In Praise of Completion
I’ve had “write an update on Substack” on my digital to-do list for weeks, but something always seems to come up just as I’m sitting down to actually start – a work email or a daycare message or a text from my husband saying his throat hurts and he thinks he’s caught our son’s latest bug… It’s been shockingly difficult to find the mental clarity to write an update, even when I do have the time.
So, fuck it. Here’s an update that promises no such clarity. After all, done is always better than delayed in the name of perfection, right?
In fact, that’s a mantra I’ve been trying to work toward internalizing for years, and I think the combination of my current and most recent careers has really helped to nail it home for me. When I worked in marketing, I often had to draft content on short notice, and in many cases I knew that whatever I knocked up on the fly would be better than anything written by someone with a different skillset (and much better than nothing). Now that I work in magazine writing, that confidence in my on-the-fly drafting has helped me fill in last-minute content gaps, edit ad text, and assist with communications – on top of meeting or getting ahead of my own deadlines.
While it’s tempting to imagine what my career could have been if I’d gotten a job like this in my 20s, at least once a week I notice my experience in a previous job making me better at my current one. I’d like to believe the same is true of my personal life, for example, that the lessons learned in my previous serious relationship have helped me be successful in my marriage, but let’s not get too crazy with extending the analogies…I’m still not ready to turn all my trauma into an education just yet.
Recent Writing
Speaking of trauma, the big update in my writing life (such as it is) is that I’m still clinging to the hope of publishing my second memoir, if only by a single fingernail. I sent the proposal to an agent just this week, for the first time in over a year, and heard back the usual: lots of nice things to say about the story and my writing, but memoir is just too hard. Sigh. Maybe someday I’ll self-publish it, just so I can shake it off my brain. In the meantime I’m still planning to revise my novel and see if I can’t nab an agent with that – I just need to find a few days before the end of the year when I’m not on a work trip and my husband is up for solo parenting so I can do a revision retreat…
As for what I’ve been writing (rather than simply planning to write when I someday have the time), well, does writing half the June/July issue count? Let’s say it does. That one’s not out yet but here’s one of my favorite feature articles I’ve written, in conjunction with my colleague Kristen – I was surprised at how much fun it was putting together that feature.
Recent Reading
I’m on track to read 50 books this year, thanks again to the Libby app and audiobooks more generally. I just finished a novel called The Gunkle, by Steven Rowley, which was a delightfully funny but also poignant story about grief and family. And I’ve also read Oh, Crap! Potty Training, by Jamie Glowacki, for reasons which should be obvious…I don’t necessarily recommend it just for funsies but it was surprisingly engaging for an educational book. Oh, and I also read Doppelganger, by Naomi Klein, which is an absolutely fascinating and kind of terrifying look at mirroring in politics and personality.
A Random Joy
I brought my husband and son along with me on a work trip to Seattle last weekend, and in addition to all the delicious food and fun experiences we got to partake in, we were delighted to learn that our hotel employed a robot butler named Sparky, who visited our room to bring me a toothbrush (and spoil our son with the gift of chocolate) on our first evening. Of course, we had to call him back the next morning for a coffee pod refill, and we definitely had to stop in the lobby every time we came or went to say “Hi, Sparky!”
Lol "hudband" – this is what happens when I use my Mac after months of just using my work PC and my Chromebook 🙃