Category: Life

Being creative when you’d rather do anything else

Life is kind of…a lot right now. (Understatement of the year.)

It’s been so unbelievably difficult to scrape together the motivation to do anything. Even the stuff that has to be done. Life admin and dishes are sucking up every last ounce of energy I have.

And that’s presented itself as a bit of a problem for me. And maybe for some of you!

Because being creative in some form or fashion helps keep my head screwed on straight. But given the current state of politics, ongoing burnout, personal responsibilities, and work stress, when I get to the end of the day, I mostly want to bury my head under a pillow and not move.

I have been trying to embrace methods to get less offline and open myself to more free time. But it’s been a bit of a struggle.

Trying to build free time into your schedule while you’re working and parenting two children is definitely more “life hack” territory than anything else. What would really give me more free time? Maybe a system that supported parents more fully and made it less exhausting to exist.

But I also know that I waste a fair amount of my time doing things that are not helpful for my mental wellbeing. (Or is it that these periods where I scroll or what TV the only time of the day I am allowed to have a smooth brain and so are absolutely necessary for decompression purposes?)

So, I posed myself the question: is there a way to be creative and build on your happiness even when everything feels like way too much?

And then I thought about what that would look like and how I could write a post about it.

And then I thought about it some more.

And then two months passed.

As it turns out, I have not solved the problem of how to be creative when you’d rather be rotting on your couch. But I have (unevenly) applied a couple techniques that have (sort of) worked (for a limited amount of time).

If you are looking for an actual life hack here, I’m sorry. I don’t have any.

I thought about listing some of the things I’ve tried and the level of success I’ve had doing those things. And maybe it would be a useful exercise for reflection? But then I decided that I don’t really want to talk about whether the focus setting on my phone helps me spend less time on Instagram. (It does, by the way.)

This image is supposed to represent creativity. But it also is a good metaphor for the inside of my brain on most days. (Photo by NIKHIL on Unsplash)

Instead I want to think about what it means to be bone tired to your very core and still have the desire to make something. Even when that desire is barely more than a spark.

While I think the tortured writer stereotype isn’t entirely accurate, there is something there. Even well-adjusted people are a little tortured sometimes. Even if your personal life is okay, sometimes the circumstances surrounding you are…decidedly not.

Do we create art to help us deal with the hard times around us? When you have reached your limit, does creating something beautiful (or ugly or difficult or messy) help you process it and work through it?

Is the act of creation when you’d rather be doing anything else somehow one of the most amazing accomplishments you can achieve?

That’s maybe putting it too strongly, but at the same time, it is amazing!

There’s the bit inside of us that wants to roll over and stop. That wants to turn on the television. Or go to sleep. Or play the video game.

And listen, there is nothing wrong with doing any of those things. Sometimes doing one of those things is exactly the right thing to do.

But when you hack away again at the creative thing, the thing that puts your vulnerability on display, the thing that you have to do even if every bit of you is screaming every time you actually sit down to do it, then that is something.

It really is.

I have written several books in my life. None of them are published (yet), but that’s fine. I don’t need them to be. I wrote those books because there was something in me that had to get them done. The ideas kept poking at me and I kept coming back to it. Sometimes I didn’t want to, but the act of finishing the first draft of something is such an accomplishment. I have rarely had a better feeling than finishing the first draft of a book. Something inside me was clawing to get out, and it made it out! Not in a polished or complete way. Not in the way I had dreamed up in my head. But there it was. And still is.

When my youngest was born at the end of 2020, I was too tired to try to write the next book. (I was too tired to do pretty much anything for a little while there.) But I missed writing. So in 2021, I started up this blog in attempt to write something on a semi-regular basis until I was ready to go back to books. That carefully laid out schedule lasted for less time than I would care to admit. Another chunk of time passed until the fall of 2023, when I started up my Shakespeare podcast. A different way to tackle the bit of creativity that I wanted to get out. Earlier this year, life intervened, and I’ve had to cut back on the podcast and other creative endeavors.

In all those times where I haven’t been working on projects, I’ve still thought about them. Sometimes I’ve thought about a particular idea every night for weeks, crafting it and refining it while making myself feel monumentally guilty for not having started it yet.

And then, I never did it. I never put the words to paper (digital or otherwise). And I started to tell myself that I had failed. That it was time to walk away. That maybe I didn’t have it in me to be a creative person anymore.

I haven’t written a book, a chapter of a book, or even a paragraph of a book in more than four years. I have been intending to write this very article for a couple of months. There is something inside me that wants to create but every time that act is about to happen, something stops me.

Sometimes that obstacle is bigger than myself. Sometimes it’s not. But beating myself up about not overcoming didn’t make the project get done. It just made me feel bad about myself.

Creativity doesn’t have to flow easily or consistently to still be there. And sometimes it disappears.

It’s a matter of fits and starts. And miniature successes and bigger failures and sometimes it means looking at the part of you that you used to consider one of your defining characteristics and wondering if it will ever come back.

Will I ever write another book again?

I think so. One day.

Will I want to write it every time I sit down to work on it?

Definitely not.

So, how do I make it happen when I’d almost rather be doing anything else?

Not sure yet.

But, hey. I did finally write this article.

So that’s a start.

June 3, 2025
What AI Can’t Do

What can AI do?

AI can tell you the best practices to apply to web content.

But it can’t fumble around in a new job after having earned a college degree that’s only tangentially related to your duties. It can’t try out these best practices with uneven application, see what the audience responds to, what the search engine responds to. It can’t organically become an expert on a niche subject matter after talking to an enthusiastic engineer growing in power until it understands the kind of article you need to write to reach people and have it matter.

AI can’t touch grass. But we probably need to all go out and do that. (Photo by Aleksander Fox on Unsplash)

AI can’t take that growth experience to its next job, where it’s already ahead of the game by knowing what to try and where to start and how to tell its younger coworkers that they don’t have to get it right away. That ultimately they just have to keep trying.

AI can’t go on a date and have a first kiss and find itself distracted in the following weeks after that magic moment, going through the motions of life and working on routine tasks only to drift back to that experience, that feeling in the pit of your stomach, the way your lips tingled and made it feel somehow real for the first time ever. It can’t wonder at a new experience, something that took you completely off guard when you thought you’d already had things all figured out.

AI can’t buy the new product that everyone’s been raving about and then discover that while it has ten functions you don’t need, it doesn’t have the one function you want. But you can’t seem to admit that to anybody else, so you end up with a piece of tech in your house that gets sparsely used until it ends up unplugged, without batteries, in a drawer somewhere. It wouldn’t find said abandoned object three years later in a fit of inspired spring cleaning, digging it out of the drawer and carting it off to the local thrift store while looking skeptically at the hot new gadget.

AI hasn’t tried typing increasingly specific searches into the search bar in an attempt to locate that one perfect tweet you saw years ago but neglected to download or screenshot. It hasn’t thrilled in the glory of saving a small piece of internet history from obscurity even though nobody else you know cares about this. The screenshot won’t sit in a digital folder somewhere only to pop up later and surprise you into loud, barking laughter. It can’t understand that weird form jokes on the internet take become a type of shared language and, in some ways, an odd form of emotional support in the modern age.

AI can’t get a bad cold and find both its nostrils stopped up and its throat aching and feel that post-nasal drip at the back of your throat that signals a lingering cough is imminent. That even after the other symptoms have disappeared, you’ll lie awake at night and not even the strongest dose of Nyquil will do anything to stop it but it also doesn’t feel like a big enough deal to go see the doctor.

AI can be funny in a programmed way, but it doesn’t know the feeling of being struck over the head by something so gut-bustingly hilarious that you and the person you’re with keep cackling until your stomachs hurt and your eyes are streaming and you both pull it together just enough to sigh but then you both sigh at the same time and that sets you off into fresh peals of laughter.

AI has never lain on a too small, not-quite-comfortable mattress, arm pinned under the body of a sleeping child, itself in a half doze in the dark, feeling the warmth and comfort of someone so small and vulnerable who trusts you so completely and loves you without any complication. It can’t wrestle with the question of whether you should just fall asleep or try to extract yourself to do the dishes. What the dishes worth anyway against that soft, even breathing?

AI doesn’t know the human experience. It hasn’t skinned its knee or held someone while they cried or felt a deep aching frustration at something not going the way it had planned. It doesn’t care if it gives you advice that hasn’t been fact checked or if you’re exhausted because your baby didn’t sleep or if you’re exhausted because your heart was broken or if you’re exhausted because you stayed up way too late reading a thrilling book.

AI doesn’t know the beauty of a sunrise or the sound of your breath in your ears as you go stubbornly run the next mile or a song you love but forgot about surfacing again on the radio.

It can’t do those things. But you can.

November 22, 2024
Hey, I’m back! Welcome back.

There’s a game my kids like to play, usually while they’re supposed to be eating dinner.

The first floor of our house forms a loop from our table to the play area to the front hallway to the kitchen and back again.

When they don’t want to eat dinner, they stand up and run away from the table as quickly as they can, careening into the front hallway, through the kitchen, and back out until they’ve reached the table again.

“Hey,” they say, adopting a tough guy attitude. “I’m back.”

“Hey!” their dad and I reply. “Welcome back.”

Then, as we try to invite them to sit down and have some dinner with us, they go running off again, leaving us to shout at their retreating backs, “Hey, where you going?”

They love it. They will run this loop a dozen times. Sometimes we try to get them to eat a bite of food every time they complete a loop. Sometimes we seize the opportunity to finish our own dinners before the next stage of the night begins.

But the pattern never varies. They always come back, and we always welcome them back. No hard feelings. We’re just glad they returned and want them to join us. Then they run away again, giggling madly.

Hey there! Long time, no see. (Photo by Vladislav Klapin on Unsplash)

I’ve had this game on my mind as I’ve been thinking about the changes I’ve experienced in my own life over the past several years. The projects I’ve started, and the ones I’ve been forced to abandon. The way I get too tired to carry on with something that I want to do. How I continue to think about that thing and how it eventually becomes so large and daunting that coming back to the project feels like an almost insurmountable obstacle.

I’ve thought about that with this blog, which I was initially so determined to maintain before everything else took up my time. How I’d reach the end of the day and couldn’t bear to write anything even though words were rattling around in my head. And how, after a while, it felt like I couldn’t write a new article because it had been too long.

But now I’m looking at it from a different perspective. Why abandon the thing you want to do to bring a little creativity back into your life? Why turn it into a point of stress by making it align to firm deadlines that at this stage of life are impossible to maintain?

What if you just…let it vibe?

So, hi, I’m back.

I can’t promise to a set schedule, but I don’t want to let the blog die. I sometimes still have interesting ideas or want to write about a book that I read, or just have something I want to say or try out. And I’m giving myself permission to do it on the schedule that makes sense for me. I know that’s not the way you’re supposed to do writing on the internet. Considering what I do for a living, I know that updating your content based on vibes is kind of the opposite of what you should do.

But nothing makes sense anyway, so why not embrace the chaos.

I’ll come back when it makes sense. I’ll write some stuff. Then I’ll go away. And I might come back soon, or I might stay away for a little longer. But you can rest easy with the knowledge that I’ll turn the corner at some point and come tearing out of the kitchen again with something to say.

I hope you’ll welcome me back each time I do. And maybe the irregularly timed missives can bring a little bit of interest to your inbox instead of becoming yet another thing that starts piling up that you haven’t read yet.

It’s good to be here. I hope you’re enjoying your meal.

October 28, 2024
Exhausted? Good news: It’s your fault
It seems like everyone is absolutely exhausted these days. Tired beyond reason. Like the kind of tired that sinks into your very bones and turns you into a depressed but sentient form of human goo that can do things like earn a wage but can’t do things like brush your teeth, shower, or make a phone call.

Luckily for you and for everyone else, I have a little secret. It’s called self-care. And if you do it, you will completely turn your life around, eradicate all your problems, become a more productive worker, a better partner, and a more involved parent. In fact, you could be a woman who has it all.

If you don’t do it? Well, everyone will resent you and talk about you behind your back for being such a complete and utter failure.

Isn’t this fun already?

Listen, we’ve all heard that systemic issues are to blame. And it sure can feel like it. Maybe you’re tired because healthcare is really expensive and so is housing and food and transportation but salaries absolutely have not grown to meet rising costs. Maybe you’re exhausted because you’re a parent and you just received notice that your child’s been exposed to COVID (again) and ebola (at least it’s new) and school will be closed 11 of the next 17 days and you have no backup childcare but somehow also still owe someone $1,000 for that. It could just be the daily grind of modern life, the 24 hour news cycle, everyone screaming at you from all directions no matter where you go.

I get where you’re coming from. But you’re wrong.

It’s all your fault! Isn’t that great?

If you are taking naps in your yard, that might also be why you’re tired. (Photo by nrd on Unsplash)

Okay, okay, hear me out. Maybe you have anxiety because climate change and job insecurity and the stress of parenting and just general mental illness stuff. So, do you have therapist? Oh, therapists are too expensive? Have you tried making more money? All therapists in the area are booked? Have to tried calling some more? You tried it and didn’t click with your first couple and aren’t quite ready to try another one? Have you considered that you’re a quitter?

Did you know that there’s probably a venture capitalist firm out there who would give you the money to create a therapist using AI that would almost definitely (probably) work really well and not lead to more long-term psychic pain for the population at large? Have you tried that?

Now, I’m not a doctor, but I did once have the idea of creating an app that someone could use to become a licensed physician, so trust me when I say that I have the advice you need. Exhaustion and that deep pervasive tiredness could have a lot of causes. Here are some reasons you might be tired:
- You aren’t drinking enough water
- You’re drinking too much water
- You don’t do enough yoga
- You weigh literally anything at all
- You didn’t take a nap
- You took too long of a nap
- You stayed up too late working
- You saw someone else yawn and it made you yawn
That list isn’t exhaustive, but the point is that these are all things you could absolutely fix. I understand you’re in a bind. You want to better yourself, but the amorphous blob you’ve become is really holding you back. That’s why I’m here to give you a few self-care tips:
- Turn yourself into a houseplant in the home of an extremely responsible plant owner. They will give you the correct amount of water to help you grow and thrive. Plus plenty of sunlight.
- Make enough in investments that you can retire early and then spend all your time traveling all over the world and learning how people live. Eventually you’re bound to stumble across someone who holds the secret to immortality. You’ve got to. One of us will find them.
- Don’t look at blue light too close to bed time. It’s a little known fact that blue light will actually turn those memory crystal balls in your head blue, which makes your memories sad, and that’s how people become depressed.
- Try to find a spinning wheel somewhere and prick your finger on it so you can enter a deep and enchanted sleep. Everyone else will be too tired and busy to come wake you up. Score!
- Kids waking you up at night? Spend a week or two waking them up at least two to three times during the night. Then they’ll understand that it makes them tired and they won’t want to do it to you anymore.
- Simply float away on a cloud and escape all your problems.
Once you discover that the key to your happiness all rests on you, I bet you’ll turn it around. You can turn it all around. You have to turn it all around. You just have to.

You’ve made it this far, which means you’re really invested in your health and wellbeing. Congratulations! I’m proud of you. And as a reward, I’ll let you know the really simple trick to being well rested: Go to bed in a quiet, dark room. Keep the temperature in your house low. Don’t look at screens an hour before bed, drink some herbal tea, do some meditation, journal a bit, express your gratitudes to yourself, have all your clothes laid out for the next day, have all your meals prepped for the next day, take a shower, and take deep breaths. Go to sleep exactly on time and fall asleep immediately. Sleep for at least eight restful hours in the exact right position without any children, dogs, or partners to wake you up. Don’t have insomnia or chronic pain. Don’t set an alarm but wake up naturally with the sun to a peaceful, quiet home with no immediate morning responsibilities.

If you do this, you’ll be so awake, it’ll be amazing.

And to think! The key to this whole thing was just you doing the right thing all along.

Don’t you feel better now?
January 31, 2023
You are enough

Listen. You are enough. You don’t have to be more. Being you is enough.

You are valuable and your worth can’t solely be measured by what you produce. Or by what you achieve or fail to achieve. Or by what invisible standards you are trying to live up to.

Maybe you’ve been tired lately. Ditched your hobbies. Abandoned your side hustle. Given up on running. Stopped meal prepping.

Guess what? You’re still valuable. You are enough. You deserve care and support and empathy and love.

Maybe you’ve been intending to write a blog post for three weeks but a combination of childcare and full time work and generally bad news in the world has sapped your desire to actually sit down and write it. (Or you write it in your head a lot but writing it on the keyboard is somehow an impassable barrier. Anxiety is weird.)

Maybe you don’t have the job you want. And it doesn’t pay you enough. (Most likely it doesn’t pay you enough!) Or you spend days procrastinating instead of working toward your deadlines. Or you aren’t working in the evenings when you feel like you should to help you get ahead. All the email newsletters full of helpful tips and webinars you intend to attend are sitting neglected in your inbox.

Or maybe you work a service job where people are jerks and yell at you for no reason and criticize you for not smiling enough and your manager won’t give you a consistent schedule. Maybe everyone wants you to forget that a pandemic happened (and is still happening wtf) but you have to go work anyway to eke out a living only to have weirdos claim you don’t deserve a livable wage.

You still have value. You’re still enough. You’re still worth basic human compassion.

Maybe you used to have hobbies and you don’t have them anymore. Maybe all the motivation seems have to leached out of your body drop by drop and you can’t seem to do anything but scroll social media and promise yourself that you’ll wake up early tomorrow and do better. (A lesson I should have learned better by now but still haven’t.)

Believe in yourself as much as this puppy believes in you. This puppy knows you deserve all the kisses regardless of whether you got your taxes done on time. (Photo by PartTime Portraits on Unsplash)

Maybe you buy a lot of a groceries with the intent making lots of great meals but then you order takeout instead. Maybe you keep meaning to learn the guitar or start weightlifting or take an online class or watch that documentary.

Maybe you simply don’t care anymore and can’t force yourself to care and any plans for the future simply get swallowed up by dread.

You’re still doing enough. Even if it feels like falling behind.

Having goals is good. Intending to improve yourself is good. But you don’t actually have to achieve goals and become a perfect efficient glowing version of yourself to have value. The depressed version of you who spent the morning crying, who hasn’t showered in four days and is eating potato chips for breakfast while watching YouTube on your phone instead of doing the dishes has value too.

Plenty of people who are smarter than me and have analytical brains that haven’t become smooth as eggs have written about the BS surrounding hustle culture and how we are trying to life hack our way to perfect efficiency inside of a whole mess of broken systems. How this mindset is making us all feel like failures if we’re not becoming the picture of #lifegoals.

I can’t fix the broken systems. But I can tell you that even if you fail to live up to weird impossible standards or even realistic ones, you are still enough!

Try to extend this grace to yourself. And others. It’s hard out there. A bunch of bad stuff is happening and for some reason people in power are trying to punch down on people who need the most care, empathy and understanding.

It’s a good time to remember that other people are enough too. When we expect ourselves and others to fit the perfect portrait of what we expect to deserve empathy, we’re doing ourselves a disservice. Maybe someone is in a circumstance because they made a bad choice. Maybe things happened outside of their control. Probably it’s a complicated mix of both! Do we really need to demand of someone that they only make good choices to be worthy of help?

Do we really need to demand that of ourselves?

We all make bad choices. And some good ones. And some that are bad but were the best ones you had at the time. That’s okay! People are so endlessly complicated but being complicated is super exhausting so we look to simplify. And by simplifying sometimes we reach the conclusion that we (or others) are bad or unworthy.

But you’re not! The world is wild. You are a valuable piece of it. You don’t have to prove it.

Seriously. You have value. You are enough. You’re doing a lot.

Are you doing it all perfectly? No, but are you doing it good enough? Probably! Cut yourself some slack.

May 18, 2022
Writing is hard. So is the pandemic.

Setting goals for yourself can be a double edged sword.

If you’re an Achiever type, who needs to get a set number of things done in a day or you feel like a Failure™, goals motivate you. They are invigorating. When you reach them, you feel so great.

But, if you are this type of person who has to check everything off the list every day and you fall short on a goal, then your feelings of being a Failure™ tend to compound, multiply, and grow until you are convinced that you are the worst and laziest person in the world for not being able to achieve this one thing.

When I started this blog last May, it wasn’t on a whim. I had been thinking about hows and whys of starting a blog for a couple years. For a long time I let my perfectionism stand in the way of getting anything done. I had to come up with the perfect content plan that would include many brilliantly crafted arguments that ended with profound realizations and takeaways.

Yes, I am fully aware I am ridiculous.

Once I gave up on the idea of regularly delivering the impossible through writing and decided that I could do literally anything else, the ideas started flowing. As it turned out, I hadn’t completely run out of ideas and had nothing to say. I’d just paralyzed myself via perfectionism. A lot of my writing for fun in the past has been fiction writing, particularly books. I thought that writing a blog would be a nice, easy release from that. These posts are shorter, therefore they’re easier! (Again, why does my brain do this to me and why do I fall for it every time?)

So I set the goal of a post a week. If you go back through my 2021 archives, I did a decent job. Missed weeks here and there, but overall, considering the having children, being in a pandemic, and the holding down a job then quitting that job and starting a new job thing, I did pretty good.

Then it all sort of unraveled.

This has basically been me for the past two months. Not pictured: The children climbing all over me.

Like many parents, my last couple months have been really hard. Sick children, sick me, daycare closings, the Omicron variant, and a whole mess of other shit has very unfortunately returned me to the type of burnout I was experiencing last summer. (I am not opposed to reviving hot cicada summer for this winter. We can make it work.) But this time instead of trying to power through and do the writing at night, I instead kind of collapsed and started mindlessly watching YouTube instead. Oh, and I also finally saw some Squid Game months after everyone else had already forgotten about it.

The terrible part, other than the absolute grinding burnout, was that I was thinking about writing pretty much every night. But I didn’t have the energy to do it, couldn’t force myself to pull out the laptop. So instead of delighting in this great outlet, I just thought about the article I wanted to write and how much I sucked for not being able to write it. Pretty much every night of December and January. Good times!

My goal for 2022 is still to write and update this blog. Weekly, if I can! But, if not, then often enough so that you know I’m still here. I have a couple topics I definitely want to cover. There’s a whole treatise I want to write about the Kate Winslet/Cameron Diaz masterpiece The Holiday. And although it’s not Christmas anymore, I’m going to write about that silly movie two months after it’s relevant. Because I want to.

I still have a couple thoughts brewing about the Mission:Impossible franchise. I want to write more about how the internet thinks of and approaches content. I want to write more about books. And I have a plea to make to authors and movie makers around the world to please stop giving your mean female characters “mustaches.” What are you doing with that. Stop it.

But the bigger goal, other than posting semi-regularly, is to be kinder to myself. And to remind myself to be kinder than others. It’s been almost two years since this pandemic thing started and everyone needs a lot of grace right now. I basically need boatloads of it by this point.

I hope you’ll give it to me. And I’ll try to return the favor.

January 26, 2022
You’re a woman who has it all

The sunlight filters in through the window and highlights your laughter as you eat salad with your friends.

Yes, you have a lunch break. And friends. You are a woman who has it all.

A career that you enjoy. That doesn’t feel precarious (at least not at the moment). You are lucky that your job challenges you and opens new avenues for advancement while at the same time remaining flexible and understanding when family stuff arises.

You’ve never felt the pressure when it comes to having kids. Never felt the squeeze as you debated whether work or staying home with the kids was the best option. Never tallied up the exorbitant cost of daycare and compared to your salary, to your benefits to see which came out on top.

You don’t have to worry that other colleagues are rocketing past you because they are able to put in the time and work that you are not. You don’t wonder if some of your teammates wish you could do more. If they do, that’s their business. What’s it matter to you?

You have a beautiful home with decor that speaks to who you are not what you desperately want to be. (Photo by Paige Cody on Unsplash)

Your children are adorable and a delight to be around. As you had planned while you were pregnant, you stuck to cloth diapering and breastfeeding. You and your partner tackled baby sign language with enthusiasm. You pureed vegetables that you boiled and roasted yourself for the baby and now cook healthy organic meals for your older child. She eats these healthy meals, fully accepting that what you make for dinner is what’s for dinner.

You tackled pumping at work with the first and the second and carried it on for the full year recommended by the World Health Organization. You provide carefully filled and labeled bottles to daycare every day (a daycare you carefully vetted against other area daycares with your selected list of questions that allowed you to weigh a list of options based on what they had to offer and not what they cost. You did not have to make a panicked decision after a ten minute conversation because otherwise the spot would be filled by the next family touring the place).

You wash and sanitize all bottle and pump parts as directed. And replace them after the allotted amount of time. After a day of answering emails and taking meetings while pumping, you measure and label, then scrub and dry the dirty set after washing the dishes for the healthy meal you prepared but before you cycle through a last load of laundry and fold what has just come out of the dryer. None of this makes you feel like screaming until your voice gives out.

You have a partner who supports your decisions and picks up his half of the work. He supports all the work and decisions you make for the children and admires the career path you have chosen, fully bought into whatever you need to do to make it work. You try not to think about the couples where both parents work because they can’t afford not to or the single mothers who have no such support system and have to grind through and find a way to make it work. In order to have it all, you must believe that others can also have it all and that there are not pressures at play that make it impossible for some.

About that loving partner. You make coparenting decisions that you both agree on. You are able to talk through your problems with each other and are so lucky that at the end of each day, you still feel that giddy romantic feeling you did when you first started dating. No crabbing at each other over cold takeout pizza after the kids are in bed before falling exhausted down on a pair of sheets that should have been washed a week ago and barely mustering the energy to touch each other on the hand.

You sleep through the night. You are able to wake up early enough to get something productive done. Each day consists of at least ten minutes of meditation and then finding time to either do yoga and/or go on a run or pursue some other type of cardio. You also manage to fit in a hobby. After all, just because you’re a mother doesn’t mean you’re not still you.

Days are portioned out and unfurl like they are supposed to. You projects and tasks at work don’t get delayed. You don’t forget to bring pump parts with you when a manager decides it’s time to start going into the office again a few days a week. You don’t sit at your desk and worry that someone else you barely know is nurturing your children during the day. You don’t sit at your desk and worry that you enjoy this quiet time away from your children too much and that says something about your suitability to be a mother.

You don’t scroll through social media mindlessly but you do find the time to craft thoughtful posts updating your family and friends about your life. You are able to stay up to date on the latest television shows and definitely know what Ted Lasso and Squid Game are.

You read and listen to interesting podcasts and create playlists to fit your mood and read to your children and buy them STEM games and ensure they can express themselves creatively and also say basic requests in Spanish and find ways to creatively turn even basic tasks into fun games to avoid whining and boredom.

Sometimes, yes, a kid gets sick or you get sick or you suddenly realize everyone is expecting you to host for the holidays this year and the house will really need a deep clean for that to happen and did you ensure the kids will be fully vaccinated by that point and you need to create a menu on top of the other meal planning and preparation you do and how will that layer in to ensure you have work and yoga and cooking and bottle cleaning and cleaning and running and reading and a touch of television and sleeping enough all while ignoring that underlying tension that we are living on a dying planet in a dying democracy and maybe it’s impossible to find any shred of happy when the systems are crumbling around you–

You take a deep breath. Your heart rate slows. All that practiced meditation really comes in handy!

You’re amazing. You’re incredible. You’re a woman who has it all. And the best part is, anyone can do it! We made it, ladies.

November 19, 2021
Have some bad advice

The world is full of advice and a lot of that advice is pretty bad.

It turns out that giving good advice is harder than it looks. I think this partially because if you reduce advice to a pretty generic level, it’s bound to be at least somewhat crappy. People are so different and employ such varying tactics to reach success that a piece of advice that’s great for one person is probably fundamentally wrong for someone else.

Some of it is that certain pieces of advice have become so baked into standard interactions that a lot if it is just tired at this point. Or, as many people are discovering, many classic pearls of wisdom are really so ill advised, they will simply cause the recipient to melt into a puddle of anger. (At this point I’m pretty sure if you run into a harried young parent in a grocery store who is about to undergo a nervous breakdown while their child screams nonstop and tell them to “Enjoy this while it lasts,” you deserve to receive at least one colorful swear word thrown back at you.)

I am good at giving myself bad advice. I do it daily. Not only that, I regularly tell myself the same kind of bad advice that for some reason I expect to be good advice today. Almost every morning I wake up telling myself that with a little work and some willpower, I’ll be able to fundamentally change my habits and who I am as a person. (Spoiler alert: It doesn’t work. For more on that, read about what I should know better by now.)

Recently, I was thinking about contributing my services to a silent auction by providing something different than a physical object or a solid deliverable of some kind. I had the thought that I could send someone daily affirmations, weekly compliments, a series of songs and GIFS and videos that were guaranteed to brighten their day. But my favorite concept idea was sending someone deliberately terrible advice.

Not the kind of terrible advice they might think is good advice. Advice that is so obviously bad they would absolutely never take it. For some reason, the idea of telling someone to smash all their computers with a hammer or only eat grapes from here on out really cracked me up. So I decided to do a short write up of some advice I have for you. It is very bad.

In fact, forget lemonade all together. Ponder the eternity of death while you eat a lemon rind. (Photo by Florencia Potter on Unsplash)

When life gives you lemons, juice the lemons, toss the juice, and then eat the dried out pulp and rinds with relish.

We’re all sick of hearing about making lemonade out of our extremely enormous pile of lemons at this point. But have we all tried to feast on the lemons themselves until we can no longer feel our tongues and our mouths are stinging badly from multiple micro cuts we didn’t know we had?

When the baby sleeps, go dream walking with a series of mysterious and fantastical creatures to discover the secrets of the universe. When the baby wakes, go to sleep for real.

Sometimes babies have to understand that you need time to pursue your hobbies and passions and time to properly rest.

Sprained your ankle? Get purposefully bitten by a poisonous spider so the sprain will hurt less in comparison.

Snakes and scorpions are also acceptable alternatives in a pinch.

If you are trying to meet a tight deadline and can’t find the motivation, close your laptop and walk into the woods, never to be heard from again.

Honestly, this is great advice.

If at first you don’t succeed, stubbornly refuse to do that thing ever again and avoid mention of said hobby until your brain literally wipes all memory of it ever existing.

It’ll be pretty awkward when you don’t know that baseball, swimming, or art exist, but that’s a price you have to be willing to pay.

Remember, when it comes to communication more is more. Relentlessly text each member of your family about anything and everything that pops in your head. The more mundane the better.

Every meal, every bowel movement, every moment of idle chatter. If five minutes have passed, it’s been too long.

If anyone asks how you’re doing, just scream wordlessly until you pass out.

Bonus points if you tell them you’re haunted and the ghost inside you hates feelings.

Now that I’ve purposefully tried to generate some bad advice, I think some of it might be good? Definitely the disappearing into the woods thing. You should definitely drop everything you’ve got and just go disappear into the woods. (Disclaimer: Don’t do this.)

I have amused myself. Now it’s your turn. Go on, hit me with your best bad advice!

November 3, 2021
Read more banned books

It’s Banned Books Week! Or, maybe you’re reading this at some point in the future and it’s no longer Banned Books Week. Easy solution: Live your life like every week is Banned Books Week.

In the past, I have often celebrated this auspicious occasion by reading a banned book. When I used to do a book podcast (um, I used to host book podcast called Novel Ideas, if you want to listen to some old book takes), my brother and I would go look up recently challenged books and read them.

On the one hand, if you take this approach, you get to read a lot of great books! On the other hand, it’s depressing and predictable what’s going to make the list. If a book has LGBTQ+ content it’s like a million times more likely to be on the list. Also, books that deal with important but dark subjects get put on there a lot because the content is so shocking and terrible! But the point is to talk about a difficult subject? And how can we talk about difficult subjects without talking about them?

It probably goes without saying, but I am not a fan of banning books or trying to dictate what anyone reads. When I was a kid, my mom let me read pretty much anything, even if it was out of my age range or above my reading level. (This is how I read The Fellowship of the Ring in the fifth grade and didn’t understand it at all and then read Dracula in the seventh grade and what the hell. My mom truly let me read whatever.) I got to experience some really cool books this way! I also read some stuff that went way over my head and I didn’t realize just how much until I read the books again at an appropriate age.

I was going to make a joke about someone knocking that stack over, but I don’t think anyone will ever want to read any of those books. (Photo by Ying Ge on Unsplash)

I’d also like to say that this isn’t the sort of position where I don’t like it when certain books are banned but am okay with it in other contexts. I do not approve even when stupid books I don’t like are challenged. Reading a stupid book I don’t like has often made me annoyed, but I think there’s value in reading them nonetheless. Reading opens you up to new worlds and perspectives and helps you learn more about what you like and what you think. And if that book challenges your set worldview? Good.

Reading dumb stuff you don’t like sometimes can help you clarify your thinking more. Maybe it helps you better articulate why you don’t like certain things, maybe it helps you think more critically about why you don’t like certain things. Whatever the result, the process is good and it helps you grow.

What’s not great is looking at list of what a book contains and claiming that it’s going to corrupt young minds. That shit is tired. Scandalized by sex? The internet and television both exist and both of those things contain sex, so it’s not like teens will never hear be exposed to sex unless they read Lady Chatterly’s Lover or something. Violence is all over television too. The American Library Association points out that some of the most frequently challenged books contain diverse content. I mean…gay people exist and so do Black people and banning a book won’t change that.

Also, can we please stop trying to ban books that teach children about their bodies and where babies come from? They need to get the information from somewhere and a reliable book with good information is much better than a parent stammering through a half-assed explanation. We all have bodies! It’s okay to learn about them.

Reading new books will challenge you, will teach you to think about different people and points of view, will introduce you to new ideas, will generally make you more empathetic, more open, and more willing to embrace nuance.

I’m incredibly biased because I love to read, but even if you think the above is a little too rosy, you have to admit that a good book can make you have a lot of feelings and a lot of thoughts and that’s a good thing.

With all that said, I encourage you to read some banned books! Maybe some that have been challenged recently or are frequent targets. Maybe something like…

Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

I had to include this because Speak was one of the most challenged books in 2020 and the thought that a whole swathe of people saw a book that is literally about a young girl trying to find the courage to speak out and then decided they wanted to silence it is really just a whole level of irony I wasn’t prepared for.

The book does deal with sexual assault, so take that into account. But I remember when I first read this book in high school, it blew my entire mind. It takes the issue really seriously and shows the long-lasting effects of assault and how people’s responses to it often continue to harm victims.

Apparently one of the reasons it was challenged was because “it was claimed to be biased against male students.” Umm, only those who commit sexual assault. Which, is probably an okay reason to be biased against someone. Maybe read the book next time?

And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell

This is a cute picture book features two male penguins at a zoo who adopt an egg and when the baby penguin hatches, they have a little family. The story is based around two real life penguins who did something similar.

The fact that an adorable children’s book about gay penguins nurturing an egg and subsequently a baby penguin is the sixth most challenged book of the past decade really tells you something about society. Not sure what, exactly, but something.

Read this one to your children out of spite and then feel a little warming in your heart.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

A graphic novel and a memoir, this book is a really interesting look into Bechdel’s family and her relationship with her father. It includes a couple surprising revelations about her dad and her own journey to discovering who she is.

In case you haven’t guessed it already, the book is not called Fun Home because Bechdel grew up in a really fun home. But certainly one rife with secrets and frustrated desires.

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

Timely for a whole host of reasons and I’m sure it’s challenged for the exact reasons it’s relevant. I liked this book and thought it did a good job tackling a tough topic and making it relatable. The book is definitely YA and features some of those common YA tropes, but I didn’t mind that so much because of who the intended audience is. It’s a good entry point for adults too, though.

This book also recently was made into a movie, which I didn’t see, so I can’t vouch for its quality. But the book is definitely worth checking out.

Beloved by Toni Morrison

This book is wild and dark. It has lots of metaphorical hauntings and one haunting that seems to be pretty literal. At times this one takes turns that will leave you scratching your head, but ultimately it faces the brutal history of our nation and grapples with how the past can cause ongoing trauma that people carry with them for a long time.

Quick aside: I recommend reading Toni Morrison in general, but if you are an audiobook person, try to find one that she has narrated! Her voice is lovely and soothing and listening to her read her own work made a lot of the writing style come alive for me in a way it didn’t when my own clunky brain was trying to process it.

Awakening by Kate Chopin

In my junior year of high school we had the option of reading a couple different books, and I specifically chose Awakening because it had created such a scandal when it was first published for featuring a woman who cheated on her husband. Spoiler alert: This book is not lurid and contains no sex. It’s all implied and vaguely talked around. Seventeen-year-old me was extremely put out by this fact.

Reading the book again years later, I was less annoyed by the lack of sex. Instead, I was struck by the fact that the main character had complicated feelings about her children, and I thought that was really cool. She’s allowed to be unhappy in her marriage, not because her husband is a terrible, abusive human being, but just because she doesn’t like him very much. And she’s allowed to be ambivalent about being a mother. Those are not things you get to see very often!

Spoiler alert: She is not allowed a happy ending and gets punished for her transgressions. Thank goodness they don’t make us all walk into the sea when our children give us complicated feelings.

This list is definitely not exhaustive. I’ve read other books on the banned and challenged lists and enjoyed them! I’ve read some books on those lists and not liked them much at all. Consider checking out these 100 most challenged books from the last decade. Give one a try. Or if you’re just looking for some books from different perspectives, you can see some of my recommendations for Juneteenth and Pride Month.

It’s okay if you don’t like one. Or if you don’t want to read a certain entry. We can all choose what we want to read. And it’s okay if those things are different than what other people want to read.

Have you got a favorite banned book? Let me know!

September 30, 2021
Why I write

Recently, I had the delightful experience of being on the podcast What People Do with the ever wonderful Brendan Howard (listen to my episode!). We talked about writing and all the different forms of it and some of the questions he asked me got me thinking…why do I write, exactly?

Aside from the fact that I’ve committed myself to a blog and if I don’t pound something out on a semi-regular basis, I am filled with a deep sense of shame.

It’s hard to pinpoint. I don’t know that there are concrete reasons. It essentially boils down to: I like doing it, I think I’m pretty good at it, and it’s really satisfying to get something down.

But it’s not like I have to write. I’ve gone through long stretches where I haven’t written much, if at all, and it didn’t make my life way worse. It definitely left a small hole and made me question my identity as a writer a bit, but I didn’t have a full out crisis.

If I suddenly decided to stop writing forever, I don’t think it’d hurt anyone. There isn’t a crowd out there clamoring for me to produce content. (At least, I don’t think so. Are you clamoring for me to produce content?)

But there’s got to be something. I mean, I keep doing it. And often simply for personal fulfillment. I amuse myself with my stupid jokes and that’s usually enough for me.

Still, I think it’s a useful exercise to try to pinpoints the whys behind my need to be creative. So here’s an attempt at that.

I love to read

This is sort of a basic observation, but most authors are avid readers. I have only ever met one aspiring writer who told me they didn’t read, and when he told me that I immediately gave him reading assignments. (For context, I was tutoring him and he asked for advice on how to be a better writer. I won’t randomly assault you in the street if you don’t read.)

For one, reading helps you figure out what other writers do that you really dig. It helps you figure out writing tactics you don’t like. It helps you become versed in tropes, which teaches you the appropriate times to break or upend those tropes or really lean into them. Reading is incredible for a lot of reasons, and I wholeheartedly embrace the advice that if you want to get better at writing, you should probably read more.

Also, it makes sense to me that if you love to read, then you would want to craft some kind of written text that other people will love to read. Readers love to share with other readers.

I like making other people happy

I don’t know if love languages are a bad thing to reference, so sorry if they are, but I’ll be damned if my love language isn’t acts of service. When people are in a bad way, my mind immediately goes to what I can do for them. What can I give or provide that will make them feel better? Usually the answer to that question is baking them cookies. But in my younger days, I used to write friends short stories for their birthdays and other holidays (they would give me a prompt and away I went.)

Last year, right when lockdown was looming imminently, I started a newsletter where I sent out a chapter of the book I was writing every day. This was partially to force me to stay on top of my writing, but it also came from a place of trying to give people something comforting to expect in their inbox each day.

When someone does read what I write and report back that they loved it or it made them happy, I’m so glad that it touched them in some way. You give me feedback that you like my writing, and I’ll go out of my way to make more writing happen for you.

Here’s a metaphorical image about following your path. (Photo by Matthew Waring on Unsplash)

It gives me a sense of purpose

Life is wild and the world is a mess. I’m constantly running around trying to get everything done and falling shorter than I’d like. Not to mention that I have yet to land that mythical job that magically fulfills everything I need in life. (Spoiler alert: These jobs don’t exist. Even the really good ones.)

Writing gives me a purpose. I might not be changing the world, but this is something I can do for myself. It’s a way I can make something that I think matters. I value words more highly than just about anything. So writing helps me practice what I value, and it gives me something meaningful to do. And to tell others that I do something meaningful.

I’m becoming a skilled expert

If you have read more than one article on my blog, you already know that I struggle with perfectionism. But also, strangely enough, writing has never been something I’ve felt the need to be immediately perfect at. I wrote prolifically throughout middle school and it is all absolute drivel that just rips off other stuff I liked. But that never stopped me or disheartened me. I loved doing it!

I’m now good enough that reading stuff I’ve recently written usually doesn’t (usually) make me cringe, and it’s nice to know that the more I do it, the better I get. That I’ve effectively “honed my craft” for enough years that I’m something of an expert. That I could, maybe…teach other people lessons I’ve learned? I have been paid professionally to write. Like, on some level, I’m a professional writer.

That’s kind of weird, but it’s also cool. At least I’m good at one of my hobbies, by god! (My other hobby being running, which I am terrible at.)

It’s fun to see the fruits of your labor

Finishing a project just feels good. Posting an article, finishing a book, capping off that play. It’s amazing to be done and then to go back and read what you’ve written. You have proof that you did a thing! That is so cool. When I go on a long run, I’m sore, but I have no physical document that shows that effort I made.

This is a great side benefit. And sometimes when I go back and read something I wrote awhile ago, when some of the details have gotten fuzzy, I’ll come across a clever line that actually makes me laugh out loud. It might be super embarrassing to admit that I can make myself laugh out loud with my writing, but I think that’s kind of neat!

I don’t know that I’ve really dug all the way down to the heart of why I do this writing thing, but I think these are all pretty good reasons for why I keep doing it. Why I keep setting myself goals and starting books that nobody but me might ever read.

Really, if nothing else, I hope you take away that it’s good to pursue things you like to do that make you feel good. And it’s okay if those things don’t make you money. It’s okay if you just do something because you like it and you want to do it. Don’t let weird productivity/hustle culture steal your joy.

And if you feel so inclined, let me know what you love to do. I bet you’re great at it.

September 15, 2021