Hello! This letter is like an ice cream cone with two scoops, one big and one little, almost more of a garnish. Both are about finishing work. The big scoop is about a kind of work I like (art) and the little scoop is about a kind I don’t (shitty jobs). 🍨
Anxiety, finishing creative projects, and Virginia Valian’s LEARNING TO WORK
As a wild and restless high-school-aged punk, I took community college classes through a publicly-funded program. As my “high school” wasn’t really school at all—attendance was optional—one beneficial side effect of going to community college was a dramatic increase in the number of responsible adults with whom I came into contact. I generally operated as though I’d been unfairly plucked from Never-Never Land and placed into a grim landscape of ridiculous (if not outright evil) expectations. I had no intention of growing up and gravitated to spaces filled with other “youth”: punk shows and collective meetings dominated by teenagers and twenty-somethings. There were older adults around, and some of them were wise, though often these “elders” reminded me of ancient adolescents. They were ragged, gruff Oscar the Grouches mummified by anger (if not also substance use) that had only increased with age.
At community college, I found something else: adults who were neither unreachable (parents) or too prickly to really touch (punks). Of course I’m exaggerating, but it is true that my time there exposed me to caring grown ups who pursued their own creative and/or intellectual development, and wanted to help me to do the same. I didn’t take the existence of this kind of creature for granted.
One of these teachers, Lora, taught a painting class I took in my final semester. I was new to acrylic painting and the bristles of my paintbrushes kept drying stiff despite my (I thought) careful washing. “Is there a way I’m supposed to get them clean?” I asked her. She took the brushes from me and ran her fingers lightly over them. “Well, you’re not going to like this answer,” she said gently, “But you just wash them more.”
I think of these instructions—their kindness and lack of judgement—when I realize that I’m over-complicating a simple task, or having trouble feeling the importance of a mundane one. It’s a classic ADHD challenge, and over-compliciating simple tasks might be one way I motivate myself to act on them. (Jessica McCabe discusses the ways motivation is different for those with ADHD in this video.) For so much of my life I’ve enthusiastically taken on projects but I tend not to finish them (or to straight-up forget about them) if they aren’t accompanied by enough momentum, support, structure, and whatever other magic ingredients result in their completion. When these projects are creative ones, like the essay collection I’m writing, they are usually ambitious and theoretically complex. I can forget that seeing these projects through can be simple and very challenging at the same time. Sometimes, I just need to keep doing what I’m already doing.
Anxiety obscures this simplicity. I’m self-conscious about my ghost trail of unfinished and hypothetical projects. Their invisible mass contributes to a deep-seated fear that I’m a dilettante who can’t finish things—can’t carry out my grand visions. The circuit of anxiety also prompts avoidance, a positive feedback loop that increases the gap between my emotional investment in making, doing, or being something and the steps to make that happen. But when I take identity out of the picture (what my output symbolizes about who I am or am capable of), I can hear the gentle truth in what the picture shows me: my actions don’t always match my ambitions, but that doesn’t doom or define me. It’s a workable situation.
With that said, anxiety (and the identity-related concerns that feed into it) can’t just be cut out of the picture. They’re not like photos in magazines whose contours I carefully followed with an xacto blade as a teenage zinester. Anxiety is the picture to work with, and working with it is how I learn to finish things.
This is one of the messages in Virginia Valian’s excellent essay “Learning to Work.” It’s an exceedingly helpful on the subject of moving through this kind of psychological stalemate, one that can bind us up as artists, writers, dreamers, and thinkers. First published in 1977, the essay explores what Valian, a psycholinguist, calls her “work problem”: avoidance of work that, at a conscious level, she found important. In her case, this was studying to be a psychologist and writing her thesis, the project through which she gently, incrementally trained herself to work. Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (also excellent), shared the essay in his newsletter a while ago. I finally read it this past week, and found in Valian’s gentle but fiercely honest exploration of her own dilemma a bit of a wake-up call—a bit like the pragmatic brush-washing advice Lora gave me as a teenager.
One of the ways Valian resolved her work problem was to work in little pulses of time short enough to avoid being overpowered by anxiety or other defensive responses, and in which unrealistic expectations hadn’t been placed. This is an effective alternative to avoiding the work altogether; I’ve previously used this approach myself (unrelated to Valian’s essay), and recommend it to coaching clients. But there was something in “Learning to Work” that pointed to some kind of knot or gap in my relationship to practice and outcome/finished work—something avoidant in how I link the two. I’m a little hung up on how to describe this knot/disjuncture, because:
I think letting go of outcome is so important, particularly when you’re deprogramming anxiety around creative practice.
There’s nothing morally or symbolically wrong with not finishing things, and it’s okay if creative practice is completely uninvested in their production.
But I am invested in making things. This investment has sometimes expressed itself in by forcing (or trying to force) my creative work to cohere before it’s ready. I’ve been learning to work with it by keeping my writing practice open-ended and taking as much pressure out of it as I can. (See letters from October and January for more on this.) It struck me, though, that as I’ve grown more confident and free with this raw drafting, I will still have to learn to work with the anxiety I have about finishing things.
In Valian’s personal account of learning to see work as a sort of “love affair,” I was struck by the ways she connected the verb “work” (the effort) and the noun “work” it produces:
“[I]mportant learning occurs in putting the finishing touches on a paper or project, learning that may govern the direction of the next work. One is gratitifed by the feeling of closure that comes with finishing a project, but aside for this feeling, the finishing touches to make what one has done presentable, to make sure the idea is expressed, puts the project in perspective, aligns it with what one has done so far and what one is going to do next.” (173)
Getting to glimpse Valian’s process of making friends with making work—from start to finish—put completion back in sight for me. It reminded me that exploratory writing doesn’t inevitably lead to finished essays (ouch), and that finishing them is also an essential part of the process—even when the point of that process/practice is your own growth and development, not outward productivity and accomplishment. This is to say “Learning to Work” helped me to see how I might approach completing (and publishing) projects with the same exploratory, growth-oriented attitude I bring to the raw writing I do for myself. This means working with anxieties that I don’t have to run into when I write just for myself, or when there’s no end to the project in sight. This doesn’t necessarily even mean the raw writing I do needs to be drastically altered before I can call it done, just that there’s some process of commiting to it, imperfections and all. There’s a lot of vulnerability to that, too: earthly exposure as the work moves toward shape and form out of private ideation.
How I’m putting this into practice is working in short intervals of time during which my focus isn’t just composing, but “sculpting” that raw material into something I’ll share with others. (This “write/sculpt” framework is one of the many gifts Anna Joy Springer gave me as her student. It’s similar to Peter Elbow’s growing/cooking framework for the writing process.)
Valian’s approach was initially inspired by research into human sexuality; her goal was to teach herself to see work as a source of pleasure and reward itself. But its pleasure and reward also involves completing things, and for Valian, the cost of not doing so is her own “under-development.” I wouldn’t be inclined to use that phrase—I’d want to soften it—and it did sting a bit to read that, but mostly because I recognized myself in that. I was able to take that in because of how Valian explicitly framed work as a gift you give yourself, which has little to do with one’s status or even how successfully the work is executed:
“The important thing is how much you can come to understand, which of your abilities you can develop, how far you can grow. The priorities of our culture, however, are completely different. The culture decrees that you should do what you are good at rather than what you most like to do; that what you produce rather than what you get out of what you produce is what counts; that your ability, reflected in achievements, is what matters. Given cultural expectations, it is all too easy to equate personal and professional worth. Once the two are disentangled, work becomes less symbolic and therefore less problematic.” (172)
Does all of these overly romanticize discipline and grit? Is it possible to engage with the word “work” without slipping into its capitalist connotations? How would the message shift if it was about “learning to play” instead of “learning to work”? What might contemporary understandings of neuro-developmental types like ADHD add to this psychodynamic approach (i.e., that importance and motivation/activation are often far removed)? These are good questions, and I’m definitely glossing over some of the counter-points I could make or add to Valian’s framework. But I still appreciate that Valian treats showing up to, and making, work as a gift you can give to yourself, a gift that is unalienated and embodied and there for us to find even (and especially) when our situation feels impossibly tangled and unworkable.
ON LEARNING NOT TO WORK
I might be burying the stakes here: I quit my job. I quit my job! I don’t yet have much coherent to say about it, except that it is a great relief and a bit bittersweet. I will have more to say once it’s sunken in (presumably some time after I actually work my last day). These things might be about the creative and emotional block that has been not being fully honest with myself about what I experience in my day-to-day (a mismatch with my inner self) and also about what I can do in response to it.
I don’t entirely know what will come next, but I do know these things: I’m coming out of barista retirement to work part-time a very sweet coffeeshop and gallery that opened here in Shelton, the small town where I live; I miss teaching; I will be putting energy back into working for myself through creative advising, classes, and other offerings TBD; the internet is full of terrible-seeming job listings, underpaid jobs moving money around on the internet. Truly henious! What is this world? Why all the acronyms?
I wanted to share the latest update to the medical leave saga I’ve shared here, and also share a few observations about jobs—I guess the shock of realizing that the best thing to do for myself as an artist might look on the surface like shooting myself in the foot career-wise (or at least money-wise), and that this might not be such an irresponsible thing after all in the long term.
I appreciated by Rachael Stephen’s video about getting a job at a coffeeshop, given the financial precarity/unsustainability of working for herself as a content creator, and finding in that a salutary balance. (I also appreciated her surfacing the conversation about how the economy is shifting in this weird digital era.) I, too, kind of miss being out in the world (that isn’t my house), so I’m excited to see what being in it brings my way.
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Read more Essence of Toast — Archive of past letters