On Care Work
This is not the blog post I had planned. That was going to be on breaking down the different parts of a book: what they are and how to use them to best effect for you. I’m sure I’ll get to that post at some point, hopefully even soon. (Check this space for that bit of brilliant writing insight.) It’s not today, though.
The simple fact is that life has needed me elsewhere these past few weeks, and it probably will at times over the next few months. People I care about need help right now, and I don’t want to live a life where I turn away from that, from caring with and for others, because I force myself to care about rigidly following whatever work expectations I had set up.
I’m going to have to not care and to remember that I am more than an editor, a writing coach, a (reluctant) business owner, and a professional. I’m going to treat myself with the compassion that I extend to my clients and the other people in my life — and that I’ve written about in these blog pages as an ethical imperative — and decenter my writing schedule and desire for perfectionism so that I can care for myself, my clients, and others in the most humane way possible.
I’m even going to forgive myself for not noticing that a stub blog entry, empty except for the title “(Draft) Breaking Down the Book,” apparently self-published and has been sitting on the resources page for all the world who cared to see, probably for a week now. It’s a little embarrassing and a lot inconsequential, and I’ve had a lot going on.
It’s also deeply funny, if you think about it.
Life is messy. Writing is messy.
And we’re not going to get it “right” all the time, at least if we judge rightness by our most perfectionist expectations. Maybe someone saw how I go about brainstorming blog posts — my messy insides got exposed for a moment, and my rough placeholder went out in the world as a draft.
Maybe that helped someone ease up on their own internal pressure for a perfect first draft, or maybe it made them feel better that, at least, they don’t send empty files for publication. Maybe it just made them laugh. I’m good with that too.
That’s what writing is: a process, engaged in by real people with concerns outside of writing, real concerns and needs that often compete with our writing desires and perfect plans, and can even swamp them. That is also what being human is, whether we like it or not (and often I don’t).
We can look forward as carefully as possible and set up the most flexible, contingent plan we can, but life is going to come at us — good and bad — and not giving ourselves space and grace to adapt is the surest way to burnout, personal and professional, if not deeper problems.
We deserve more. We are more.
I don’t like missing these posts. I don’t like being messy. I don’t like being inconsistent and not meeting targets. And I don’t like feeling like I’m failing at basic tasks that seem like they shouldn’t be that big a deal.
But here’s the thing: the idea that we can, or should, continue to meet or exceed expectations (ours or others’) at all times, no matter what (or perhaps at all), is deeply ableist, unfair, and inhumane. The extent to which we, as people and professionals and industries, have internalized these expectations to the point of invisibility and normalcy is just not okay.
Life is more than that — especially if we can support each other and ourselves to create pockets of alternate possibility, according to what resources each of us has at hand and what we can afford to share, or want to. It’s hard to think clearly when you’re pulled in too many directions, or tired, or worried about something, or perhaps in pain. And we shouldn’t have to.
If anyone would like to write that errant blog post, let me know. Maybe I can reciprocate someday.
