This past Saturday night, I was reading in bed next to my sleeping partner when the feeling hit. We were staying in a quaint A-frame that overlooked a remote reservoir tucked into the northern armpit of Utah’s forested Wasatch Plateau. The moon lit a bright, sparkling path across the water, and the only sounds gurgled from a hefty air conditioner that appeared to run on coal.
We’d spent the day moving slowly between activities; coffee and books, a run-walk along the water, a lazy wander through an art market in the closest town (~31 miles), chewy slices of pineapple-jalapeño pizza washed down with chugs of lime-razzed Diet Coke. What I am saying is that I was having the chillest time in this redneck paradise. And yet I could not comprehend my book’s scintillating prose over the hostile buzzing in my chest.
That’s sort of been life, lately. Both undeniably lucky, beautiful, fun. And yet also haunted by periods of dread that show up like religious missionaries; persistent and uninvited. The cause is obvious. The next six weeks of my life are almost comically chaotic: I have a book entering the world, a wedding in Europe sandwiched between high-pressure launch events on both sides of this country, and deadlines I shouldn’t have signed up for.
The way I am dealing with this anxiety, naturally, is to optimize everything. My face is nearly always a constellation of star-shaped pimple patches. I’m constantly scanning for transgressions in my relationships to prove that my people do not, in fact, love me as they claim to. The barcode that grants access to my gym has never seen so much action. And my to-do list is a fastidious archive of my neuroses, updated in real time.
What this trepidatious squirreling looks like in my work life is sitting down to write something like this, bouncing through 18 different open tabs in my browser, penning a sentence, replacing a word, and, actually, backspacing the entire thing because IT SUCKS. I’ll slog my way to a final draft like an altitude-sick climber summiting Kilimanjaro, only to yak my guts out at the top, perfectionism clouding the view.
This is why you haven’t received this “weekly” newsletter in — checks watch — 34 days. When the book tour was distant enough from reality to feel like a later problem, words came easy; I craved this space to be myself, to dispatch the weird shit no editor in their right mind would pay for, and to process my life in a way that hopefully resonates.
But now, with just over a week until my first event, nothing feels “good enough” to publish. I am questioning the validity of everything. Like, I wrote a whole ass thing about memory and journaling and it was deep and the prose was solid but actually did I even believe what I was saying anymore? Like a text message you’ve taken months to respond to, the longer the lag, the worse you feel about yourself, and the harder it is to press send.
Probably because I bought a lot of powerful crystals over the weekend, that will definitely eviscerate my stress and magically make me expertly charismatic on tour, I finally got the spiritual big-spooning I needed. This morning, I picked up my copy of Meditations for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman, and unearthed this wise nugget:
“One more paradoxical truth about control: often, the way to have the best ideas, and to produce the best work, is to develop an ability to forget entirely about trying to control the quality of your output. And the easiest way to do that is to focus on quantity instead.”
I know that, in this particularly demanding moment, perfectionism is a symptom of a brain that is trying desperately to protect me from harm. It’s applying a kind of pimple patch that buffers against public stupidity instead of my own incessantly fiddling fingers. But it’s also cock-blocking my creative process, man.
Focusing on producing something over something good, Burkeman argues, is a way to put yourself “back in the driver’s seat.” I think a similar sentiment could be applied to the book tour. What if I manifest real presence over a sparkling performance? It violates everything my lizard brain is currently fighting for. But, as Burkeman writes, when we do fall wildly short of our own standards, “the world never actually seems to collapse.”
Anyway, before I can overthink this:
Where in your life are you focusing more on the outcome than the process?
Might a quantity-over-quality approach serve you better?
When you find yourself reaching for control, what do you think you’re trying to protect yourself from?
