(Late Night) Thursdays with Jen: Birthday Edition
On my 36th birthday, I reflect on the development of a writing discipline - which made this a very happy birthday.
Dear reader,
I hope you all had a joyous and restful holiday and new year. The beginning of my calendar year includes not only the two aforementioned occasions, but also a personal one – my birthday.
I am not a birthday person. At times, I'll force myself to write about my day of birth, but rarely celebrate it and have a preference not to. In fact, here's a picture of me taken during one of my earlier birthdays where I developed a party facial expression that has never gone away:
This year, I feel slightly different about my birthday. I have long associated birthdays with aging amid failing to reach major milestones – specifically writing oriented milestones. Although I have chugged along contentedly in other dimensions of my life, each birthday preceding this year felt like a reminder that I was falling short of the writing volume, the publications, and the artistic markers needed to feel satisfied.
My birthday gift this year is actually feeling more accomplished, though not in the delusional, grandiose ways I desired when I was much younger. This gift was made possible by figuring out (for now) a piece that I had been missing for 35 birthdays – actual discipline and showing up.
If I were to describe how I approached writing before, it would be “pretty bullshitty.” What does "bullshitty" look like aside from shitty? If I could chart out the way I approached writing – and other things in life generally – it would look like this:
Click here or the image above for a larger version.
The aforementioned chart is actually a productive rendering of my creative process. Most of the time, things looked like this:
Click here or the image above for a larger version.
Although I am speaking about writing, the frenzy-inspiration model of living could be applied to other parts of my life – exercise, picking up new hobbies, some relationships. I don't want to be completely critical of this way of life since there are times when it served me well. That said, there was a consistent mismatch between what I wanted to do and the manner in which I approached what I wanted. And, I wasn't getting younger nor progressing further with these sub-par approaches.
Thus, for the next few newsletters in 2023, I am going to write more about my writing journey over the last year that resulted in me not hating this upcoming birthday. There are too many decent and unsavory lessons to go over in this single newsletter and I need to feed the future content machine. Here's a tantalizing preview of the next seven newsletter, should you continue to subscribe:
Lesson #1: Change my definitions of short-term and long-term success
Learning #2: Create a system to document progress and value the process as much as the outcome
Thing #3: Cultivate community that serves an accountability mechanism – and try my best to be in community with mutual accountability and respect
Habit #4: Develop space – physical, temporal, mental – for creative work and compartmentalize the rest of life
Number #5: Critically examine my work and my process, which includes being receptive to feedback and further change
Placeholder #6: Celebrate the small wins, but always have a bigger (realistic) vision in mind
#%(&#*$GRP #7: Demystify and immerse myself in the worst, most unsavory, but absolutely necessary part of being a writer – the business side of things
I want to stress that the above series will not be some kind of self-help, hereʻs “how to do it,” bullshitty guide. First, I am still fumbling through my process and refining in the way I work. Second, the self-help genre (especially in blog form) makes me writhe in its cringe, cheese, and self-adulation. Rather than impose help you didn't ask for, this series will be personal reflections of my own respective processes, which I hope will be helpful for others as they think about what they want and what works best for them.
There's also no doubt in my mind that I'm going to reach disappointment and a lull again in my creative endeavors – it's an inevitable part of writing and perhaps life generally. For now, I'm relieved to finally have a system to lean on rather than waiting for inspiration. As I age, those moments of creative lightning become more rare and more incised by the stressors of adult life.
I have a birthday to celebrate, so I'll end the newsletter with one offering. The biggest shift I made over the last year was changing my relationship with time. I began to see my time as a precious resource that should be fiercely guarded (and thus used accordingly) and not as an enemy that I am fighting against to accomplish certain things before an arbitrary deadline.
On that note, happy birthday to me.
See you in...a Thursday in the future where I will write about getting real with myself and reimagining what writing success looks like to me.
Hope your new year isn't bullshitty,
JTVN