Missing the deadline

It is June 30th and the whole month has gone by without me writing you a newsletter. Which means it is June 30th and I am sitting here wondering whether this will be the first of my newsletter deadlines that I miss.

But, you say, it’s still June 30th. There are hours left of today. Couldn’t you whip something up?

It might be time to tell you about a talent of mine.

I am good at missing deadlines.

I was laughing with a friend recently about how I am neither good at getting things done early nor good at working under pressure. Which, of course, is not entirely fair to myself — there are plenty of weeks where I show up responsibly to my desk to write every single day, and there are plenty of deadlines I’ve stayed up late and emptied my pantry of snacks to finish. But I have, historically, gotten myself into this bind several times: I’ve procrastinated like I’m a binge writer, but when the clock starts ticking down, I’m not rewarded by the adderol-like burst of focus that many last-minute writers count on. (Of course, sometimes the adderol-like burst is, literally, adderol, a strategy I haven’t tried.) Instead, I am rewarded with hours of ineffective and unfocused low-level panic, and the question of whether I can find a way to pull myself out of that panic enough to write. Things I am good at include self preservation, so sometimes the answer is, oh well. Go to bed and fuck the deadline.

Some people seem to be incapable of saying “fuck the deadline,” and they seem to be very successful people. “Fuck the deadline” is a safety valve that has probably cost me several opportunities. But my willingness to use it has also made a certain value clear: there’s only so much suffering that writing is worth to me. If success depends on being willing to suffer more, I’m simply not going to succeed. So then the task becomes: how do I make writing less difficult? How do I recalibrate the ratio of difficulty to pleasure, since apparently that is the only way I am going to be able to do the thing in front of me.

People will tell you that writing is a lot of things, but they rarely say how much of it is just managing your own mind. What is my goal today? What is my resistance to that goal? What are my strategies for overcoming that resistance? What is my resistance to the strategy for overcoming my resistance? Make up a way to do something. Begin to feel that way is either not working or patently ridiculous. Decide whether to try that way a little longer to see whether it starts working, or make up a different way.

I recently started a small daily meditation practice, and have been immediately struck by the parallels between meditation and writing. How many times during a writing session do I notice that I’m spiraling out into stress about writing, or just sitting there waiting for it to be done? How do I gently bring my attention back to the task? Oh, here I am in a meandering daydream about this character. Is this useful, or am I avoiding actually committing words to paper? Wait, why am I thinking about dinner? How do I gently bring my attention back to the task?

All of this, of course, is on a good day, when my mind is a relatively neutral place to be. When I am sad, or anxious, or overwhelmed, the task of getting to a place where writing is possible is a completely different one.

Our mythology of writers is that whenever they feel despondent they think, oh good, material! And then they scribble out their feelings, and feel better. Or they at least feel inspired, in a poetic and tragic way. Even if we set aside, for the moment, the questions of whether this a) really happens and b) produces good writing, there is the practical issue of working on any project longer than, you know, a few pages. Working on an existing project usually involves sitting down to a set of questions or feelings that don’t line up with the questions or feelings you are having on the day you sit down to write. In this way writing requires compartmentalization like any other job, except that the compartmentalization requires the building of somewhat stranger and more delicate walls, since the job is still to tune in, on a deep level, to some part of the thinking and feeling apparatus that you are currently walling yourself off from.

I’ve always been bad at compartmentalization. The whole idea of turning away from a given feeling makes it scarier to my anxious mind — why are you avoiding it?? It must be truly awful! And if it’s so awful, how can you possibly focus on anything else?!? Being around other people often helps to re-regulate my mind when it’s anxious, as does physical labor. Sitting alone at a computer generally does not help. So here, again, I turn to mindfulness principles: what if writing is a room in my brain that I can come and go from at will, a room with a nice basket outside the door where I can set down my current feelings before entering, knowing that I can pick them up again, if I want to, when I leave? What if I imagine placing the feelings of sadness or distress that are currently populating my body into the basket, walking into the room, and closing the door? What if doing so is not running from those feelings, but instead acknowledging that they’re not so urgent they can’t be put down for a couple hours? I am hopeful that the more I strengthen the muscle of these habits, the easier they will be to use. Still, even at its best, a week where I have to make this kind of effort every day yields maybe half the amount of writing as a week where my brain is quieter. Which makes me worry: can I only write when I’m happy? And if I fail to resolve certain areas of unhappiness in my life, will that mean I am not able to progress in my career? 

Let’s circle back to the question of writing into and about one’s distress. I don’t find this to be good for me personally, at least not in the moment of distress itself. Especially if anxiety is at work, “putting it on the page” is something I experience more as tunneling deeper into a bad place than as catharsis. I do have useful methods of journaling during times of depression or anxiety, but what actually goes down on the page is usually me talking back to the anxiety in ways that are mind-numbingly repetitive. I used to worry that not writing into my distress was cowardice: did I not care enough about being a good writer to look my demons in the face? But one thing I’ve learned from several years of navigating my own mental health is that the thing that feels “hard” (and bad in your body) is rarely actually the brave, necessary thing to do. And the thing that feels suspiciously good and easy? The thing that makes your nervous system unclench? Yeah, probably do that thing. I’m only now starting to ask, okay, can I apply that to writing? (There is a distinction to draw here between anxiety/depression and, say, grief — a difficult emotion, but not one that lies or walks in circles the way anxiety does. But even with a “truer” difficult emotion, there is the question of whether writing is helping it to pass through, or magnifying it.)

I’ve always been drawn to the idea of writing as a kind of sorcery that can bring other worlds into being. I’m never quite sure how to practice that, though — how do you write utopias rather than dystopias, or even just write the solutions more than the problems, without falling into a cheesy, Pollyanna-ish optimism? I think maybe it has something to do with the room for writing and the basket outside the room. I don’t know what that looks like in terms of the content of my writing, but the practice is teaching me about holding both, about neither giving distress too much power nor shutting it out. Perhaps the practice — the how — will eventually find its way into the product — the what.

Today is June 30th, and today my mind is more or less an okay place to be. It’s been better, it’s been worse. Today my brain is an office with a relatively comfortable chair and, if no breeze, at least window with some light coming in. It seems I’m not going to miss the deadline after all. So yeah, sometimes fuck the deadline, but also sometimes fuck running away from the thing. Self preservation can be both. Depending on the day.