the everyday “ought” out of my life.
Our entanglements with productivity run much deeper than many of us are aware. It runs deeper than the internet, and deeper than the Industrial Revolution. In fact, it’s been killing us slowly for millennia. I don’t have nearly the time or space to get into that right now, though I’m sure I’ll have occasion to in other posts. For now, let me end this how I started it: with a Parks & Rec joke, specifically a Ron Swanson-style riff on Aristotle:
“For anyone who plays jazz sax, or works with wood, or for any craftsman in general, hell anyone with a job, the ‘good life’ seems to consist in whole-assing that job. That’s as it should be. Would anyone really say that carpenters and tanners and grill-masters have functions and activities, but a man as a man doesn’t? Doesn’t he come out of the womb with a whole ass, so that he can whole-ass one thing?
That is, indeed, the question. Ron Swanson will tell you to “whole-ass one thing,” and I’m not here to tell you different. But I encourage you: your half-assing is just as important.
So is your no-assing.
You can whole-ass something, or you can not ass at all. You are capable of both. Your ass has capacity. All your different assings are integral to your form-of-life.
You are not your assing. But do ass for your own good; for what brings you life and gives you fire. Put your whole ass at stake, but remember that you were not born with an ass just so you could whole-ass one thing.
And the less you are your ass, the more you are yourself.
Now go and let your ass be.
“This mere existence, that is, all that which is mysteriously given to us at birth … can be adequately dealt with only by the unpredictable hazards of friendship and sympathy, or by the great and incalculable grace of love, which says with Augustine, ‘Volo ut sis’ [I want you to be], without being able to give any particular reason for such supreme and unsurpassable affirmation.” — Hannah Arendt