Why Do We Talk So Much About Goals?

It’s okay to not have goals.

Have you ever noticed how much we talk about goals in our culture? From new year’s resolutions to aspirational advertising, we live in a very future-oriented, acquisition-based, improvement-obsessed paradigm. We rarely question the assumption that we need goals. But do we?

The problem with a goals mindset is that it orients us permanently toward the future. We are always thinking about the arrival. Achievement, satisfaction, even happiness all exist in the space where the goal is realized. But of course when we get there, we realize there are ever more goals. It never ends. There’s always more to do, always more to get. There’s nothing wrong with having ideas about where we’re headed, nothing wrong with dreams. But if we’re regimenting our lives around goals, we risk neglecting the quality of our lives.

Is this the case for you? Only you can decide if it is, and what that means to you, but if the space of your day is taken up by how much you can get done, and you find yourself exhausted, dissatisfied, and experiencing existential terror as the years tick by and you still haven’t found purpose or fulfillment, you may want to examine your relationship with goals and their associated outcomes.

Consider that you may not want what you think you do.

I used to have a big dream for myself. I wanted to get a novel published. And I failed. It devastated me. I wasn’t able to write another novel for fifteen years. Now I’m on the road to publication again, but I’m going about it differently. While I nominally have a goal of publishing my novel, I recognize that what I really want is how I imagine publishing will make me feel. Like I’ve arrived, like I’m a real writer.

It's okay to want those feelings. But it’s important to recognize that publishing isn’t the only, or even the best, way to get them. And letting a goal dictate how you feel about yourself is a dangerous game. The world is full of stories of middle-aged folks having crises because the things they thought they wanted didn’t make them feel happy or fulfilled.

I only started feeling like I was a real writer, like I’d arrived, when I started taking myself seriously despite any goal and achievement thereof. This is what brings fulfillment and eventual happiness: the ability to find value in the self for how you live rather than in what you achieve. Achievements are nice but they’re icing. When you live based on a clear understanding that it’s the feelings around achievement that you are actually craving, you can begin to look for other, smaller ways in your daily life to attain those.

Here's what that looks like in reference to my example of wanting to feel like a real writer: I write as much as I can, I regularly put stuff out on a blog while I toil away at the larger project of my novel, I insist on seeing myself as a real writer and describing myself as such. Together all this adds up to a feeling of arrival. What about publishing my novel? I still really want that! But I feel good about the journey now, as challenging as it can sometimes be. That’s a big win.

Goals talk is only just talk because that’s what it’s supposed to be.        

We all know go-getter types who actually do set goals and achieve them, as if they’re part machine, but most people we know probably spend more time talking about their goals than they do actually achieving them. We’re probably a bit like that ourselves. Most of us use goals talk to feel like we’re doing goals. Imagining accomplishing our goals feels like we’re actually doing it in the moment. But the come-down is that later we feel awful when we don’t accomplish them. It’s a bit like a drug reaction. But if we understand that this is what goals can do for us, give us a chance to test out ideas and have good feelings in the moment, we can have fun goals talk without the hangover.

I’ve learned over time that goal setting is best done sparingly, if at all. My quality of life is higher without them. As I point out above, this doesn’t mean living without any idea of the direction I’m headed. But I no longer use a goal setting methodology (visualize outcome, create steps for achievement, feel bad when things aren’t going well, consider it a failure if I don’t realize the goal…). Instead I focus on how I want each day to feel. Sometimes I want to feel busy and accomplished, and sometimes I just want to sink into an endless peaceful moment. Then I find activities that go with those feelings. Somehow the stuff that needs to get done gets done. Most of the time haha.

You Can Learn to Fiercely Protect Your Creative Practice

Even us timid people can be bold when it comes to defending our creative space.

A friend recently commented on how fiercely I protect my creative practice. The amusing image that popped into my head of myself armor-clad with sword drawn is at odds with how I see myself usually. I lack self-confidence, and I’ll avoid conflict at almost any cost. And yet she’s right. I defend my creative practice against anything that threatens to encroach on it. Somehow I’m bold and audacious within that space.

Part of my defense involves prioritizing my creative work over other things, but much of it is the mental and emotional labor that defending the inherent value of my creative work requires. When the main work of your life is something that doesn’t earn any money and doesn’t involve caring for others (e.g. being a wife/mother), you inevitably find yourself in a position of having to protect and defend against judgement (much of which is self-judgement due to conditioned cultural beliefs), incomprehension, or just plain indifference.

How is it that someone like me, so unassuming and even timid in general, is able to so fiercely advocate for her own creative practice? Moreover, how am I able to continue to do my creative work in the face of the often inhospitable world? I’m not a warrior, I don’t believe my creative work is all that important in the grander scheme of things. I’m not out to change the world with it. I just want to be happy, and my creative practice is how I ensure that on the day to day. Creative practice is my antidepressant, you could say. That alone is reason enough to protect it, but that’s not what enables me to do so. Likewise, I believe in the inherent value of my practice, but that’s not enough to engender my fierce protective instincts.   

What enables me is the space I’ve created around my creative practice, like a buffer zone between my work and the rough edges of the world. While I created that space out of necessity, I’ve come to find that I’m a different person there. Whatever boldness and audacity doing creative work requires in the first place becomes what I use to defend my creative practice against anything that threatens it. This could be something as small as an overbooked schedule. It could be something as big as a relationship that is using up the emotional energy I need to put into my creative work. In the creative entrepreneurship spaces I have recently found myself in, it often looks like explaining that for me creativity is a way of life, a way of being in the world. It’s not part of something else, not part of a business, for example (although business could be a part of creativity…perhaps). Creative practice is the thing around which all other things revolve. It is my center.

I think a creative practice requires this kind of fierce protection. Creativity and the time and space to do creative work are so easily encroached upon. Even robust practice can erode like sand from the repeated insistence of the gentlest waves. It can happen without us noticing. Life takes over, things come up, creativity can wait. If you don’t insist on that time and space and on the importance of your creative work (at least to you, if to no one else), it will inevitably languish.

You’ll feel strident, like you’re repeating yourself endlessly (I have to do my work. No, really, I have to do my work). You’ll feel selfish (I’m sorry, I can’t do that. I have to do my work). You’ll feel weird (I know everyone is doing [the thing everyone is supposed to want to do], but I need to do my work). All this is what following your passion and purpose feels like, I think. This is what it requires from you.

I didn’t develop my fierceness overnight. It grew as my practice did, in pace with it, organically over years. So don’t worry if you don’t feel fierce about your practice. I advise clients to find one way they can prioritize their creative work, big or small. Take one vacation day a month to do your work. Cancel one activity – better one that drains you than brings you joy, but either will do – and do your work. Once you begin to experience yourself prioritizing your creative work, you’ll grow in confidence that you can find your boldness, and that your work is important enough to protect and defend. You’ll begin to want to don your armor and draw your sword in defense of it. If I can do it, you can do it.

Divergent Thinkers Have an On Switch

Misfits exist for a reason.

I’ve spent much of my life feeling like I’m doing it wrong. It’s like other people know something I don’t: they get it, and whatever “it” is eludes me. Growing up, I noticed my brain seemed to work differently than it was supposed to. The first time I took a standardized test I failed, because the questions didn’t make sense. I couldn’t pick an answer from the multiple choices because in my head I was thinking of all the contingencies, hidden variables, and alternative possibilities inherent in the question. What was supposed to be a problem of logic appeared anything but to me. I didn’t realize at the time that this was simply a symptom of my highly imaginative, non-rational (intuitive) way of seeing the world. My logic isn’t based on rational cognition.

When you grow up feeling like you’re doing it wrong, like you may even be a bit stupid because you just can’t figure things out the way you’re supposed to, you start to wonder what your use is. What possible role can you play in society when you can’t understand the rules of the game? Maybe you allow your difference to be pathologized: there’s something wrong with you, clearly. It’s not developmental, exactly, but it could be psychological and emotional. Therapy and meds may help you be a normal person who can have a normal life. You look at the people around you living out their normal lives seemingly happily, or happily enough, and of course you think that’s what you should want.

Or maybe you consign yourself to your fate. For whatever reason you just weren’t born for this world or this time, it sucks and it’s unfair, but you have to accept your alienation because what choice do you have? This is who you are. Therapy and meds don’t make much of a difference because your difference is more fundamental than emotions or psychology, or even a chemical imbalance. It’s about who you are. But still, there’s that question. What is your use? Why are you like this, what purpose does it serve? Because you know you’re not alone. There are others out there like you, and there has to be a reason this type of person exists, some evolutionary advantage to being out of step, of not seeing things the way others do.

I think there is. Divergent thinking may not be valued during times when maintaining a status quo is seen as paramount (which is most of the time), and it may even be feared and rejected during those times, but when the status quo is experiencing a great upheaval, divergent thinking is exactly what we need. Times of turmoil, when old ways no longer function well or are being outright challenged, are times that need people who can see opportunity in chaos, who even thrive in such circumstances.

Something interesting happened to me when the Pandemic of 2020 hit. It was like I had an on switch inside of me that got flipped. Even though I experienced the worry and sadness I saw leveling those around me – and I was cognizant that I occupied a relatively privileged position of being able to avoid many direct and personal effects of the Pandemic – that year was the most creatively rich and fulfilling of my life thus far. It was as if the confusion and disquiet of crisis awoke in me some kind of constructive response that I’m still not sure I fully understand. I had a distinct feeling of “this is my time.” I can’t explain it, but there it is. I’ve spoken to others who had a similar reaction, so I know I’m not the only one.

I think this is the reason divergent thinkers exist. We play an important role in society at all times, but in particular it’s those liminal periods of uncertainty and ambiguity where we can shine. Where other people may react with fear and grief, we sense the possibilities and may even feel excited by them. And this is one of those times in history. Maybe the Pandemic didn’t hit your switch, but something else might. One thing that holds misfits back from recognizing our potential is that while we are usually aware of how we don’t see things the same way as others, we aren’t as aware of how we do see things. Often we can feel guilty about our true thoughts and feelings because they aren’t the "correct” ones.

You’re not doing it wrong. In fact, you may be doing it right. Wake up to your potential by learning the value of seeing things differently. And you may find that you’re not that different from the many other misfits out there, looking for their people!

The Protagonist Bias and Creative Rejection

The truth is, almost nothing is personal.

Dealing with rejection is part of being creative. If you’re putting your work out there in the world, inevitably you’ll experience rejection of some kind. Our protagonist bias can make dealing with it more difficult. This is a bias that emerges from seeing ourselves as the protagonist of our own life story. It can make us take things personally when the truth is, almost nothing is personal.

Humans are meaning-makers. That’s what we do all day long. We interpret what we see and experience by creating a story from it. The story is how we understand the sequence of events, and anchors us in linear time. It’s causal by nature: something happens that has effects, which then have more effects. Even if we’re not consciously aware of the story we’re creating, our brain is constantly doing this for us in the background.

Understanding our lives through stories has its benefits, but there is one major drawback. It positions us as protagonist, and gives rise to an illusion that everything that happens to us is somehow about us. This is reinforced by the stories we see and read for entertainment. The basic plot of a novel or TV show centers on the experiences of a protagonist, and all events are connected to them either in that the protagonist makes them happen or is impacted by them.

As the star of our own story, we suffer from the bias that what we experience is personal. When we hear people laughing in our vicinity, many of us have a knee-jerk reaction that they’re somehow laughing at us, even when we know it’s extremely unlikely. We’re interpreting everything from our own perspective, and it’s a natural and adaptive trait to assess things in terms of what they have to do with us. But it also leads to many faulty assumptions.

The truth is that almost nothing outside of ourselves has to do with us. That is to say, our own reactions belong to us, but the outer circumstances that elicit them do not. Knowing this can help immensely when it comes to dealing with how people receive our creative work. We may feel that people’s reactions to our work have to do with us, but they don’t. Not at all. Two different people can see entirely different things in our work. Their reactions are 100% to do with them and their own internal mindscapes.

Not taking people’s reactions personally is difficult, though, even when we know they aren’t. That’s because we identify with our own work. We see it as an extension of ourselves. This is where we need to detach. We need to make a hard break between our work as it belongs to us during creation, and our work out in the world where it belongs to consumers. Once we put it out there, it’s not ours any longer. It has a life of its own. Many writers I know don’t read reviews, either negative or positive, to help them make this break. What people think about their books doesn’t have anything to do with them.

The one sticky area is when you have work out specifically for critique, which is often part of the creative process whether it occurs within the confines of a critique group or when you have your work on submission. I’m not going to lie, critical feedback can suck, because you can’t make that hard break. You have to listen to and parse feedback in these cases. But the same rule applies: any feedback is ultimately 100% about the person giving it. It’s not the truth, it’s just an opinion. But it can be very difficult to deal with critical feedback and I advise choosing critique partners and other feedback opportunties with extreme care. Remember: ultimately your creative process is yours. You get to decide what it looks like and what kind of feedback you let into your life.

Don’t feel bad about being cautious about or even rejecting feedback. Protecting yourself is necessary, particularly if you are an HSP and very sensitive to feedback, critical or otherwise. Your creative practice is sacrosanct, and anything that interferes with the joy you feel in creative process needs strong boundaries around it. Don’t let anyone tell you that you have to get feedback, or that you have to listen to it. You don’t. Feedback does not necessarily make work better. Listening to the wrong kind of feedback can make your work worse. Pay attention to your feelings in these matters. Feedback only helps if you are open to it, and it’s the right kind. Trust yourself. What matters is how you feel about your work, not what other people think about it.

Doubling Down on Creativity in Difficult Times

Make your creative practice sacred.

When life gets busy and we’re stressed out and exhausted, what are some of the first things we jettison? You’d think it would be what’s causing us so much anxiety, but no, we double down on those things. If we just work harder, faster, more, we’ll get things right and life will feel good again. It’s the pleasurable activities we jettison: our hobbies, our leisure time. Let me just get through this busy period, we think, and then I’ll have time for the fun stuff.

I’ll have time this weekend to write. I’ll have the energy then. Maybe.

I want to wait until I have the space to really focus on my music. Next month after all these deadlines, then I’ll be able to really dedicate myself to it. Maybe.

My new year’s resolution is going to be to spend more time painting. Next year is going to be my year. Maybe.

How many weeks, months, and years have gone by like this? Life always gets in the way somehow, doesn’t it? And meanwhile we still don’t feel creatively fulfilled or like we’re fulfilling our potential. I’ll get to it when life doesn’t feel so hard, we promise ourselves. Except life always feels hard.

I spent years of my life making promises to myself that I’d finally finish a novel, and I never did. Until I realized something about creativity that changed everything for me. Creativity isn’t a luxury. It’s not something we have to wait until we are free and clear of life difficulties so we have the space and time to do it. Creativity is the way through difficulties. We have evolved the capacity for creativity because it’s how we move through challenge.

Think about it. Which of our ancestors were more likely to survive existential threats? Often it was probably the ones who were willing to get creative. Creative thinking has been selected for throughout the evolution of human beings. Creativity isn’t something that is gifted on some and not others. It’s a type of cognition and energy we can all tap into that can lead us through difficult times in life if we trust it.

Instead of waiting for the space and time for creativity, we can use creativity to make time and space for ourselves. The key is to find a creative practice that is generative for you (energy-producing rather than energy-draining), and use it as a way to heal and regenerate from the daily traumas of life. When you hear people talking about creative practice as sacred or spiritual, this is what they mean. It is a way to step away from ordinary, stressful life and reestablish your connection to your inner peace and joy. This is creative practice as sabbath, or as a meditation or mindfulness practice. It is creativity as refuge.

It sounds good, but perhaps isn’t easy to put into practice, right? Like any habit, in the beginning it requires a little pushing, but not in the form of a grand plan or schedule. Not in the form that has failed in the past: I’ll carve out some time this weekend, next month, next year. I’ll put in fifteen minutes a day, starting Monday. The problem with plans is that they always start in the future. Plans are thoughts, not action. And when you make a plan for something that is in actuality quite a tricky thing to establish as a habit, there is going to be a high failure rate.

The secret to having a creative practice is to do it now. That’s right. Why not now? But you have all this stuff you have to get done…. Do you, though? Right now, this instant? Do you have five minutes? That’s enough to start. Make a doodle. Write three sentences. Sing something. Then go do those things you feel you have to do, and let the knowledge that you just experienced something creative, sacred, all your own go with you as you continue through your day.

That’s your start. Do it again the next time you think about being creative. How about now? Be creative now. Let that part of yourself lead you through a few minutes of special space and time that is your secret little sabbath-in-the-middle-of-the-day.    

Are You Afraid to Put Your Work Out There? This Will Help

Eight guidelines to help you get brave about putting your work out into the world.

Time and again the number one thing my coaching clients say holds them back from fulfilling their creative dreams is fear of putting their work out there in front of other people’s eyes. Fear of negative judgement, or worse, being totally ignored (this is a far more common outcome) can become a real creative block, and keep people from even starting a creative project. It can hold others back from finishing, because the thought of putting their work out into the world for consumption steals the joy from their private creative practice. The chasm between the subjective experience of creative practice and the objectification of your creative work in the public sphere can feel vast and terrifying.

I understand this fear because it held me back for many years. I experienced a lot of rejection in the early part of my writing career and it eventually wore me down until I was unable to write at all. When I started up again, I knew I would need to develop some better mental skills to help me deal with this fear of being seen and judged. I still struggle with putting my work out into the world, but I’ve come up with some guidelines that have helped me, that I share with clients and now am sharing with you.

1. In the beginning, it’s just hard. There’s really no getting around the fear and anxiety of taking those first steps of putting your work out there. But I promise, it gets easier, and the rest of the tips are meant to help with that.

2. Volume. When I started my blog, each post felt so precious because I felt like I had to make each perfect. This made me feel extra vulnerable. But after I had a bunch up, I stopped worrying so much that each one was excellent. If you are working on larger projects, like a book, consider joining a critique group where you can get feedback on small bits.

3. Consistency. What doing your creative work regularly helps with is realizing that not all your stuff has to be brilliant. I write a weekly blog post. Some weeks I’m on fire, others definitely not. I post regardless (mostly). Some of my blog posts are just “eh.” That’s okay. Same goes for my fiction.

4. Nothing is personal. The way people receive your work and what they think about it is 100% about them, and you have 0% control over it. Repeat this to yourself as much as necessary.

5. Be specific about the feedback you want! Asking for and receiving feedback deserves its own separate post, but in the beginning when you are putting your work out and need some encouragement and practice with hearing people’s responses to it, tell your friends exactly that! Ask them to tell you one thing about your work that they liked, that inspired them, that stood out, that made them think. Tell them you do not want any critiques or advice! Just positive, loving, encouraging words. And choose which friends you ask carefully. You know which friends are great at positive support, and which aren’t. Then, believe what they tell you.

6. Make sure you enjoy doing your creative work. If you enjoy your process and feel good about your work, that will go a long way toward insulating you against difficult feedback.

7. Take all feedback with a grain of salt. Again, people’s opinions on your work are 100% about them. Pick and choose what you listen to depending on context, the type of creative work you are doing, and ultimate goals. Be your own advocate, believe in yourself and your own judgement, and stand strong in your own truth.

It’s always hard to put yourself out there. But you can get better at it with practice. Don’t feel bad if you struggle with it! Us creatives are all in the same boat with this, and believe me when I say that we all feel similar fears, insecurities, and self-judgment. So here’s my final guideline:

8. Reach out to other creatives! Find people who aren’t afraid to talk about their struggles and difficult feelings, and share their journey with you. Knowing you’re not alone is one of the best ways find strength on your own journey. And you’re not alone, I promise.

How Group Shaming Makes Change Particularly Difficult for HSPs

How to recognize and deal with the phantom judges in our heads.

Shame is one of the most powerful tools communities use to maintain cohesiveness. The other is the feeling of belonging. These are two sides of the same coin, and that’s why you often see them paired in group dynamics. The stronger the explicit rules of belonging, the stronger the shaming when you violate them. Take a cult, for example. You don’t just leave a cult, you’re excommunicated.

Belonging is a very pleasurable emotion. In involves feeling safe, loved, accepted. Group shaming is a deeply painful emotion, because it strikes at the core of our very being: we feel rejected, bad, alone. These emotions are hardwired into us, because sticking with the group elevates our chances of survival. When we stray from group norms, we may be shamed, but more importantly, we expect to be shamed. We know what’s coming.

It’s this expectation of shaming that makes it so difficult to effect changes for ourselves that lead us down a different path. Any time we challenge the status quo we are making ourselves vulnerable to criticism, which in my opinion can be and often is wielded as a shaming technique (as opposed to constructive critique, advice, or feedback, though these can also hide a secret heart of shaming, particularly if they are unsolicited). Other people may or may not criticize us for our new choices, but the judges in our heads sure will. These judges are our internal Greek chorus of conformity. They exist to make sure we don’t stray too far from the group. They have our best interests in mind, evolutionarily speaking. But emotionally speaking? Not so much. They make us feel like shit when the stakes aren’t basic survival. Which mostly they aren’t. But our brains don’t know that.

Change is difficult for a lot of reasons, but these internal judgy voices are a major reason. They’re the voices that say, “What will everyone think?” And, “What if people think I’m wrong/bad?” “What if people decide they don’t like me?” They’re the voices that start up every time I publish a blog post about one of my opinions. What if people disagree (and tell me I’m stupid, wrong, and bad)? When I do an interview about my ideas on anti-productivity, these are the voices that tell me the collective rage of my productivity-obsessed culture is going to come at me and blow me straight to hell. That may sound like hyperbole, but psychologically speaking that’s what being group shamed feels like, because often group norms are tied to morality. Doing the right things means you’re a good person. Doing the wrong things means you’re bad. Shaming is a form of emotional ostricism. Its purpose is to give you a taste of the hell of permanent shunning.

If you are an HSP, it’s likely your internal shame-throwers are particularly vocal. Part of the reason is because HSPs are often shamed for being the way they are. While HSPs comprise a relatively large minority (estimates are 15% to 20% of the population), it is a form of neurodiversity that is not widely recognized or understood. That is changing, but most HSPs have had the experience of being shamed or at least misunderstood for their high sensitivity, strong emotional reactions, and difficulties managing anxiety in “normal” environments like school and work. Being an HSP is painful not just because of the condition itself. It’s also because we are so misunderstood, and often do not even understand ourselves because of the lack of informed studies about how the HSP brain operates.

HSPs are also particularly vulnerable to these internal judgers because we are highly sensitive to any kind of feedback, good or bad—this has to do with how their brains function at a neurochemical level and can’t be therapied away. This is why tough love generally backfires on HSPs. Please, for the love of everything, do not use tough love on an HSP. Their brains will code you as a danger, and this will impact an HSP’s ability to trust you. I’ve lost friendships because my brain was not able to move past the scarring experience of tough love, as much as I wanted to move past it! Competitiveness and aggression are likewise damaging to HSPs. Gentleness and kindness are what work for HSPs. Extreme gentleness and kindness (or what seems extreme from a “normal” perspective). HSPs will blossom and flourish in a gentle and kind environment where we feel safe. If the environment does not feel safe, we will shut down.

Being aware of how our internal judges seek to keep us on the path of conformity is the first step in changing our lives through daily choices. Your internal judges are not you. They are the collective voice of your cultural conditioning. If you disagree with them, that’s fine! You will feel uncomfortable doing so, especially at first. It’s enough just to start to pay attention to when you disagree. Start thinking about why. What do you think? How do you feel? Respect your own thoughts and feelings. They’re real, they’re legitimate. You’ll be surprised how life can start to feel better just through the simple act of paying attention to what you think and feel. Eventually you’ll learn to recognize the judgy voices for what they are: phantoms. They may always be there, because cultural conditioning runs deep, but calling them out for what they are will give you power that you’ll be able to use to make decisions more in line with what you really want.

On Belonging

If you want to feel you belong with others, first you must feel you belong to yourself.

I’ve recently joined Andy Mort as one of the facilitators of The Haven, his gentle community for deep thinkers and sensitive creatives, where I run a forum called “From Burnout to Book.” Writers of all kinds and at all stages of their own writing journey can find kind and compassionate encouragement there, and I invite you to join us. If you sign up to the Haven using my special link, you will get a free 45-minute consultation with me about your writing, so I can learn how to better support you in the forum. The Haven is a wonderful community and a true home for us gentle souls, and we’d love to have you there!

The Haven is built around a year-long contemplation of themes that change with the seasons, and in October we are reflecting on belonging (we just recorded a podcast episode about it that will be coming out soon, available here). Let me ask you a question: Do you feel like you belong, truly belong, anywhere?

I’m one of those people who’s never felt they belong. I have always had this deep-seated feeling that I don’t belong here, in the world. It mostly manifests as a sense that other people all know what they’re doing, they belong in their own lives, but I somehow don’t. It’s like an existential version of imposter syndrome. I can’t say where it comes from, though I have my suspicions it has its roots in being a shy, highly sensitive kid who often experienced rejection and was deeply hurt by it. Its origins don’t really matter to me, though – what interests me is how belonging, and not belonging, have resonated through my life, and how I see these things now, as an adult looking backward and forward from the middle stage of my life.

Being a misfit is a part of my sense of self (I’m an Enneagram 4, after all!). It’s something I value, but also something that has always been painful. I left the US at age 16 to go live abroad, because I did not feel I belonged in my home culture. I spent the majority of the next decade living in other countries, because not fitting into a culture where I was a foreigner was easier than not fitting into my own (and I genuinely love learning about other cultures and studying languages).

What I realized after a while, though, was that living overseas was in part an attempt to escape myself. For a time in a new place I was able to pretend I was a different person, exploring different ways of being in a new culture, but my self always caught up with me eventually. Usually around the one-year mark, if you want to get specific. Wherever I went, there I was.

It’s telling that I didn’t start to feel like I belonged somewhere until I started to feel like I belonged in myself. The sense of being rooted in myself, living the life I’m meant to live (whatever that means), is what brought me home, finally. I don’t mean physically: I’ve been back in my home culture for many years now. I’m referring to the feeling of having found my thing, and my people. And what brought me to this place, my home, as I see it, is accepting who and what I am. I’m a writer, a creative, a person who must live and be in that realm of creative energy and inspiration for the main of my time. Even if it means my life isn’t successful in a conventional sense. Even if it means I never make much money.

What does it feel like to belong? It feels safe, and unbounded by conditions. It feels like not having to change myself, or perform thoughts, feelings, or actions. You know you belong when you enter a space that was already holding you before you walked through the door. That’s how I feel in the Haven, and it’s how I feel in my own life. I have made space for myself, I am holding myself compassionately and with deep and unconditional support.    

So often we go about things in an inside-out way. If I belong with others, I’ll feel like I belong (to/in myself). If this equation isn’t working for you, try flipping it. If I feel like I belong (to/in myself), I’ll belong with others. I found my people when I became my own people. Focus on yourself, know who you are, do what pleases you. You may find that this is what turns the world toward you, and brings you to a place of greater belonging that has always already been holding space for you.

Change Your Future by Switching Out This One Word

The difference between “look” and “feel.”

So I know that’s a bit of a dramatic title. But this one little trick really can make a huge difference in your life if you let it. First, though, let me ask you a question.

Do you remember what you wanted your grownup life to look like when you were a kid?

I love asking people that question, because you get the most diverse answers. One of my friends told me she doesn’t remember having any specific dreams about the future. Another said she wanted to be a professional thinker (hey, me too!).

We are often asked to visualize our futures. It’s almost a cliché that at some point you’ll be asked where you see yourself in six months, a year, five years. Our perspective of the future is very conceptual. We are encouraged to think about what we want it to look like, in order to set goals we can then work toward.

What if instead we asked ourselves what we want our future to feel like?

To do this effectively, we need to eliminate all visual aspects of our answer. Our first reaction to this question is probably to imagine a situation, thing, or person we think will make us happy. Try cutting out the visual. Close your eyes and go into your body and ask it how it likes to feel. Pay attention to your body’s response when you ask it what feeling good is like.

For me, feeling good is a lightening and lifting in my chest, like I’m uncurling from a fetal position and throwing out my arms to embrace the sky, sun warm on my face. That’s how I want my life to feel like.

Now comes the challenging part. It’s tempting to want to embed your desired feeling back into a visual picture of all the stuff that’s going to make you feel that way. Resist this temptation! Nothing’s wrong with wanting things, but we’re trying to work a little mental magic here, so we need to de-link our desired feeling from our conceptualized futures. Instead, think about the things in your life that make you feel the way you want to feel now.

For me, it’s when I’m authentically who I am online in a way that leads to genuine connection with others. Or when I’m reading, researching, thinking, or writing. Or when I’m being my natural, unguarded and un-boundaried self with my dogs.

Now comes the easier part. Keep doing the things that make you feel the way you want to feel. Do them more. Do them every day. Find more things that make you feel that way. After a while, you’ll discover you attach your happiness less and less to the stuff you think you want, and more and more to the things you’re actually doing. You’ll have learned how to be in the moment rather than the imagined future.

But we still need or at least want goals, right? It’s difficult to live 100% in the present moment. Most of us are working toward something in life most of the time. Let’s take a look at how we can rewrite goals so they put us into the present moment rather than that imagined future.

Here are some of the things I think about when I am imagining what I want my life to look like:

• Thousands of Instagram followers.

• Money coming in.

• More friends.

When we switch out that one little word, go from look to feel, it changes how we see things. Here are some things I think about when I am focused on what I want my life to feel like:

• Having fun making dorky TikTok videos.

• Challenging myself to develop a business that fits into a creative model rather than trying to fit my creativity into a business model.

• Meaningful connection with other creatives who are putting their work out there.

See the difference? The second list of goals is both more specific and focused on how I feel. It is oriented around values such as having fun, challenging myself, and creating meaning for myself and others. Plus, these are all things that are already a part of my life. By doing this exercise, I’m learning how to value what I already have and training myself to focus on my feelings rather than acquisitions. This frees up my mind to find other creative and fun ways to continue to feel good about my life.

It takes practice to change how you think about your future, but if you work at it you’ll get to a place where you realize your happy future has arrived, and you’re already living it! 

August Prospective 2021: Thoughts on Burnout and Breaks

I’m taking an August holiday - see you back here in September!

Hello Readers! I want to thank you for visiting my blog and reading my essays. I’ve been posting weekly here for a year and a half, and it has been a joy. I plan to continue my regular posts here well into the future. Writing is how I think and learn and have fun.

I’ve decided to institute an annual August holiday from blogging. Mostly this is due to a question that has been on my mind lately: “Can I really continue to post every single week…forever?” And while I have not encountered any serious impediments thus far to doing so (my inspiration has not failed me yet!), this question just won’t leave me be. Surely at some point this will become onerous. Right? I mean, posting every single week can’t be sustainable forever. Right?

I don’t know the answer to that question. But I do know that creative work is my lifeblood, and if it ever stops being fun, that will be a very bad day. And I also know that burnout doesn’t just happen overnight. It’s a cumulative process where we push ourselves a little, then a little more, then a little more… Like a frog in a pot of water being slowly heated to boil (what a horrible metaphor, I hate it, but it aptly describes the circumstances that lead to burnout, I think). By the time we realize we are on our way to burnout, it’s often too late to forestall it.

I don’t ever want that to happen when it comes to my creative work. And lately I’ve been feeling a little tired. Traffic is down on all my platforms - here, my podcast, social media - probably because people are either on their summer holidays (Europe) or getting ready for the school year to start (US). August feels like a good time to take a break, give myself a breather, take my own staycation holiday.

And to begin to prepare myself for the next phase of creative entrepreneurship. Over the next six to eight months, I will be working on turning my creative business into an actual business. That is, launching my first major product and upping my game in market research, networking, and promotion. In addition, I’ll be readying my novel for querying or possible self-publication. It will be a thrilling but nerve-wracking time, and I want to be ready. Because I want to be able to enjoy it. I want it to be a time I remember as life-giving and full of creative joy.

So I will see you all back here in September!

What We’re Missing in Our Conversations About Creative Entrepreneurship

Creative commitment is the missing ingredient.

It’s no secret I aspire to be a part of the creator economy. I’m a creative entrepreneur: I put out creative work (essays and a podcast) on a regular basis for public consumption, and I’m seeking to monetize my work through offering coaching, Patreon tiers, and hopefully soon a creative product such as a course or ebook. I’ve joined a large a growing group of people seeking to do that same thing. Competition is fierce, rewards are scarce, but that is perhaps the nature of all business ventures. That’s not my problem with the whole thing.

My problem is that I see two things getting lost in the conversation around creative entrepreneurship. The first is that the creative part of things usually gets subsumed by the entrepreneurship part. For people who are primarily business-oriented, this is fine. But for those of us who consider ourselves first and foremost creatives, we can find ourselves being distracted from what drives and motivates us: the joy of creativity, our lifeblood.

My second problem has to do with the way we talk about entrepreneurship. We are overly focused on the external manifestations of success (think social media followers, money), and of it happening on a relatively short timescale (think a year or two). For many of us, entrepreneurship is going to look like a long, hard road of frequent failures, a success sprinkled in here and there. Most of us will never “make it,” if making it is defined by riches and fame. Some of us may perhaps find modest success. Many of us will give up.

The interesting thing is that the first of these problems can provide us with a solution to the second. Committing to creativity can see us through. The first reason is that the long, hard road of entrepreneurship looks a lot like creative life, as anyone who has ever tried to publish their writing or get noticed for their music or art will tell you. I have decades of experience in not achieving my creative dreams behind me, and while that may seem heartbreaking on the face of it (it certainly felt that way often enough), it actually has been a great gift. I am now able to truly find joy in my own creative process regardless of outcome – and this is the holy grail of creative life.

Entrepreneurship is different, of course. The point is to generate revenue through providing value, so doing it for the love of it isn’t enough. But as a creative entrepreneur, I can use my hard-learned lessons in persistence and patience to keep me on the path through the inevitable failures and disappointments. I believe that success is often simply a function of sticking it out. You keep showing up, and eventually you’re the one in the room with the biggest body of work behind you and the greatest face recognition value.

But the most valuable tool in our kit is our capacity for creative commitment. By making our commitment to creativity rather than entrepreneurship, we can weather both that long, hard road of entrepreneurship and make it a little less frustrating for ourselves. Entrepreneurial success entails making money, and there are many ways this can play out over time in the life of a creative, many or most of which we can’t predict or control. But creative success entails feeling fulfilled by your creative work. It doesn’t rely on extrinsic measurements of value such as money or esteem. It is about how you feel about your work. It’s about that joy of creativity that drives and motivates you.

Commitment to creativity through thick and thin – through sickness and in health, in other words – may seem weird, because we don’t often think of creative work in those terms. Usually we think of creativity as serving some other goal, not as something that has value in and of itself. But for creatives, it is a way of life, of being in the world. Making a commitment to your creativity can be the essential ingredient that sees you through, because what it means in a practical sense is that you keep doing your creative work regardless of how the entrepreneurship part is going. On the entrepreneurship journey sometimes you’ll be up, and sometimes you’ll be down. Your balancing force is your creative commitment.          

Are You an Analyzer or a Synthesizer? Or, What Robots Can Tell Us About Creativity

What we can’t program into AI tells us a lot about ourselves.

I started my PhD on an interdisciplinary fellowship that required me, a social scientist, to be housed in a STEM lab with other fellowship students who were in fields such as ecological engineering and biochemistry. I’ll never forget what our faculty mentor said on our first day.

“We don’t need more analyzers,” he said. “We don’t need more people who study ever-smaller parts of the problem. We need synthesizers. People who see the bigger picture and cross disciplinary boundaries.”

The fellowship was meant to train a new generation of scholars who were not constrained by the traditional academic project of specialized analysis in disciplinary silos. Unfortunately, I realized early on that while academic institutions may pay lip service to the value of interdisciplinary scholarship, the way they and their peripheral institutions (i.e. funders, publishers) are structured makes it extremely difficult to do good interdisciplinary work.

The problem is that analytical work is just easier to value within our system. We know how to fit it into existing structures of knowledge, and it’s easy to calculate its value based on known parameters. Analytical methodologies are more predictable and easily systematized. A prime example is the scientific method. It looks the same regardless of your project.

We have a system built on analysis. So what about synthesis? What is it about the work of synthesis that makes it kind of like that guest you regret inviting to the party because they’re so perplexing and disconcerting? Here’s where robots come in.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has seen amazing advances in the last fifty years, and is currently a burgeoning and exciting field of inquiry. One of the challenges is figuring out how to program self-directed learning. AI robots are skilled at analytical tasks like deduction and modeling – both important in terms of learning based on expected outcomes. But they have made few strides in synthesis – which is a learning process that results in unexpected outcomes. Analysis is inward-looking and makes use of a set of constraints that guide the inquiry and outcome. Synthesis is outward-looking and requires both an open field of inquiry and open-ended outcomes. Analysis can deliver understanding of current conditions. Synthesis can deliver new solutions to current problems.*

What are AI robots missing? According to roboticist Hod Lipson, two essential types of intelligence: creativity and curiosity. We have not yet figured out how to program and operationalize these traits in AI. Partly this is because we don’t understand how they work, particularly creativity. Creativity is fundamentally an experimental and evolutionary process. Evolution proceeds through trial and error, and without a specified or predictable end goal. It is experimental in nature, and very much dependent on a complex interplay of constantly changing inputs and incremental outputs.

Curiosity is perhaps the greatest driver of creativity, besides the problem structure itself. Curiosity is an active drive that pushes us to pursue knowledge not only about the world right there in front of us, but about abstract unknowns. It is what enables us to not only learn what we need to know about our immediate environments in order to survive, but to imagine what lies beyond the horizon. It is at the core of human adaptability and our success as a species. And on an individual level, curiosity functions in a similar way. Curious people often fare better because they’re better at handling uncertainty, ambiguity, and novelty. They’re creative problem solvers.

The challenge of programming creativity and curiosity into AI underlines just how distinctive and exceptional these traits are in human beings. They are perhaps among our most valuable characteristics, and should be fostered at every turn. While it remains to be seen if we’ll figure out how to design AI robots that match humans in these capabilities, we can intentionally direct and grow our own creativity and curiosity. And may I suggest we combine those with another trait that thus far eludes AI: kindness.

*This and the following sections on AI and robots were inspired and informed by this paper by roboticist Hod Lipson and this interview with scientist Lex Fridman.

Movement as Part of Creative Practice

Physical activity is the flip side of the coin to creative work.

I’ve noticed that the most creative people I know have a physical activity that they regularly practice. I know musicians who run, writers who do yoga, visual artists who hike. I personally love to take walks. When I ask my coaching clients to describe how their creative practice fits into their life, many talk about their physical exercise as something that is at odds with their creative practice. Exercise is often a priority for them because of its physical and mental health benefits, but they don’t generally see it as directly related to their creative practice. I encourage them to see physical activity as a part of their creative practice, the flip side of the coin to doing dedicated creative work.

The reason so many creative people have a physical practice is that movement actually makes you more creative. Most people don’t consciously understand this connection. They may think that the elevated mood generated by exercise is conducive to getting their creative work done, because it’s easier to do stuff when you’re feeling good. But actually, this isn’t the reason exercise enhances your creativity. That endorphin high from exercise is a parallel benefit to enhanced creativity but is not causally related to it. The exercise itself is what makes you more creative.

Creatives through the ages have used physical activity as a component of their creative practice, even if they do not explicitly frame it as such. The American Transcendentalist writers Emerson and Thoreau were well-known for their lengthy nature walks. Thoreau walked, or “sauntered,” as he called it, for at least four hours a day. He identified it as a spiritual practice, but the way he saw spirituality is very much how we see creativity today: as an understanding of life that arises as we gaze through the lens of our inner selves at the outside world. The Transcendentalist perspective emerged in part as a reaction to the development of empirical science that posited that the world can only be known through our observations of the material realm.

The Transcendentalists understood that an intuitive experience of the world is essential to the flourishing of the creative soul. Thoreau intentionally used his sauntering habit as a way to harmonize his body and mind and thus elicit creative thinking. In fact, he did not believe that a mind could be properly inspired unless the body was, too*, making physical activity both advantageous for and integral to creative thought.

Ironically, empirical science now backs that up. Numerous studies have shown the benefits exercise has on creative thinking (this NYT article has a good summation of them). However, some types of physical activity do serve creativity better than others. It is not a coincidence that creatives generally prefer solitary or semi-solitary types of exercise: running, yoga, hiking. Team sports, where your mind is engaged with the other players around you and the strategy of the game, are not conducive to creative thought because they focus your mind too much on the outward circumstances of the game. The goal with a physical activity as part of your creativity practice is to soothe your mind into a state where its subconscious cognitive processes switch on. These are where creativity is born and develops. Thoreau saw this method of unfocused yet guided cognition as thinking with “carelessness.”†

I encourage you to see your physical activities as part of your creative practice. Even activities like gardening count. The only requirement is that they be the type of activity that doesn’t require too much active focus on your part, so that you can give your brain the space to activate its subconscious, intuitive thought processes. Creativity thrives when we expand our perception of what counts as creative work. It’s not just the moments we sit down and start doing our creative work. There is so much that goes on behind the scenes in our brains to make those moments of “performance” possible, and you will reap the benefits if you give your brain the space and time it needs to fully access its creative potential. Integrating your physical activities into your perception of what comprises creative practice is one way to do this.

*This and other insights related to Thoreau were inspired by David C. Smith, 1991, “Walking as Spiritual Discipline: Henry Thoreau and the Inward Journey” in Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 74:1/2, 129-140. You can find the article here. It is not open access, but you can sign up to the database (JSTOR) using your personal email and read up to 100 articles a month for free.

† Ibid., 134.

Creativity Requires a Different Kind of Productivity

Making anti-productivity work for you.

Can you define productivity? Go ahead, give it a try. Or if you’re anything like me, just keep reading to see where I’m going with this haha.

Most of us would probably define it something like “doing lots of work efficiently.” We may also specify that the work has to be of a certain quality. You’re not being productive if all you’re producing is crap. Another important aspect of productivity is that you have to have an idea beforehand of what kind of work you want to get done and what it’s going to look like when you finish. This is so you can measure whether or not you’ve been productive. Did you accomplish the goal, meet expectation? Productivity is as much about judging results as it is about making them.

So. Productivity = a combination of efficiency and output that is measurable. Do you apply standard productivity goals and measures to your creative practice? I’d be surprised if you don’t. Productivity is the framework we apply to almost all types of work. Do you have a goal to do your creative work on a daily basis? For a certain amount of time? Do you have a time deadline for completing your project? That’s using a standard productivity framework.

Does it work for you?

Does it really?

Do you feel like you’re tapping into your creative potential? Do you enjoy your creative process? Do you feel creatively fulfilled? If you do, then you are suited to standard rational models of productivity. If you don’t, you may want to consider an intuitive approach to productivity. A method I call anti-productivity.

Anti-productivity is how to be productive in the creative realm. And it’s pretty simple. First you toss out all those external goals and measures. No more word counts, hours spent, timelines. Now, it’s difficult to entirely get away from such things. It’s okay if you still have vague goals along these lines, especially at the beginning. Keep reminding yourself that for now you’re experimenting with not doing it that way. You will find as you grow in skill at anti-productivity, you’ll increasingly just not care about that stuff.

The second step is to link your work to how you feel. Pay attention to your feelings and how they manifest in your body not just when you’re doing your creative work, but when you think about it at other times of the day. When you have good feelings that make you feel expansive and excited inside, that’s what you want to focus in on and explore. If something feels bad, makes you tighten up and feel anxiety, that’s your body telling you it’s not the way. Do what feels good. Put what feels bad aside for now. Eventually you’ll get to a place where you’ll trust yourself and the signals your body sends you. Your creative practice will start feeling amazing. And then you’ll take off with it, and nothing will stop you.     

It probably seems like I’m just telling you how to develop intrinsic motivation vis-à-vis your creative practice, but that’s only part of it. Intrinsic motivation helps productivity across the board, not just in terms of creativity. What I’m getting at here is that creativity is productivity in its fullest sense. Standard productivity that centers on goals and measurements is a method that has extracted some components of human labor and drive to work and rationalized them for mass production. Real productivity is inherently creative, and creative work is inherently productive. They are one and the same. We just have an incomplete understanding of what productivity is in our society, one that is suited to capitalism but not to human nature.     

Creative productivity works very differently from standard (extracted) productivity. In fact it thrives on the very aspects that have been eliminated from our understanding of productivity. Procrastination, for example. A recent study has shown that moderate procrastination enhances creativity. So pay attention to your feelings and they tell you that today isn’t a great day to do your creative work. Indirect focus is another counterintuitive part of creative productivity. Standard productivity requires sustained and methodical focus. Creativity thrives when you don’t do that, because creative thought originates in our subconscious mind and requires an unfocused, mind-wandering type of cognition (the type that happens when you are daydreaming, for example).

I like calling this anti-productivity because that appeals to the rebel in me, and I think so much of the info out there about productivity gets it wrong. I like feeling like I’m being anti-establishment and going against the grain. But you may find that a different way of conceptualizing it works for you. Playing around with ideas and framing is part of the process. Ultimately having fun has been shown to be one of the best ways to enhance productivity, so try eliminating the unenjoyable parts of your creative practice and see where it leads! You may be surprised by the results.

Interlude: What I Do When I'm Just Not Feeling It

Instead of pushing through, pivot.

You know those weeks that are an almost-comical series of awful and exhausting things? I’ve just had one of them. The blog post I was trying to write, well, it’s just not done. I could push through, put it up, but I wouldn’t feel good about it. I haven’t said all the things I want to say in it yet. It needs more time to develop.

This desire to give it more time clashes with my equally strong desire to be consistent about putting up a new blog post here every Friday. And for all the time I’ve been writing this blog, this is the first week I’ve ever felt this conflict. I’m sure it won’t be the last, though!

The usual response to this type of thing is to push through, right? I’ve made a commitment to putting up a weekly blog post. And while there will undoubtedly be weeks when I do have a good excuse for not following through, this doesn’t feel like one of them. But I’m equally committed to not forcing myself when I feel resistance turn into that particular brand of anxiety known as dread. And I’ve been feeling that this week.

I’ve written about how I believe creativity should be enjoyable. Not all the time, but most of the time. There are two reasons for this. One, if it’s not enjoyable, eventually you’ll be forcing yourself through it every time, and that’s neither sustainable nor conducive to doing your best work. Two, if it’s not enjoyable, what’s the point? Creativity is what makes my life feel like it’s worth living. It’s what gets me out of bed every morning. For me, it has to be enjoyable.

You can see my conundrum. Do I fail at my deeply held belief that creativity should not be forced, and finish that blog post even if it feels awful? Or should I fail at following through on my commitment to my readers to have a weekly blog post up on Friday?

I finally realized that this perspective was too either/or. It was so constrictive and uninspiring that it was depressing me. What was the third option here? I thought about what is exciting me right now. My fiction. This summer I’m trying to finish the third draft of my novel, The Gentle History. This is a big deal, because it will be the first finished draft of a novel I’ve been able to complete in 15 years. And I’m loving the process, which is itself also a big deal (my attempts to finish novels in the past only led to misery because I was - you guessed it - forcing things).

So I decided that this week in lieu of my typical blog post, I would post some excerpts of my novel. Will people want to read them? Maybe, maybe not. That’s not the point. The point is, I feel excited about it, and it has allowed me to continue to be in touch with my creative flow of inspiration even in an impossible week. It gives me a way of honoring my goal of putting up a weekly post, and it’s a way of sharing my process, which is also something I’m committed to. So many boxes ticked!

Sharing excerpts from a novel is challenging, because novels are longform, and excerpts are short. So these are really more vignettes, in no particular order, that give a feel for the novel.

The Gentle History a novel about a woman who discovers she drowned as a child. It best fits into the genres of literary slipstream, dark psychological, and mystery/thriller.

Draft 3; excerpts.

Sometimes I get flashes in my mind of geometric shapes sliding together, gone so fast that what I sense are afterglows, more a feeling of something visual; apparition. I wonder if they are brief revelations of the inner workings of my mind. Not its organic workings, but the way it perceives how the world fits together. Angles and planes, points and ledges, moving across and over each other, merging, folding, subsuming.

The way yesterday slides under today. Then today bends and buckles at its own horizon, and yesterday emerges again. Yesterday contracts, lengthening into a line that arrows forward in a loop that comes back around to pierce the center of a disc that is another day.

I am a single point that sometimes becomes a line and sometimes a spiral. I spin under the water, a whirlpool, I come up as a wave. I can’t remember what I remember. So I start back at the beginning.

It was dark, and I was alone.

*

When I struggle up through layers of hangover-laced sleep and open my eyes to the pitch black of my basement apartment, I can believe that this is some strange afterlife or purgatory. The house phone’s ringing upstairs. It rings and rings, stops, then begins again and seemingly again and again. Or maybe this happened over the space of days. Or all at once, just one everlasting ringing. I close my eyes on it all.

Later, I pad to the bathroom, the glow of my laptop on my bed my guiding light, keeping the door open so I can pee without turning on the overhead bulb. Then I turn on my coffee maker, which I miraculously stocked at some point so it’s ready. Coffee, a bit of milk from a fridge with the inside bulb screwed out - I find the milk by feel - and I’m back on my bed, leaning on a stack of pillows propped up against the wall, laptop on my thighs. I go straight to the Bandits & Bureaucrats webpage to see if there are any new pictures from the weekend gig.

Paige has a kickass life, she somehow made it and I didn’t. The thing is, I was always ok with that, or I think I was. She was the one who couldn’t handle things. She acted like I was jealous of her success with music and all her cool music friends, but I wasn’t. Things just started getting dark for me. I was less and less of a real person, and she took it personally. At least I think that’s what happened. But I’m not sure, sometimes I’m so utterly confused by it all.

Bandits & Bureaucrats have gotten pretty big in Philadelphia. Paige plays the cello, which makes the band stand out. I’ve never been much into music, but I liked going to Paige’s gigs. Cello is definitely my favorite instrument. I can’t stand violin, it’s too high-pitched, but cello is in the right vibrational zone for me.

Tonight there are some new pictures of their Saturday night gig. Paige sits in a purple-pink haze at the left of the stage, wrapped around her cello. Her expression is what it always is when she’s playing, serious and lost-in-it, eyes gazing at things the rest of us can’t see. In one photo she holds her bow at the ready, head cocked to one side. Her brown hair is pulled back, her face sheened with rose from the lights. She’s beautiful. I mean, really.

No, I was never jealous of her when we were still friends. I’m jealous of her now, though. All the photos of her and the band, her husband, other friends who show up here and there, all people I know but not on my own, outside of Paige…it makes me feel sick. But still I look. I want to see.

*

Minutes pass, or don’t pass. The river moves. A light in an apartment across the way comes on and is extinguished almost immediately. Another light, this time left on for an indeterminate time. I don’t notice when it goes off, only that it is no longer on. The river moves some more. I have another mini vodka, and then one more. It’s the hour of nothing, the empty hour between three and four in the morning. The space between the end and the beginning. My time. It just feels so good to sit here alone in the dark office, drinking, watching the river and the apartments across the way.

Then, there’s something in the water. It floats along near to the shore and catches in some debris. It’s large and lengthy, and it takes my brain some time to catch up with what my eyes are telling it. It looks like a person, possibly face down, what seems like its head bobbing against the debris it’s caught up in. The leg end floats wide, circles, dislodges the head, and it continues its slow float past the office. I stand, peering at it until it disappears under the bridge a few hundred feet down the river.

In this empty hour, I’m not sure I’ve seen what I think I have. Across the way, the condos are all dark now except for one, where there’s a blue flickering from a tv. I stare at it, idly trying to discern a pattern to its intermittent flash, and wondering what I should do. Was it really a body? It could have been a log, it could have been a long cushion or piece of foam – hell, it could have been just a bunch of trash traveling en masse down the watery avenue. Why had I assumed it was a person, a dead person? Now, in retrospect, it seems quite obvious that it wasn’t. I sit again and scoot the chair up to the desk, eyeing the phone. I could call it in, but if it was a dead body, does it matter if I do? There’s no one to save here. I quail at the thought of speaking to a 911 dispatcher. I’ve never called 911 before, and assume they will want me to stay here to speak with the police about what I saw. I clearly can’t do that, they might smell alcohol on me. I really can’t be sure, after all, that I really saw a dead body. It was dark, the lights along the river are not strong enough to illuminate details. More and more I am convinced what I saw was nothing more than trash, an illusion of a body.

“Dammit,” I whisper. I turn on the computer and log on. Can I send an email about it? I do a quick online search. Doesn’t look like it. There is a phone tip line. I could probably call it in anonymously.

But even doing that, for something that is increasingly vague in my mind, feels like too much. I’d be wasting their time, calling. Now I don’t even know if I saw anything at all. I could just be having flashbacks of a dream from last night, or something that came from my subconscious. It’s already gone, a phantom, another lost memory.