Back in 2014, I was thinking of starting a podcast.
The only thing was, I was already working 40+ hours a week at a demanding job, volunteering in my community, enrolled in a women’s leadership program, and trying to be present for my friends and family. And I was blogging and writing a novel in my “spare time”.
It was… a lot.
During one of my evening leadership seminars — appropriately, on the subject of work/life balance — a realization hit me. I wasn’t just trying to balance those two elements of work and life. There was, for me, and perhaps for you, too, a third distinct category.
“Work” consisted of my day job, which was important because unlike everything else I was doing, it paid me money, which I needed for food, rent, etc.
“Life” included my family, friends, and community involvement, all of which were crucial because we live in a society with other human beings, and it’s important to build healthy relationships and be invested in those around us.
But what about the stuff that was just for ME? My passion projects — my novel, my blog, my idea for a podcast?
That evening, the seminar spoke to the dual demands of work and home life, and how those two realms were often at odds. The speakers — most of whom were working parents — suggested intentional work/life scheduling and boundary setting, and spoke about how you could find just enough time to accommodate each, if you made the right sacrifices.
Yet I couldn’t help but sense a strange commiseration among the speakers, a weariness that suggested life was a frenzied, helpless dash for them just as much as it was for us.
I got the feeling, too, that the speakers were speaking theoretically —from aspiration, not experience — and that, deep in their hearts, they didn’t feel like experts on the subject. They were just as desperate for answers as those of us in the audience.
When I stood up and asked my question about fitting in a third component — my passion projects — there was a muttering of “Slow down there, tiger,” amidst nervous laughter. How dare I ask for a third allocation of time when the first two were already so impossible, so incompatible?
But one of the speakers gave me a response I will never forget.
“I’m not sure it’s possible in the way that you want it to be,” she said, carefully. “Because often, saying ‘yes’ to one thing means saying ‘no’ to something else. It’s like putting a fitted sheet onto a large mattress — you can get three of the corners down no problem, but when you go to tuck in the fourth corner, one of the other three pops back up.
“You can never get all four corners tucked in at the same time. So… on one day, you might put in a full day of work at your job, and spend some quality time with your family, but you won’t necessarily have the time or energy to write. Or on another day, you may write in the morning before you go to work, head to a volunteering gig afterward, and have nothing left for your family.
“One of the corners will always be springing up. And maybe balance doesn’t mean getting all four corners to stay down at the same time — but rather, managing which ones you allow to pop up and when.
“Sometimes you’re going to have to neglect or say ‘no’ to something that’s important to you. And you’re going to need to give yourself grace every day, regardless of what you are able to do.”
My mind was completely blown. No one had ever dared to be that honest with me about work/life balance before. Everyone I had spoken to about it had always hinted that there was a way to Do All The Things that no one else had discovered. The unchallenged assumption was that it was possible… but we were all still figuring out how.
What if work/life/passion project balance looks different than we imagined? And what could it — what DOES it — actually look like in practice, not just in theory?
(Ironically, this question became the root of the podcast I started not long after — Write Now with Sarah Werner.)
It can be tempting to cut out the “extraneous” in our lives to help everything else that matters fit — sadly, this is often our passion projects. But I need to have a creative project going in order to process things and interact with the world. For me, creation and understanding are linked, and I cannot have one without the other.
Your own reasons for creating may be similar, or they may be completely different. Either way, setting aside time for your personal creative work is NOT selfish.
So how do we fit our passion projects — our podcasts, our novels, our memoirs, our quilting course — into an already busy life? What does balance actually look like in a real and practical sense? What could our lives become if we learned how to manage our creative energy and, in the words of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Gandalf, “use the time that is given us”?
Let’s find out. Over the next several weeks, the “Dear Creators” newsletter will be focused on work/life/passion project balance. I hope you find meaning and fulfillment in the journey.