When It Does Not Go To Plan
To say last month didn't go to plan is an understatement. It went so not to plan that I actually ended up doing nothing on my business all month. That's not an exaggeration.
At the end of June, knowing I had a busy month with starting my job and having lots of family things booked in, I wrote a note with the four projects I wanted to make sure I did in July, and all the steps I needed to do them. It was one of those moments where you think “hmmm, this looks like a lot for the busiest month of the year” but you still hope you can make it work, with a few late nights.
I did nothing on that plan last month. Out of twenty things, not one was ticked off.
The descent happened quickly. The first week of the month I went in for my hand over week at my job (I'm doing a maternity cover contract), and I gave myself the space to take that in and get used to long days again. This is also my usual mode of operation: I don't have to yet, so I won't. I thought I'd be able to squeeze things out the following week while I was on holiday with my parents and then do the rest when I was back and in routine.
Then, the morning we were going on holiday, I awoke at 5am with the unmistakable burning of my recurrent UTI, and everything fell apart. I spent the week in pain and constant anxiety, there was no room in my brain to think about work, no energy to even read. We came home, the antibiotics took away the worst of it, but by then the habit, and the will, was broken. I felt more easily overwhelmed, I had commitments coming at me and I had to just let go.
It's amazing how quickly it can break down. How one and a half bad weeks can break a habit of work months and years in the making. At the end of June I was more in flow than I remember being for years, I had nothing but ideas, I was writing thousands of words, I felt like everything was happening and it was surely impossible that the train would ever stop. And then it broke down at the next station and never re-started.
There are two points I want to make about what happened last month.
The first is that, on their own, none of these things mean anything. They have no significance. Around the third week of the month I was starting to panic that things were backing up and that time was running out, I felt guilty and irresponsible for being ill. I had to remind myself that the timelines were arbitrary, that whether the things on that list happened in July or not was wholly unimportant. I had to let go of the meanings I was making and just focus on getting through the present.
The second point is to once again re-iterate that one of the most important things in creative work is returning. We all want to set up fail safe routines that will allow us to carry on through adversity, we want to achieve consistency, we want breaks only when we schedule them. And so when the inevitable happens and our routine breaks down we have to deal with the guilt of that too, and the feeling of failure and disappointment. Removing the guilt and expectation leaves the door wide open for you to walk back in when you can. The art of returning to the work is the one that means you will keep going.
What I could have done is delete that note of July projects in disgust with myself. I could have beaten myself up about it, I could have let it overwhelm me and hang over me tolling the bell of shame. I could have tried to squeeze as much of it as I could into some final days. I could have changed all the plans altogether.
Instead I replaced the word “July” at the top of that list with “August”. I didn't make it mean anything about myself, about the work, about the future. I simply returned.
This was first sent as a letter to my email subscribers – to get my monthly letter and reading list, sign up here.
