Arriving
Novae and I had a FABULOUS zoom on Friday, thank you to everyone who attended! (There were a lot of you all! It was so appreciated!) I hope everyone learned a ton — Novae and I will figure out when we can do that again, hopefully we’ll hit one a month!
But right now, we’re both in the trenches. Novae’s coming in on the end of a novel, and me, well, I’ll share my particular flavor of insanity with you all tomorrow night (trust me, it’s pretty insane!)
Until then though — someone recently told me this piece of advice I wrote a few hours before midnight on 12/31/2022 was good for them, so I thought I’d re-share it here, for y’all. It was elsewhere, on a discussion about disillusionment and motivation.
Everyone else has given you practical advice, but I’m gonna get metaphorical. And this is a system that will likely only work for me, but I’m still hypergraphic, so here goes:
I think it’s probably easier if you don’t think of writing as a means to an end – whatever that end may be. Money, awards, fan mail, fame, all of that shit’s fickle, right? And what’s more is, it’s all out of your control.
I think it’s probably better to have an idea of yourself as a writer flowing with the currents of time, rather than trying to nail things down to any particular point of satisfaction.
For some segment of people, whose careers are far beyond mine and who do not know me: I have yet to arrive.
For some, they see the things I’ve accomplished, and they think: I have arrived.
But the best place for me to be, for my continual mental health as it relates to my writing career (and long term thread followers here will remember my legit on screen mental breakdown, when my YA in 2017 didn’t sell, the self-same entries of which I showed my new psychiatrist, causing her to say, “How about some Klonopin?”) --ahem-- the best place for me to be, is: I will always be arriving.
You cannot change the past, and you certainly cannot control the future.
All you can really do is be.
Did you show up and try your hardest, on any given day? Great. Good job.
Was yesterday a shit day? Yeah? Okay, well, it’s over now – and the clock’s still ticking. Time to ride.
I will give Donald Trump one thing – he fucking made me love writing.
I spent 2+ years assuming I was going to die. It would not be hyperbolic to say writing is one of the things that saved me.
But you know what, too? After that?
Everything else is such small potatoes.
And maybe that’s bad, maybe it’s broken me, (maybe I am full of shit here tonight, typing this to you.)
But . . . perspective is everything.
And while I do pour my heart and soul out into the books that I write, as I write them – everythings’s a lot easier now, because I get to do it fearlessly.
What’s the worst that could happen? I don’t get famous? I don’t make money? People don’t know my name?
Man…I’m fucking still alive. (And that was some tenuous shit there, for a long time, psych-wise, in early 2021.)
Having that be my Y-axis for accomplishments since November 2021 has been fucking amazing.
You can’t keep doing the same thing and expecting different results.
I’d heard that piece of advice so often it sounded trite to me, until this past year when I fully began to embrace it.
What do you want to do?
What do you want to get out of life?
What’s stopping you?
What’re you doing today that’s the same thing you did yesterday that continued to make you unhappy?
Fix that shit. Change it, divorce it, educate it, go around it, whatever it takes.
Hone in on your goal like the point of a pencil sharpened in one of those old fashioned desk-clamp crank-types, worked by an obnoxious second grader.
But don’t make the mistake of making your goal something you can’t actually control.
Because what’s the only thing you’re sure to get? Today.
Now.
These next five minutes.
What do I want to be doing right now that is the best use of my time to perform the thing that will make me happy?
And if I don’t do it, well–shit, acknowledge that, but shrug, don’t beat myself up and do change it next time. I’ve learned to have incredible patience for all the me’s of my past. Sure they screwed up some, but largely, they were doing the best they could at the time. You can’t always be looking back, and expect to have a future.
I feel pretty confidently that there are only two types of people in the world (and I know I’ve talked about this on here before).
In life, really – you get two choices: are you going to spiral in, or spiral out?
I feel like you can probably work great art in either space, for a time.
But I think if you’re a person who spirals in, who doesn’t enjoy new experiences, and cannot flow with change, there will be a moment when you get your nose disjointed, when you’re not given the respect you think you deserve, when your laurels go unwitnessed, and that will make you cranky.
I can get why you would spiral in though. Spiraling in is comfort. There’s less risk – but there’s also less reward.
Whereas spiraling out, you might have the opportunty to make a fool of yourself on a very large stage. (Or write overly thoughtful posts here, two hours to midnight on NYE, proving that you’re a germaphobic nerd with few real life friends, heh.)
But – you also have the opportunity to catch onto something greater than yourself. To be in conversation not just with the past, but with the future, as it happens. When you know that you are owed nothing, the universe really doesn’t care about you, or your money, your fame, and your glory, and understand that life is only what you make it – instead of finding that knowledge scary, you can have the wisdom to recognize it as a source of freedom.
So there.
That’s like all the tips on how to do this thing for 25 years, still not manage to be full time at it, and still stay mostly sane.
There’s plenty of people out there who can write circles around me, who sit on mountains of cash like Smaug’s hoard, and who will never know my name.
But that’s okay.
I’m still arriving.
More soon, once Novae and I resurface! <3
xo!
Cassie