This is The Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 64: How To Rest As A Writer.

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps aspiring writers and all writers to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write every day. I’m your host, Sarah Werner, and believe it or not, life has cranked up the crazy to 11. If you listen regularly to this show, you may know that I recently completed and then launched a new writing project. I had been toying around with the idea of a story, an audio diary, a diary of a girl in space, and one day … I have all of this podcasting equipment and I got the idea to turn it into an audio diary and just read aloud the script that I had written and let people experience the story in a different way. It would also be easier for me to publish because I’m used to publishing podcast episodes, and I’m used to publishing print stuff too, but not ever for myself. All of the print stuff that I write is … I ghost write books. I write articles for other publications. There’s never been a big Sarah Werner branded publication out there with my own creative thoughts and ideas in it. So I was like, I’m going to try doing something creative in a medium that I am comfortable with.

So, I launched Girl in Space on September 18th. I spent many, many, many, many, many weeks and even months up until that creating marketing items, creating trailers and promos, doing script writing, rehearsing, and then that first episode, I really learned how to do sound design and audio editing for real with that first episode. It took me about a hundred hours, maybe a little bit more, to just fully produce that first pilot episode. So I launched it on September 18th, which was this Monday, and for whatever reason, it kind of exploded. I don’t even feel like I’m equipped to talk about this. I don’t know, but it showed up on the homepage of iTunes and was featured in Apple podcasts in the featured section. It’s currently, I think, number eight on the podcast art charts, and then number three or four on the performing arts charts. It’s like, what’s? What? What even is this? I think back, and I have so many people to thank, and one of those people is you.

I sent out an email a while ago to my Write Now podcast mailing list, and I said, “Hey, when this comes out, if you want to download the first episode and maybe subscribe, I’d be really grateful,” and I think you did that. You did it. You did that, and because of you, I think you’ve catapulted us into this whole weird new place where Apple just tweeted about us a few minutes ago and everything is insane and wonderful, and it’s because of you. So, if you have subscribed to Girl in Space on iTunes or wherever it is you get podcasts, thank you. If you haven’t, hey, it’s never too late. You can help keep this crazy carousel of fun going, but I’m just humbled and overwhelmed and surprised and thrilled, and so, so, so grateful that at least for this first week, Girl in Space has seen some success. So, gosh, thank you.

This actually leads into today’s topic, which is how to rest as a writer, but I initially got the idea from one of the people in the I am a writer Facebook group, which you can join for free out of Facebook. This is from group member Bethany, and she posted something I want to read to you. She posted, “I’m currently in the self-loathing phase of my writing journey, exhausted and burned out. Writing just gets harder and not easier. My fear is becoming a whole entity that cripples me to the point of wanting to quit for good. Then, that thought depresses me because writing is the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do since I knew it was a thing when I was three years old. I cannot get past the blank page anymore, as if I don’t have control over my body.”

So, Bethany wrote this a couple of days ago, and it really resonated with me. I think if you write to any degree during the day, or even just work hard on your passion projects or any other projects, you might understand this feeling. She uses the word self-loathing, but beneath that, I’m hearing these undercurrents of being exhausted and burned out, of not being able to move forward, of wanting to quit, of not being able to drag yourself onto that blank page. I want to talk about this today in conjunction with the Girl in Space launch, because this has also happened to me. So I mentioned earlier that I put a good hundred or more hours into that first episode, and it’s not even a huge episode. It’s like 26 minutes long. The script was about 20 pages. So it’s not this huge project, but at the same time it consumed me, and even today, as I check my Twitter, as I check Facebook, as I check the ranking on the Apple podcast charts, it still consumes me. The knowledge that I have 11 more episodes to record consumes me.

I’m a part of a Pathfinder group, and Pathfinder is sort of an offshoot of Dungeons and Dragons, if you’ve ever heard of that or played that before. So, we had some friends over for that yesterday, and we started at 2:00 PM and by 6:30 PM, I had just fallen into this coma, myself, not my character. I would stand up and my legs felt like jelly and I couldn’t move and I was kind of falling asleep, even though the story is really riveting. Finally, I just said, “I’m so sorry guys, but I need to stop.” I think they were very gracious and they said, “Oh, okay, do what you need to do.” So I went to bed. It was 7:30 and I was exhausted. I just laid down and I remember thinking to myself, “I wish I could lay down more because I’m so tired.” I was laying on my back, staring up at the ceiling, wishing I could become one with the bed or maybe somehow sink through the bed into a form of deeper rest.

It had been a long week. In addition to launching Girl in Space, which took up a lot of my creative and mental energy, as well as my usual normal energy, I’m also … I do freelance work, like I said. I do a lot of writing and it had just been a very busy week, lots of meetings, lots of face-to-face, lots of interviews, and I was just so dead, and I think often our answer is to keep pushing. So, like Bethany said in her Facebook post, I keep trying to write. I keep trying to push. I keep trying to get words onto the blank page. For me, I keep trying to … what’s the word these days? Hustle? I keep trying to hustle. I keep trying to not stop. I keep trying and trying and trying, and that’s good, right? Never give up. Keep trying. Never stop. Never surrender. That’s good advice, isn’t it?

Some of you who’ve been listening to the show for a while may know that back in April, 2017, I left my full-time job at a marketing technology agency. I’d been a content strategist there for five and a half years or so, and while I loved my work and while I loved the people that I worked with, I was just simply burned out, and so I said, “I’m going to take a sabbatical and do my own thing for a while.” A sabbatical is just a big, fancy, professional-sounding name for a break. So, I’m going to go just focus on living for a while. My husband and I kind of talked it over and financially it would be okay. We don’t live a very glamorous life. I don’t live in a mansion. I live in a very, very tiny house in the Midwest, and so we could take a break for a little bit, but you know what? My last day at my job was on a Friday. That Monday, I was working already.

We had had some freelance stuff that was coming in. People knew that I was transitioning out of my full-time job and so that Monday morning, we had freelance writing work and I was like, “Well, I’ll just … I’m a little nervous about the financial situation, so I’ll just do a few of these writing projects just to make sure that we’re covered, just to make sure.” Spoiler alert, I never took my sabbatical. I just kept putting it off because freelance work kept coming in and I kept saying, “Well, I’ll take my sabbatical next month. I’ll rest later.” I just kept kicking the can further down the road, to use a cliche, and I’ve thought about it and I’ve thought about it and the idea of a sabbatical is beautiful.

When I think about a sabbatical, a week or two of just reading and drinking tea and going for walks outside and resting, my heart fills with joy and this beautiful, restful sense of peace, so it’s not something I don’t want to do. I think I want to do it very much. So why do I keep putting it off? Why do I, in fact, go the other way and keep hustling even harder? I’m talking about this today, because I think that it might resonate with a lot of writers, especially if you are the type of writer who works a full-time job, or maybe has a lot of family duties, and you’re trying to just fit everything into this mad cap schedule, and you hear from me that, “Oh, you need to write 200 words a day, maybe over your lunch break. You need to spend time with your family. You need to do your job. You need to read a book.” You’re like, “Sarah, you’re telling me I need to do 12 things every day. When am I supposed to have time to rest?” You have a great question, my friend. This is a great question. I think I’m still wrestling with it a little myself, but I also have some thoughts that I want to share with you about it.

So, I may just be speaking for people in the United States. I live in the United States. I’m in the Midwest, where we have this good, old-fashioned, Protestant word ethic. We work really hard, and I think there is an enormous stigma against rest. It sounds like a little silly because our bodies are made to need rest. Sleeping is one of the major events in our lives. We’re technically supposed to spend one third of our lives sleeping. It’s healthy. It’s part of how our bodies work. It heals over our brains. It heals over our bodies. It allows certain processes to happen. Sleep is a very necessary biological function, but if you talk to people, there’s this certain awe that we have of people who eschew sleep, of people who don’t seem to need as much sleep. In fact, there seems to be a sort of contest going about how exhausted you can make yourself.

So, if you think like water cooler talk, all the co-workers are hanging out in the break room or the water cooler or wherever it is you hang out, and you’re like, “Oh man, I was up till 11:30 last night,” and everybody’s like, “Whoa,” and then the next person’s like, “Well, I was up until midnight,” and “I was up until 1:00 AM,” and “I was up until 2:00 AM,” and then “I pulled an all nighter,” and everybody’s like, “Whoa.” It’s treated like this awesome accomplishment if you somehow deprive yourself of sleep. So it’s seen as this tough, cool thing. I remember it was like that in college too. It was like, “Well, I was up all night studying for this test,” and “Oh man, we partied until 4:00 AM,” and whatever. So, there’s this weird, unspoken stigma against sleep, but there’s also this weird, unspoken stigma about resting.

I worked for a long time for a very progressive fund tech startup, and there was this one time we were doing an expansion of the building and they were building this large room and the inside of it was being painted just pure black. We all knew it was for a new video studio, but at the time, I started joking like, “Oh man, that’s going to be our nap room, and there’s going to be nap pods, and it’s going to be pitch black and we can rest and take a nap over lunch.” I said that at the time because I was very interested in productivity and I was reading about how all of these CEOs and extremely productive people were actually taking naps in the middle of the day, not for three or four hours at a time, but just a 20-minutes power nap. I was reading about the benefits of just taking those 20 minutes, letting your brain shut down, and then going back to your work feeling refreshed instead of eating a giant lunch and then feeling like you’re made out of sludge by the time 2:00 rolls around and pumping yourself full of more coffee.

So, I remember suggesting this nap pod idea, and just getting laughed at, and then having to sort of laugh it off as a joke myself. I got the response of, “Oh yeah, naps, that’ll make everyone productive,” and “Yeah, we want to pay you to sleep on the job, ha ha,” but it was very uncomfortable because I had been kind of serious. They say that driving tired is very similar to driving drunk or driving under the influence. So why would you want someone in that condition pushing through a deliverable for a client, but there is this stigma. There’s the stigma that if you need to rest, you are lazy. If you need to rest, you cannot possibly keep up. If you need to rest, you are seen as a less than worthwhile employee.

Again, I’m not advocating that people take three hour naps at their desk at work, because I have had coworkers in other jobs who I’ve seen just sleeping for hours at their desks, and yeah, it’s not great for your professional image. Maybe it’s just this culture of toughness, this culture of self-denial, this culture of, you need to be working every minute of every day to make the corporation that you’re working for more and more money, that you need to somehow hurt yourself or kill yourself for your job, that you need in addition to your job, a side hustle for the gig economy, which I, myself, participated in. When I was working in my full-time job, I had side gigs, so I would get done working my eight hour day. Before that, I would be working. After that, I would be working. There comes a point where you just never stop working and your health begins to deteriorate.

I love the idea of hustle. I love the idea of working towards something that is important to you and something that you love, especially if you are looking to change the way you’re living. So, I love that aspect of hustle. What I don’t love is that we sacrifice our health for it. We sacrifice our wellbeing. I’m saying this to you as … well, hopefully not a hypocrite, but as someone who’s experienced it. I do this to myself. We had friends over for Pathfinder and at 6:30, my body just shut down and then I slept for more than 12 hours. My body is falling apart, and yet we keep on. We keep pushing ourselves, whether to impress a boss, impress a spouse, impress a friend, whether to appear tough or, I think in my case, my sense of self-worth is tied up in what I produce. I think to myself, “Well, if I’m not producing anything, then I’m not worth any.” So if you’re exhausted, if, like Bethany, you are stuck in this place of self-loathing and you can’t push forward and you’re exhausted and burned out, society will just tell you to push harder, to hustle harder, to drink more coffee, have an energy drink, but we’re not machines. We’re weird, biological bags of skin and bones and organs. We’re beautiful, delicate creatures. The simple fact is we need to rest.

Now, here comes the second part of the problem, especially if you are a writer, because when I talk about resting, I think what I’m talking about is recharging, right? It’s not just laying down and sleeping. It’s rejuvenating your brain. It’s recharging your energy so that you can go out and keep creating, because you can’t create if you have no energy. You can’t create if the gas tank is empty, figuratively speaking, because here’s the kicker. What do I do to recharge my energy? What makes me feel fulfilled? The answer is writing.

I had an argument with my husband the other day and he was like, “Sarah, you are working way too hard. You work your eight to ten hours during the day, and then when you stop, you don’t stop. You keep working.” I was like, “Well, yeah, but the eight hours stuff is for business. It’s for our freelance writing projects, and then, when I’m done, I work on what I want to work on, and that is my Girl in Space podcast, some other stuff I’m writing for fun. That’s me resting,” and he’s like, “No, you just said you’re working on it.” He said, “You’re working.” I was like, “Well, no, but when I create stuff, that’s what recharges me.” So we went back and forth on this and I realized this paradox, and that is sometimes, for some of us, especially those of us who are creative, writing can be part of resting. If you have a creative hobby that’s fulfilling, is it work, or is it rest? But can work truly be rest? Can creation truly be rest. It may seem like it, and I think that that’s, for a while, why I was overworking myself, because I forget. Because it brings me joy, I forget that creative writing, while wonderful, while it fulfills me, while it refuels my tank, it’s work. It expends energy.

So what I want to ask you today is to think about what recharges your energy. I’ve talked about this a little bit before. I have an episode about prioritizing your writing. I have an episode about being an introvert or an extrovert and how we deal with our creative energy, and it might sound like new age-y garbage, but that’s okay. I still believe in it. I want you to think about what recharges you? How do you get your energy back? How can you rest? First and foremost, I think you need to be getting sleep. If you’re a new parent, you can skip this part, but you should be getting six to eight hours of sleep a night, if not more. So, that’s one part of it.

The other part is the question I asked earlier, what recharges you? I had to sit down and actually like brainstorm a list because it was, for whatever reason, not immediately apparent to me. I originally had writing on the list and then I crossed it off and then I put it back on the list and then I crossed it off again and then I put it back on the list again, because I think it depended on what type of writing I was doing. So, writing a script or a screenplay or a novel, I think that takes creative energy, but if you want to write to collect your energy back, then that’s the more journaling side of things, writing in a journal, maybe writing a letter to a friend. That might sort of re-energize you in a way that other types of writing don’t. So, think about the different types of writing that you do, if there’s one that recharges you and helps you rest and understand yourself.

So on my list are walks in nature. I am, for whatever reason, I’m a big nature fan, and I actually recently read a scientific article about why nature recharges us and why it’s so good for us to go outside and take a walk, and I’ll link to that in the show notes for today’s episode. Also on my list are curling up on the couch with a cup of coffee and a good book, visiting a bookstore and buying way too many books, reading myself to sleep at night. I asked a few other friends, “What recharges you?” They said, “Curling up on the couch with my kids at the end of a long day, watching the sunrise on my back porch with a cup of coffee, going out with friends for drinks.” There are endless ways to recharge, but I want you to think about the one or ones that work best for you.

When you think about them, I want you to focus on the one or ones that fill you with a sense of peace, with a sense of longing, with a sense of joy, because that’s how you’re going to rest as a writer. Maybe it’s a 20 minute nap. Maybe it’s a 15 minute nap. Maybe it’s just, “Mom is going to sit in this rocking chair and close her eyes for five seconds.” Maybe it’s taking a sabbatical. Maybe it’s taking a single day off. I know that I ask a lot of you. I ask you to write and follow your passions and follow your dreams. I ask you to write and read and spend time with your family and live a meaningful life, and now I’ve just added rest to the recipe. I’m very demanding. I know this, but I think that if we’re going to do all of these things, and I talked about this in a previous episode where we looked at prioritizing writing and using a weekly schedule to balance out our work, life, passion balance, and that is, you don’t have to do these things every single day, right?

So, every single day of the week, I’m not going to say, “Okay, Monday, I need time to work, spend time with my family, read a book, write creatively for however long, rest appropriately, eat all of my fruits and vegetables, and go to three soccer games,” right? Nobody has that kind of time, or if you do, please tell me your secrets. I’m not asking you to do all of these things every day. I’m asking you to take a look at a chunk of time, say a week, and make sure you’re fitting in those things at least every week.

I’ve talked before about my very wise friend and mentor, Melissa Johnson, and how one of the first lessons that I learned from her was that balance requires sacrifice. It seems like an oxymoron or a paradox, right? It’s like, what? Balance is a good thing and it shouldn’t require sacrifice, but it does. If I’m going to spend my very limited time each day focusing on … say your three priorities are work, family, and your creative projects, maybe you only have time one day to go to work and then work on your creative project. Maybe your family gets the short stick for one day, but then maybe the next day you go to work and then you spend time with your family and your creative project gets neglected, but that’s okay because the next day is Saturday and you’re going to take your kids to the zoo and then send them off to their grandmother’s house so that you can work on your novel. So, I do think it’s possible to do all of the things, just not do all of the things every day, or do all of the things all the time, exactly at the time that we want to do them.

The question that I want to leave you with is, are you being intentional with the way that you expend your energy? Because that’s sort of getting to the root of the problem, right? If we need to rest in order to produce more energy to create more things, maybe we should be conserving the energy that we have, and we’re not expending it on useless things so that we don’t need to go overboard with the rest. I am really terrible about this. So, I get up early in the morning and I have this burst of energy that is generally fueled by coffee, but often I waste that energy. I waste it on stupid stuff like going through all of my emails. It’s like, it seems important, but it’s not actually important. If I were to write down the three things I needed to accomplish in order to feel good about the day, I don’t think that answering emails from people I never solicited emails from in the first place would be on that list, so this is a point of growth for me as well.

So the question that I’m going to challenge you to ask yourself, the question that I’m going to be asking myself this week is, am I being intentional with the way that I’m expending my energy? Am I wasting it on useless stuff or am I conserving it for that important time with my creative writing, at work, with my family, with loved ones? Then, am I building up that energy that I’ve spent with good rest, with activities that are actually restful? I’m one of those people who, I take my phone to bed and I actually sleep with it under my pillow and I can kill 45 minutes just scrolling through Instagram and not even feel like I lost 45 minutes. That is not a great use of my time, and it’s also not restful because while I’m going through Instagram, I’m not really enjoying myself. I am sort of fulfilling this social obligation that I feel I have to like certain people’s pictures or to keep up with people’s lives or to validate my sense of self-worth by seeing how many likes I got. It’s not restful because you’re searching for something, so I need to spend that resting time, doing things that are actually restful.

I would love to hear about how you rest as a writer, if you have any thoughts about rest in this side hustle, side gig economy, I want to hear your thoughts. You can always email me at hello@sarahwerner.com. That’s H-E-L-L-O@S-A-R-A-H-W-E-R-N-E-R.com. You can also go to the show notes for this episode, episode number 64, and leave me a comment there. I would absolutely love to hear from you. If I don’t respond right away, it’s because I’m taking a break from checking my email. I don’t create this podcast alone, and I want to thank you for listening to the show. I want to thank you for supporting me emotionally and financially and in so many ways. So, thank you so much for listening to the Write Now podcast.

I would also like to extend a special thanks to my Patreon supporters. Patreon is a secure, third party donation platform that lets you pledge a dollar per episode or $2 per episode or a million dollars per episode, however much the show is worth to you. You can do this by visiting sarahwerner.com/patreon. That’s P-A-T-R-E-O-N, or by simply searching for the Write Now podcast on patreon.com. Special thanks today go out to official word champion, Elise Jane Tabor, official cool cats, Sean Locke and Rebecca Werner, official bookworms, Matthew Paulson, Gary Medina, and Lilith Black, and caffeine enablers, GB Fulford, Chris Kuropatwa, Phillip Flint, Barbara Miller, Harrison Werner, Coleen Cotolessa, and War Writer. You are all wonderful and amazing and beautiful people and I am so grateful for your support, so thank you. If you would like to join this list of wonderful and amazing people, again, you can go out to sarahwerner.com/patreon or simply search for the Write Now podcast on Patreon.

Additional thanks go out to each and every one of you who have supported my show, Girl in Space. You are just amazing. I never thought that I could create something and have it resonate with so many people. So, my gosh, I am just … I’m humbled and grateful by how wonderful you are. So please keep being amazing. Keep listening to the show. Episode two will be out, not this Monday, but next Monday, October 2nd. So, listen for it then. Gosh. Yeah, I’m just … I’m so overwhelmed, so thank you.

Life is good. Writing is good. Work is good. Family is good. These are very basic things that I’m saying, but they just feel so true today. I want to add to that list that rest is good. I want you to take care of yourself so that you can produce your best creative work this week. I want you to ask yourself, am I being intentional with the way I’m expending my energy? With that, this has been episode 64 of the Write Now podcast, the podcast that helps aspiring writers and all writers to find the time, energy and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I am Sarah Werner, and I’m going to try to get some rest.