tossing up the tasks of staying alive.
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This week’s love note is on routine and the failure of it. Below the note are my little lists of recommended reading, watching, listening, and also gratitude. Free subscribers can see a sample today. If you’d like to support the work and get access to the full notes weekly, just click Subscribe. Thanks for being here either way! <3
Dear ones,
The year I wrote my book, I spent months on a near-daily routine of writing in the 5’o clock hour of the dark, winter mornings. I’d crawl out of bed and transfer Captain the dog from his crate into bed so he could snuggle under the covers with L, use the light of my phone to make it to the kitchen, feed Diesel the cat, put on a hot pot of water, open the jar of coffee beans and inhale deep before scooping them into the grinder, and finally make it to the laptop with mug in hand. In Boston, I wrote at the dining room table, wrapped in a shawl, looking out past a row of garbage cans onto the neighbor’s dimly lit house. In Minneapolis, I wrote in the spare room, lit up with fat-bulbed string lights, gazing onto the neighbor’s roof. With the exception of Monday mornings when I ventured to the yoga studio at 5:30am to teach, I wrote almost every weekday for months. It was routine I was proud of; it was discipline.
I could rattle off a slew of additional accomplishments regarding routine: I have, for about 21 years, exercised daily every morning (spare severe illness); I have flossed daily, without exception, since my teenage years; for at least two years I wrote a daily gratitude journal; for a full summer I did Julie Cameron’s morning pages; and, I finished a PhD by age 28, which required daily research and writing. There are a lot of reasons for this that have nothing to do with me being better than anyone, including: having a trauma-inspired tendency toward obsessive compulsive behavior, having years of flexible employment that gave me leisurely mornings, being childless, having a mostly neurotypical brain, and, of course - being a Capricorn Rising. I assure you, I’m not sharing any of this to brag.
This is actually the set-up to a note about failure. The past year or so of my life, routine has been significantly harder. I still do some form of exercise every morning and I still floss every night, but everything else? It’s been a whole trip around the sun’s worth of tossing up the tasks of staying alive and seeing where they land. Will I write today? Will I respond to week-old texts? Will I remember to re-order the cat litter, the recycling bags, my probiotic? Who can know?! The post break-up unraveling left me sometimes feral, scrounging around the flow of a day like a jumpy squirrel. When I tried to find consistency, a crying spell would get in the way, or hours would pass without me realizing it (brain fog from grief, from Covid), or a writing day would turn into a ‘on the phone call with insurance companies and bill collectors as I attempt to switch everything from shared accounts to solo accounts’ day. I wrote some, in fits and starts, but nothing close to consistently.
Of course I was harder on myself because this kind of amorphous day to day was unfamiliar. I wanted to just push through. I wanted to buckle down, suck it up, or at least find a way to make workaholism a coping mechanism. I have the radical emprints “your worth is so much more than your productivity” sticker on my laptop, but I know the placement is ironic. I always opened the laptop. Always.
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