What Are You Balancing? – Write Now 147

Sarah Rhea Werner: This is the Write Now podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 147, “What Are You Balancing?” [Theme Music Plays] Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps all writers, aspiring, professional, and otherwise to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m your host, Sarah Werner. I have a cup of good coffee, a glass of water, and a lot to talk about. [Laughs] I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting this year, whether that’s because I’ve spent so much time indoors and away from people, or just because that’s where I am right now, but I’ve noticed a lot of differences between where I am now and where I started. And I think it’s important to talk about where we’ve been in our writing journey and where we are now and to assess what has changed, why it’s changed, and how we feel about those changes. I would encourage you to do this for yourself as well. I started this podcast back in 2015. I mean, technically I started planning for it and recording things in 2014, but the podcast launched officially in 2015. When I first started this show, I wanted to sort of unravel the mystery that was work, life, and writing balance. I first became interested in this topic when I was introduced to it during a leadership seminar about work-life balance. This was a seminar specifically for women, and so they talked about work and life as sort of the two halves of how you spend your time and energy. “Work” was your career, and volunteering, and sort of being involved in the community. And then “life” was your home and raising kids, taking care of your pets, family obligations, all of that stuff. And the big question was, “how do you balance these two things as someone who’s invested in their career?” At the time, I was very invested in my career. And ahead of me, I saw a future of continuing to work in the marketing and advertising space. I wanted to be eventually an executive. I was at the time a content and UX/UI strategist for a digital marketing company. I think at the time I wanted to become the director of those services. And then after that, a VP of those services. Or at least that’s what I thought I wanted. Because that’s what I could see in front of me. Logical steps laid out. A plan to follow. But there was still something very clearly missing from my life. And that was, the more I thought about it, creative satisfaction. Some of you may know this. Some of you may have lived this. Some of you are maybe living it right now: If you are a creative person who is not involved in some kind of creative work, creative project, whatever that might be – things feel bad. If I personally am not working on some sort of creative project, I get really depressed. And sometimes I even get physically sick. I know it’s probably psychosomatic and there’s really no scientific basis for this. This has just been my own experience, but I need to find a healthy outlet in my life where I can create things. And with all the time that I was spending at work, with work related activities, thinking about work when I got home from work, answering emails at home for work, and then also washing dishes, washing laundry, buying and cooking food… you know, “life”… I didn’t have the time or the energy to write. This is really when I started picking up books like Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Big Magic” and Stephen King’s “On Writing”. I had read “On Writing” before in college, but this was my second read through. And it hit differently this time because I was in a different part of my life. I was in a different phase of my life. I don’t know if you’ve noticed – sometimes you need to read not only the right book, but you need to read it at the right time in order for it really to affect you. So what I was reading and what I was hearing was, “Oh, I just need to get up extra early to write.” If you spend time sleeping and more time awake, you’ll have more time in your day. It was very obvious, right? So I tried getting up at 4:30, 5:00 AM, before work to write creatively. I got some words and it was a little bit of satisfaction, but as we’ve talked about before on this podcast: time and energy are two very different things. You can have all the time in the world, but if you are burned out and exhausted, you’re not going to be able to spend that time in a meaningful or meaningfully productive way. So I was at this leadership seminar and they were talking about work-life balance. And during the Q&A I raised my hand. I remember I was sitting in the back of the room and so when they called on me for my question, everyone turned around in their seats to look at me. This was before I started my public speaking career and before I started podcasting even, and so this was not okay. [Laughs] I did not like being the center of attention and so I just pretended nobody was looking at me and I asked my question. The question was to the effect of, “finding work-life balance is all well and good. But what if, what if – there’s a third thing that you want to add in there? Your passion project?” Again, retrospect/hindsight is very interesting because I can look back now and see and understand that I was defining both “work” and “life” as categories that were for other people to make money, to serve others, to keep the house clean, to keep myself fed. [Laughs] To find time to do workouts, be healthy, spend time with friends and family. Somehow neither of those things were for me. And I feel kind of terrible saying that, but with all the “work” and “life”, there was really no space for writing. A third element that really was not approved by society. This was before the big self care movement. This was really before people started talking about the importance of mental health and hydration and making sure you had space in your life for yourself. All of the signals that I was receiving and had received for years and years told me that if I wanted to do something for myself, if I wanted to treat myself, I had to do that outside of normal work and life. And to do so was an indulgence. It was selfish. Again, I think that this is not really a problem anymore. I feel like self-care has become an accepted and even maybe expected thing. But at the time, my creative work did not fit into either the “work” or “life” categories. “Work” and “life” encompassed all of the things that were imposed and not necessarily chosen. Things that were dutiful and not necessarily freeing. And I have to admit, as much as I liked my job and as much as I love spending time with family and friends and cleaning my house and all of that stuff, I would run away in a heartbeat to go and do some writing. When I asked the question at this leadership seminar, “what happens if there’s a third element that you want to balance? Work, life, and a creative writing habit or a creative writing practice – whatever you want to call it – A hobby, a passion project.” We were having enough difficulty balancing work and life and I wanted to add in a third element. And the speaker, who later became a mentor and very good friend of mine, said something that I wasn’t ready to hear, and she said, “Well, you have to give a lot of stuff up. You have to give up something in order to get something. Time and energy are finite resources. And if you want to fit something in, you necessarily have to take something else out.” She used the analogy of getting all four corners of the fitted sheet on the bed without one of them springing up. You could have three corners down at any one given time, but there would always be one springing out of place. Of course, I did not like this answer. [Laughs] I wanted to do all the things. I very stubbornly wanted to add that third element of a passion project into my work-life balance. Now, at the time I was working under an assumption of what “balance” meant. And think about it right now. What does “balance” mean for you? Does it mean equal time and energy spent in the realms of work, life, and creative work? My thought process as I remember it evolved from understanding “balance” as spending equal amounts of time with each of these three realms, to spending equal amounts of energy on these three realms, to understanding that “balance” didn’t necessarily mean equal parts of all three things – And that maybe for eight hours of work, I needed four hours of life stuff and two hours of creative stuff. And then eventually to realizing, in the back of my mind – it was something I was not able to put into words for years, which sounds very silly, but you know what? This is what my brain was doing – Eventually understanding that maybe I didn’t necessarily want “balance”. I think part of this was difficult because “balance” is held up as a good thing. We are told to “achieve balance” like, “Oh, I love achieving things. I’m a perfectionist. I’m an achiever. If there’s something I can achieve, give it to me. So balance? I want to achieve that.” And it wasn’t until later, much later, that I realized that I didn’t necessarily want to balance all of the things that I was balancing. That maybe what I wanted was imbalance. I realized more and more that my balance consisted of a lot of things I actually either did not want to do or did not find meaningful and I wanted an imbalance. I wanted to spend more of my time writing. I wanted that to be “out of balance”. I wanted it to be everything. And that’s when the guilt and the shame set in. The sense of, “who am I to think that it’s okay or to think that I am somehow exempt from having to balance all of these things? How dare I want creative freedom?” And you know of course the word that showed up in a blinking flashing marquee in my mind was “Entitlement.” “Greedy.” “Selfish.” I had been balancing for years things that I did want and things that I did not want. Duties, obligations, commitments, things that I was even bringing on myself that no one else was asking me to do because I thought I should do them or I needed to do them. But let me ask you, “do you feel like you are a writer? Do you feel like your purpose in this life is to create?” And so, “what good is a balance that excludes your purpose? Your very reason for existing.” All I have ever wanted to do was write… And, you know, read, and drink coffee, and a couple other things, but… [Laughs] I know my purpose is to write and create. Maybe you know that too. Maybe it’s hidden away in the back of your brain. Something that you feel guilty thinking about and dare not indulge because we’re told maybe it’s greedy or selfish, or everyone else has to work a dead end job that they hate so we do too. But is it greedy or selfish to want to live into your purpose? No, absolutely not. It’s not greedy or selfish, it’s simply counter-cultural. There is a road laid out in front of us by culture, by society, by history. Whatever you want to call it. There’s a path. And that path has logical steps and progressions: childhood, entering the educational system, entering the workforce, retirement perhaps. But this path is not, as I have learned, a moral obligation and the socially approved or normal balance isn’t right for everyone. It’s an easier path to follow because it’s all laid out for us, but that doesn’t mean it will satisfy you or your creative spirit. So what is your ideal balance or imbalance? And what would it take to actually get there? What can you drop in your life right now, today even, that does not feed your purpose? That is simply an obligation that you feel like you should be doing; because maybe other people are doing it or other people have told you that you should be doing it. What are you balancing that doesn’t necessarily need to be on that scale? How are you spending your time? And, more importantly, how are you spending your energy? And compare that to, how do you want to be spending your time and how do you want to be spending your energy? What do you want and what do you not want? And are you allowing yourself to be honest about it? Again, for me, it was really hard to be honest about that because I felt like letting myself do creative stuff was selfish, greedy, indulgent. But it was also my purpose. And I could not get away from that. I’ve been thinking a lot about work-life and writing balance lately because what I have today is so radically different from what I had when I initially started this podcast. The buckets into which I put activities are just even completely different than they were seven years ago. And for me, it started with seeing the things that I wanted not as bad or immoral, but simply counter-cultural. I think this has been helped too by the fact that I’m simply getting older. And one of the beautiful things about getting older, I’ve discovered, is you start to care less and less what other people think about you. It’s very freeing. [Laughs] I really, really love it. Today I can actually say, “Yes, this is what I have in my life. This is what I want in my life. And if you want to judge me for it, that’s a you problem.” Because I know what I want. I know what feeds my purpose in life. And in my eyes, there is no higher moral good than that. So I want to ask you this week, “what are you balancing? And do you want to be balancing it?” I would love to hear your thoughts and your input about today’s topic. This is something that has been on my mind to talk about. And I feel like I’ve only just recently gained the right words with which to talk about it. You can let me know your own thoughts, your own insights, your own experience in the comments section for the show notes for today’s episode, which you can find on sarahwerner.com. That’s S-A-R-A-H-W-E-R-N-E-R.com. You can just scroll down to the bottom of the show notes for this episode. And there should be a nice little comment box there where you can just write whatever you want. I don’t even want to say “within reason.” You do you. I do try to keep my podcast and my website appropriate for all ages, so maybe just keep that in mind, but I would love to hear your thoughts over on my website at sarahwerner.com. I would also love to say “thank you” to all of the amazing people who support me and this podcast out on Patreon. Patreon is a secure third party donation platform that allows you to donate a dollar per episode, $2 per episode, whatever you feel like to help support this show and keep it ad-free. The funds that you donate allow me to keep the show going and keep it accessible for people all around the world. So for those of you who are currently donating, thank you so much. These people include Tamara K Sellman, Amanda King, Laurie, Regina Calabrese, Amber Fratesi, Charmaine Ferrara, Dennis Martin, Michael Beckwith, Mike Tefft, Sarah Banham, Summer, Tiffany Joiner, and Whitney McGruder. Again, thank you all so much for your generous support. It means the absolute world to me and to the listeners of this show. If you’d like to become a supporter of The Write Now Podcast, you can do so by clicking the button on the show notes for this episode that say, “Help support this podcast” and it will take you out to Patreon where you can make your pledge. If you are not in a place where you can financially support the show, I totally get that. I am still very grateful for you. You can support the show by just telling someone else about it. Word of mouth is the best way for podcasts to spread. So if you know another writer/creator in your life who might benefit from listening to the Write Now Podcast, let them know where to find it. Maybe download a few episodes for them. Show them how to listen to a podcast if they’ve never listened to a podcast before, which is very common. And yeah, just thank you for doing that. I’m trying to think if there are any other calls to action that I put at the end of the show. I don’t think there are. You’d think that after seven years of this show I would either, A) have it memorized, or B) have some kind of sheet in front of me, a checklist maybe, that tells me what I need to say at the end of each episode. So I think that’s all I want to say for now… So thank you for listening. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being you. This has been Episode 147 of The Write Now Podcast, the podcast that helps all writers, aspiring, professional, and otherwise to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m Sarah Werner, and I know you can do this. [Theme Music Plays]