It's Back-to-School Season, Kiddos!
Elite procrastination techniques, shouty resolutions, and Lauren Groff.
See how I did that?
By “that,” I mean blast out a whole manifesto about developing this Substack, only to not write anything at all for a month.
To be fair, I have spent a decent amount of time doing adjacent things: researching more about the platform and other writers who publish here, pondering content plans and “about” pages, and cycling haphazardly through different layout and color schemes.
I have also, in the last couple of days, been failing spectacularly at what I “should” be doing - which is focusing on the work that pays my rent. Instead I have been mooning around WeWork, flopping down at different desks and armchairs and couches in the hopes that one of them will turn out to be the magical concentration station, only to sigh heavily at my laptop screen for the millionth time and then talk to literally anyone willing to distract me.
One of the “community desk” guys just came back from paternity leave, and let me tell you, there is no better procrastination technique than encouraging a very jovial dude who hasn’t slept in a month to talk about his firstborn son. I asked him to show me a picture, and he did a whole song and dance about how he didn’t want to be that guy who forced baby pictures on everyone but since I asked…. He then proceeded to show me 5-10 pictures while apologizing for showing me so many pictures, and I told him it was fine because I used to do the same thing to people with my cat.
ANYWAY
Eventually I decided that forcing myself to “work,” while punishing myself for being unable to, was not the best use of my time. So I went home to try to finally get out another one of these newsletters, while eating cold pasta directly from the tupperware.
In addition to pondering the newsletter business in the last weeks, I’ve realized that I’m chewing on not one book idea but two, and have spent a decent amount of time wringing my hands about how the hell I’m supposed to accomplish any of this while also earning enough money to live on comfortably, let alone start saving again. All this hand-wringing is a very useful way to be spending my time, as you can imagine.
The truth is, I think the time is coming where I will have to double-down and invest some money - or some significant unpaid time, which is functionally the same thing - back into my career for a year or two with the idea that it will finally get me someplace closer to where I actually want to be. If you know me well, you may have some inkling that I am a person with a lot of money anxiety - or perhaps more accurately, I am a person who tends to funnel my anxious tendencies into “scarcity mindset” bullshit around money, in ways I know are very self-defeating but are also very sticky.
No need to drag you all through the minutiae of where this all comes from, but I am about to be 40 and I currently live in a place that affords me a lot more financial and psychic leeway than, say, New York City. So I need to get over it and take advantage of some of the things that the Berlin chapter of my life enables me to do - especially since I don’t want to be here forever.
I’m not sure whether this is going to mean carving out a fixed portion of my week for “personal projects,” or just broadly giving myself permission to let my brain decide what the deal is from day to day - kind of like I ultimately did today. We shall see. But the other day I was talking to my therapist, who I only see very occasionally these days, and she paraphrased a Brené Brown quote along the lines of middle age is when all the voices that have been whispering inside you start to shout. And while I’m not sure I feel middle-aged exactly, things are starting to get a bit shouty when it comes to my long-deferred ambitions and discontents.
Book Weather
It is very suddenly fall in Berlin, in that oh-so-Berlin way where it went from 2-3 weeks of unbroken, sunny 30° to high of 18° with cloud cover quite literally overnight. I am less bothered than you might imagine, as I always find back-to-school season to be something of a relief. It’s when a lot of my goals and resolutions for the next year start to come into focus, even moreso than at the beginning of the calendar year. And it also marks the imminent return of cozy cooking projects, good film releases, and dark nights with books.
On the book front, I have been reading and rereading a lot of Lauren Groff lately. Let me tell you, nobody does it quite like Lauren Groff. By “it,” I mean write extremely precise stories that by their end have become almost infinitely vast, and that make me feel both extremely inspired and horrifically inadequate. I am enough of an editor by now that I can pull apart what she’s doing on a technical level, but it’s not particularly replicable, nor should it be. You can’t replicate someone else’s particular genius, because you can’t live from inside someone else’s body and brain. The best you can do is maybe adapt a couple of their tricks, while trying to noodle out whatever your particular genius is.
Anyway, maybe I will write more about Lauren Groff at a future date. For now I will leave you with a paywall-free link to this profile, which I found after reading The Vaster Wilds - another one of those books that just gets more extraordinary the more I sit with it. It’s one of the more fascinating articles I’ve read recently about someone’s creative process, in no small part because she seems perfectly content to spend insane amounts of time and effort on things she knows she will never use. God willing I should ever feel so free.