what's working

In some ways, shifting my focus is like starting a brand new job but going to the same old office. It’s hard to make new routines in a familiar place. For two decades I trained myself to accomplish certain tasks on certain days in a certain order. (Old habits and old dogs come to mind.)

My family and I talked it out.

“I need specifics,” I said. “What do you need me to be doing?”

“Handle the food,” they said. “The rest we will split up.“

OK. Just food and words. Food and words. I can do that. I can do that. During the day, when I start to get distracted by other jobs, I stop and ask myself if what I am doing is related to feeding my family or to my writing career and if the answer is no, I have to stop doing that thing and get back to work. I’m like a graying kindergartner. ;)

But, some things that are helping me focus on the real job:

1. Listening to and reading about writers and their work. Melissa turned me onto the Commonplace podcasts, which are long, lush conversations between poets and artists about how their lives and work entwine. Every time I come across someone whose work interests me at all, I chase them around the internet for awhile and read whatever I can. (Then I tell myself, we are doing the same work, these people and me. They have bodies and families and houses and demands and they get the work done. You can too.)

2. Starting the day with a little ritual: journaling, exercise, then reading poetry out loud to myself. (Currently working through the latest Poetry Mag, as well as Kyce Bello’s gorgeous new book, Refugia.)

3. I just added another practice to that last week, inspired by Kortney’s Ursula project. Copying one poem a day into a copywork book. Something about reading the work aloud then writing it out by hand fires up the creativity in my brain. I’m ready to get to work!

(On the food front, today I’m making this lasagna for dinner. It’s the kind of thing I can make in stages throughout the day and will provide lunches for tomorrow! Win.)

tonia

P.S. working on the newsletter this week! But it might come out a few days later than usual. I’m sooo close to meeting my goal of finishing the draft of the novel this month! Wish me luck!

small shifts

So often in my life, the biggest changes hinge on the smallest shifts. Just recently, in fact, I was with a friend and happened to see her daily planner. She was showing me some odd bit of something she’d collected and scribbled down for later. Her book, I noted, looked nothing like mine. I stared at her pages. They were perfectly ordinary, no elaborate decorations or cute drawings. No washi tape or fancy clips. But at that moment, a door in my mind swung wide open.

I’m a quasi-bullet journaler. By this I mean, I absorbed the idea of a planning notebook and I write down all my tasks in a neat row and check them off when they are done. At the beginning of the year I make an index in the front and never write anything in it except: “January, p 1.” Sometimes I keep one of those vertical calendars and then get confused by it. Occasionally I use a symbol to mark a task, then forget what the symbol means; later when I notice that task still hasn’t been done, I write it again in a daily task list. My task list includes everything I need to get done in a day: yoga, walk, clean bathrooms, water plants, call X, etc. It works for me.

My friend, as far as I could tell, used a similar method for keeping track of her to-do list: a list, some checkmarks. What caught my attention wasn’t her method, it was her content. She’s a busy woman with multiple jobs and a family. Her day probably has a hundred tasks she could put down and mark off. But her task list didn’t have any of the mundane suspects my own does. She didn’t write down, “feed animals,” like I do - as if I don’t feed the animals every single day of my life, as if somehow, if it doesn’t appear on a list I will just look blankly at the meowing cats and shrug, clueless as to why they keep bothering me. Instead, my friend’s book was a collection of her notes, inspirations, ideas, and specific tasks related to her art.

When I got home, I looked in my notebook and found endless lists of household chores. The same things every day on a rotating carousel. Monday always has “clean kitchen.” Thursday always has “meal plan.” If an archeologist digs up this book someday they will not know I am a writer. They will believe I spent every full day of my life cleaning and cleaning and cleaning some more. (Occasionally, you will find in a task list the all-purpose word “write.” That’s it.)

I’ve thought about this a great deal in the time since I saw my friend’s book, the reasons why such a complex and demanding part of my life rarely shows up in my own notebook. Part of it has to do with fear and claiming ownership of myself. It’s hard to fail at a task like “scrub toilets,” after all. Part of it has to do with a natural period of transition from one career to another, and this, I am still trying to work out.

But I do know this: the next day I didn’t write down anything I usually would. I didn’t note down that it was the day for cleaning bedrooms and doing laundry. I didn’t remind myself to exercise and give basic care to the animals. I wrote a detailed list of what needed to happen next in my novel. And when I came across things I needed to remember for writing articles or ideas for future posts, or notes for my newsletter, I wrote those down there too. Suddenly, my whole approach shifted. In the past, I have struggled to take the time for my writing work the way I should. I would sit down, write frantically for a couple hours, then look at my task list and see a whole list of chores still hanging over me. Now when I look at the page, there is nothing but the vital work calling to me and I am free to attend to it. Amazingly, so far, even without my lists, the house is still standing, the animals are alive and I am still clean and healthy.

Such a small, yet transformative shift.

I’d love to hear about the ways you nurture your own vocations.

peace keep you.

tonia

one month later...

Judith. Probably on her way to dig up and destroy something I planted.

The first fear I had about leaving social media was that if I went off-line, I would disappear. Fourteen years ago, I was homeschooling, raising four children, deep into the years when it is easy to feel you exist only to make other people’s lives run smoothly. On top of that we had a child with intense behavioral needs. We couldn’t leave him home, we couldn’t take him to other people’s homes. We were stuck. I often felt trapped and lonely. I desperately wanted to be seen and understood. I’d married young, skipped college, had children early; I was in a slow fall-out with church and religion which had previously been a constant in my life. I didn’t know anyone doing what I was doing every day, no one who thought the way I did.

Then I found blogging.

I discovered that writing helped me order my life, helped me process the hardships and joys. And eventually, it helped me find other people. The relationships I made became a lifeline for me for over a decade, seeing us through the hardest times of our lives. I found my voice, I found my calling, I found friendships - all because of the online world. I can honestly say my time online changed my whole life for the better. At some point, however, the balance tilted, and the online world (social media in particular) began to feel like less of a lifeline and more of an anchor. I told a friend recently, Instagram et al, began to feel like I’d moved into the dorms and was never going to be able to move out again. I thought about this for several years, going back and forth. On the one hand, instant connection, beauty, friendships. On the other, this deep knowledge that I was cheating myself from something more. That I was frittering away time and energy that I didn’t have to waste. It took a long, long time before I was brave enough to hit that delete button and face what it meant.

After that decision in June, it took a couple of weeks before the emails slowed down and the conversations began to die out. Every day, things are a little more quiet. It was disconcerting at first. By the third week, I lost all motivation to work. What was the point? No one was reading. No one knew if I was writing or not. I moved around my house in a fog for several days, feeling forgotten, useless, questioning my whole life. It finally hit me that this was what withdrawal feels like, my brain searching eagerly for some instant affirmation, a little hit of dopamine to assure myself I exist, people like me. Once I realized what was happening, I could begin facing those feelings and dealing with them.

“We must do our work for its own sake,” says Stephen Pressfield, and I’m just beginning to understand what that means. My inner self knew all along…if I want to go deeper, to discover what I am capable of, I need to move on. I need to do it alone, just me and the page, me and the work, me and the fear. But I also needed that beginning place, that safe space in which to find myself, to try out words, ideas, to make connections and understand possibilities. A month later, I’ve quit thinking of social media as a waste of my time. I feel grateful, and more gracious toward all of it, but I also feel more confident that its usefulness in my life has passed. I’m visible. I exist. I’m writing.(Even slow-blogging again!) I’m connecting with good people. I’m happy. And I can’t wait to see what comes next.

My advice now? Do what’s right for you. You’re the only one who knows what you really need. (And don’t be afraid to move on when the time comes. It’s all good!)

Love to you, friends.

tonia

Why I'm deleting my Instagram account for good.

When I begin this post, I’m sitting by the window in a little cabin that Mark and I have rented to celebrate our anniversary. We’re on the west side of the Oregon Coast Range tucked against the edge of the woods. Down the road and over the highway, the Pacific Ocean rides its tides back and forth across the shoreline leaving a tumble of broken shells and Barnacle-encrusted Mussels in its wake. Here in the cabin, I look over a meadow, a fringe of Spruce and Hemlock. Everything has softened into the deep green glow of dusk.

Whenever we go away together, we try to leave the electronics behind as much as possible and though I confess to an occasional email check, this day has stretched itself out deliciously slow. We’ve hiked, read, ate, talked, napped, poured over field guides, until I feel the kind of deep satiety that comes from having stretched my faculties to the furthest reaches of the given hours. Now, while evening settles in, I’m here at this window, head full of words, spiral notebook and pen, the soft tick of the wind, the crack of fire in the woodstove.

Sometime after I get back from this trip I will delete my Instagram account once and for all. I deleted Facebook a couple of years ago, right after the election, horrified by the roaring train of anger it unleashed in me, the fracturing of relationships, the things I can’t unsay, and the things I can’t unknow about others. When the time came, I had no doubts about deleting Facebook; it was obviously not good for me. But Instagram is a little different. My experience there has been gentler, more encouraging. I like taking pictures, I like sharing quick thoughts (which feels more like chatting with friends through the day) and I like the people I have made relationships with. Still, it is time to go, and as promised, I will share my reasons why here.

**

Instagram (and social media) requires my discontent:

Creating need in the user is an important part of social media’s success. Need for stimulation, novelty, ideas, approval, connection, and products is what keeps us going back again and again. The problem is there is no satisfaction point. The more I see, the more I want, the more I see that others have, the more I want, the more I share what I have and receive approval, the more I want. One of the first things that happens when I unplug from Instagram is a shift in my perception about my life: I’m happier with my home, my relationships, my work, and my appearance. Real contentment is the antidote to corporate manipulation and consumerist culture, but I can’t expect to have it while I’m using corporate/consumerist tools.

Instagram is distracting me all the time:

I won’t spend a lot of time on this because although it is a major factor in my decision-making, everyone knows this for themselves. It is time for me to just quit pretending I will ever be able to stick with the “moderation” route. No matter how I try to control it, eventually I will be picking up my device throughout the entire day “just checking.” There is no middle ground for me. (Since I quit looking at Instagram, I still unconsciously pick up my phone randomly and check the weather app. Still working on that addiction to novelty.)

Instagram is changing the way I work:

Nicholas Carr, in his 2010 book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, talks about the ways tools shape our brains. When the typewriter was invented, writers quickly adopted it for its speed and efficiency, but it wasn’t long before people noticed the structure of their sentences was changing too.

“One of Neitzche’s closest friends…noticed a change in the style of his writing…[his] prose had become tighter, more telegraphic. There was a new forcefulness to it, too, as though the machine’s power was, through some mysterious metaphysical mechanism, being transferred into the words it pressed into the page.”

Fr. John Culkin said, “We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and then they shape us.”

It’s possible that the typewriter made Neitzsche into a better writer, but I have not found that true for the social media tools I am using. Instagram was designed for images with short captions. Even though I used it for micro-blogging and put up longish posts regularly, I still found that the nature of the space - requiring frequent postings and tailored for quick engagement - was encouraging me to write too fast, too often, and too brief. A good skill set if I want to master social media or possibly online journalism, but not a good skill set for a novelist. (And not a good skill set for being a modern human, if we’re honest.) Over time I realized I was losing my inability to sit with an idea and think deeply about it, let alone write slowly and subtly about it. I am being inevitably shaped by the tool I am using the most often.

Instagram is not productive:

To be successful, an author needs a committed base of readers. I originally believed that in order to publish, I needed to gain a good number of followers on multiple platforms. (This may be important for a certain kind of writer, artist, or business owner, I don’t know.) But the truth is, at this point, even when my follower number grows on social media, I still only engage with about 200-300 people. Instagram’s numbers look promising, but they are fairly insignificant. Most of those followers will not care if I publish a book and most will not buy it, so from a career-perspective, spending an inordinate amount of time (between creating content, commenting, and the addiction factor, it’s a ridiculous amount of time) building a following on Instagram is not efficient or productive for me.

I am not published yet, so I could be wrong about this, but I think the negatives outweigh the positives when it comes to my professional engagement on Instagram. Writers build relationships with readers by writing and sharing their work and that’s what I’m focused on now.

Instagram is not actually that fun (sorry!):

An experience I’ve had multiple times: I take a social media break. A week later, I come back, open the Instagram app and scroll through, excited to see what I missed… and nothing is going on. I’m forever astonished at how boring it all is. Even the posts I am usually excited about are not that interesting viewed with my dopamine-cleared brain. This phase usually lasts for a half a day or so before I succumb and return to being so fascinated by what is in my feed I can’t stop looking at it every hour. This is called addictive behavior, my friends. Instagram only gets fun when my brain releases the chemical to make me think it’s fun Ugh.

Instagram (owned by Facebook) is not a company I want to support:

Integrity matters to me. Corporate responsibility matters to me. Facebook/Instagram spies on us, co-opts our expertise and uses it for profit, sells our information to advertisers and political machines and manipulates our behaviors. It does not represent the kind of company that I would normally support and it’s time I quit doing it

Jaron Lanier has lots to say about this if you want to read more.

I like who I am without Instagram:

I like that I’m not taking pictures of everything I do. I like that I can just have a thought and not share it right away. I like that I am not distracted from personal relationships. I like that I don’t know everything my friends are doing already so I want to go out more, have dinner, real conversations. I like how focused I am. I like how I can sit and be quiet without a device nearby. I like that there is space in my thoughts for more than, “I wonder if anyone posted/commented/messaged…” I like the freedom I feel. I like the way my brain and body feel. I like that my experiences are my own. I like that I’m not feeling inadequate or left out. I like that I’m not part of the crisis/reaction cycle that happens on social media. I like that I have all day to think about an event and not know anyone’s opinion about it until I have a real face to face conversation. I like that I can make an adult decision about what tools are right for me and which are not. I like how content and peaceful I feel. I like how my mind creates its own novelty and comes up with new solutions, new questions, new projects all the time.

Turns out, I’m interested, connected, focused, happy, and content, all on my own.

**

These are my reasons for leaving Instagram. We’re all in different places and different seasons, so don’t feel you need to justify your choices to me. I don’t judge anyone for using social media. This is just where I’m at now after many years of social media use. If you find something in this post that rings true for you, I hope you’ll feel empowered to really consider it and make the choice that’s right for you!

Peace keep you, friends!

When staying means going

Maybe it was my religious upbringing, but I’ve always been alive to the idea of voices speaking to us behind the curtain of the ordinary world. Not audible voices, but stirrings, like strings being plucked deep inside the self, themes that emerge from the common stuff of life and repeat until our conscious minds can grab hold of them. Lately I’ve felt like the small universe I inhabit has decided to bring me in on a conversation it’s been holding for a long time - about presence and communion and love and beauty and trust. Everywhere I go these days I feel this invitation to enter in. It comes in dreams, books, music, conversation, news articles, daydreams, even in the moments I steal to sit on the front porch and watch the birds. There’s a melody to it, (something like Norah Jones’ Come Away With Me, maybe?) smoke and tenderness, a hint that something good lies ahead if I want to join in.

I was lying on the grass on a recent Sunday afternoon, watching the brand new leaves of the maple tree filter out the sun, soaking in the first real warmth of the year. The cedars along the driveway were rubbing their needles together in the breeze, shush-shush-shush, and I could feel the invitation come again, rolling deep through me, like it was coming up from the earth itself. If there had been any real words, they would have been something like this:

Stay. Stay in the quiet. Stay right here.

Lying there, listening, I thought about what it means to stay present to what the world is saying, the knowledge of the ground under our feet, the trees, the creatures. What it means to be present to people and relationships, to our own selves. What it means to be present to Spirit and Love, to really hear and understand and follow. And I understood that it would take an expansion of my thinking and a whole lot of yes to things that other people would perceive as a no, but it was going to be worth it.

There’s a line in Fellowship of the Ring, where Bilbo describes his life (which is deeply tangled in the pull of the Ring) to Gandalf:

Why, I feel all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread. That can't be right. I need a change, or something.

I know I feel this away. Pulled in so many directions, I can only just stretch myself to cover the surface, so inundated with noise that I can’t hear the whispering of Spirit and earth even if I long for it. It’s not in my power to quiet the whole world - but I can quiet myself, and my part in it. I want to live deep, attentive to the community and work I’ve been given. For that reason, I’m slowly eliminating my social media accounts. (I’ll share more about deleting Facebook and Instagram soon.) I’ll focus on my fiction work, maintain this blog, and offer a monthly newsletter to those who wish for a little more. One location, slow writing, space in which I can engage in the real truths and work of my life. A going that is really a staying put, a no that is actually a YES.

Note: I hope you like the new space. I’ve tried to keep it a restful place, easy to navigate and simple in design. You might notice that I’ve disabled the comments. After 13 years of blogging, I know that the comment box can be a busy, distracting place for both me and the reader. If you have something to share or a question to ask, please always feel free to email me directly. I’ll be glad to hear from you. Thank you for coming here. Thank you for subscribing.

much love,

tonia