hold.
A friend of mine told me I was pulling the ripcord on my
career by being so outspoken about how badly I didn’t want
to travel and speak anymore. Didn’t I realize the people who
were asking me to speak might read my blog, and then not
invite me? Exactly, I said. That’s the plan, I told him. I’m a
writer, not a speaker, but I’ll never write another book again
if I can’t get out of this constant cycle of output and
exhaustion.
I had the sense that my essential self, my best self, was
slipping away, and the new person in her place was
someone I very much didn’t want to be. She was shaped out
of necessity—tough and focused enough to bear the weight
of my work life, when the real me, tender and whimsical,
would have crumpled under the weight.
Some of being an adult, though, is about protecting and
preserving what we discover to be the best parts of
ourselves, and here’s a hint: they’re almost always the parts
we’ve struggled against for years. They make us weird or
different, unusual but not in a good way. They’re our child-
sides, our innate selves, not the most productive or
competitive or logical, just true. Just us. Just very simply
who we are, regardless of how much quantitative value they
add.
It’s the perfect weather for writing: gray, cool, windy. Too