“All of creativity is pushing and letting”

Perhaps needless to say after this unexpected two-week hiatus from this blog: it’s been a pretty difficult time for writing. After leaving my job in August, I’m entering Month 7 of full-time freelancing again, and inevitably, that’s primetime for feeling the downsides of this lifestyle: burn out from juggling several projects at once on odd schedules that don’t match with your 9-to-5 friends, insecurity after so many rejections from editors/other opportunities for work, a general malaise and lack of inspiration after seeing the structurally racist/sexist/hypercapitalist foundation that often exists below even the work that I claim I do because I “love,” the fear of not knowing what will happen in my career for the next few months. 

I remember a specific moment during my first year of freelancing when I went to the movies with my family on a Sunday night. I had finished a deadline weeks ago, but had every pitch rejected from editors ever since. The next day, I realized I would have nothing I “had” to do for my “work” except keep trying to look for work. Just before the opening credits began rolling, I suddenly felt the most impending sense of doom. 

What the hell am I going to do tomorrow? The feeling of yet another day of not having a definitive answer literally made my stomach burn, so much that for a moment I wasn’t sure I could even tolerate another day of it. 

After freelancing on-and-off for nearly six years, I no longer underestimate the terror of this feeling. Many articles on freelancing describe this as the anxiety or restlessness of lacking structure, but for me some days it can feel so much deeper than that: its the fear of being meaningless. It’s the terrifying threat of waking up knowing you may not doing anything really useful, may go weeks and weeks without achieving anything concrete at all. A friend recently made me realize this this also what sometimes made travel feel empty — when you realized 

On weeks like this, a part of me instantly craves again the validation of a full-time job — having specific tasks each week that I easily complete and get praised for. As a recovering Ivy Leaguer, I’m accustomed to basing my self-worth on this external productivity and validation. But then again, whenever this craving comes, I also remember what I’ve learned from these more structured and “serious jobs” in the past: productivity is not the same thing as purpose. Finishing tasks doesn’t mean anything if it doesn’t make me feel like I’m making a real difference with my work. There is vast difference between being busy and being meaningful. 

During this period, I am remembering the term “active waiting” that Danielle LaPorte used to describe time spent “happily preparing for what you trust is on its way to you.” To me, these periods are about allowing time for slow, meandering steps that may not look outwardly productive but still build towards something important, especially in a culture that often convinces us to do just for the sake of doing (I am thinking of an acquaintance of mine who once told me, after burning out from her current job, that she was going to Harvard grad school as a way to “take a break”).

There’s privilege in being able to choose to “actively wait” — the privilege of not having immediate financial burdens, health concerns, or responsibilities to attend to. There’s privilege in getting to wait for the “right fit”, instead of having to simply “make do.” And yet, acknowledging that, it still always surprises me how many people with the same privilege never take advantage of it. 

In college, I had one writing professor who made active waiting an expectation. Often, she would even advise us not attempt to finish a piece for now, even if we had worked all semester on it. She would return the piece with only the feedback of “Keep writing.”

“Right now, we don’t know,” she would tell us after. “It’s too early…we still don’t know yet where all of this is going…” She would intentionally call our “final” drafts of our essays “third drafts,” to make clear that nothing about this essay — even after submitting it — was “final.”

At the time, immersed in an Ivy League English department, this all felt radical. In her class, a piece didn’t have to win a Pulitzer tomorrow. It was allowed to take time; letting a piece of writing “sit” was not always procrastination, but sometimes a natural step in the process.

Of course, this can be very easily manipulated into justifying inertia. But as another writer friend reminded me, ideally there is a balance: “All of creativity is pushing and letting,” he told me. “Pushing when its time to go after something, and letting when its time to be gentle with yourself. You can’t force anything into existence.” These last two weeks, I decided not to push myself and instead let things sit. I don’t know if that call was “right”, but I’m hoping I’ll keep learning how to tell the difference, between moments when I’m cleverly avoiding something, and moments when I’m asking life to give me too much.

In November, when the downsides of freelancing weren’t feeling quite as heavy, I remember an evening I realized: though I didn’t feel immensely “happy” at the time, or “excited” or “joyful” or even “good,” I simply knew I was exactly where I needed to be. I think there is something to be honored in that feeling on its own, the feeling of having no FOMO or regret — not because you don’t know a million better things you could be doing, but because you know there is no way you could be doing them right now, of being like a marionette puppet that has made peace with where their strings collapsed, in a strange way relishing the surrender of having no choice to be anywhere other than where you are.

For a traveler, and a person consistently working to be more present, any time this feeling occurs seems significant. I’m trying to get back to that feeling now, finding the balance between pushing and letting some things “sit,” focusing only on the third drafts of things in my life instead of worrying about when they will be “final,” and remembering that maybe my professor was right and we don’t know yet where all of this is going.