i'm good at all the narcissisms
today is the last day of my month-long sabbatical and tomorrow i go back to work and so of course i am experiencing the biggest sunday scaries ever but [ilovemakonnen voice] on a tuesday and as is often the case when i am in this place i will try to essay my way through the feeling here with you (as is always the case i will also be supplementing this treatment modality with drugs, aerobic exercise, and breathwork).
as we waited at an airport restaurant on sunday before flying home, deborah asked me if i had any regrets about how i'd spent the month and i said, already understanding how ridiculous it was going to sound, how clearly it spoke to my pathologies, "not being more productive," and she (lovingly, fairly) laughed in my face.
it is laughable for me to take this bounty of time explicitly designated for rest (the very name derived from the sabbath!) and dream mostly of filling it with work. but i really did have all these grand plans for various projects that i have been working on bit by bit or wanting to work on but blocked by being too tired from my day job to make real progress on that i was sure i was going to complete all of during this period (while also at the same time definitely writing a lot of notes to you and you know also getting lots of exercise and spending time with friends and beating elden ring) and while i made meaningful progress on a bunch of stuff (including a future home for these notes!), i didn't really land anything and the thing about me in both creative work and job work and honestly just any kind of task in general is that i pride myself above all on being able to cut through the bullshit and just deliver so this hurts!
people repeating cliches as if they're deep wisdom is one of my greatest pet peeves and one of the ones i find most annoying is one that goes like [smarm voice] "when i'm old i'm never going to think back and wish i got more done at work." but the thing is i kind of love "working" (in the broader sense: applying my energy to an obstacle and seeing that energy) and feel very satisfied by getting things done. in some ways (but not in crucial other ones), i am happiest when i'm in the flow state of focused work. the notion of work in this folksy aphorism means more specifically "alienated wage labor" rather than "hobbies you take too seriously" but even in that sense, i am grateful that i...still kinda love work (which is why my sunday scaries almost always end up being mostly if not entirely unwarranted). this is almost certainly just me having taken the neoliberal blue pill a long time ago (i love taking pills) but my feeling has always been that if in order to afford to live i am required to spend so much of my time at work, why not a) try to make that experience as pleasant and joyful as possible for both the people i work with (some of whom tend to become my closest friends) and myself and b) derive as much satisfaction and fulfillment and pride as possible from the things i am required to spend these hours of my life doing for the money and health insurance.
for me (again, the perfect late capitalist subject, with no dependents and, for now at least (just literally knocked on wood), no major health issues and above the waterline of precarity), the tension of work in my life (in the broader sense again, both paid and not) is not about not wanting to work, but about how do i dial in the right internal balance between living in the tunnel of a flow state and then getting out of it to be a full human person in the world. balance is the goal but in practice i tend to veer from one extreme to the other: i get too zoned in on what i'm trying to build or make (either for my job or for myself) and being inside that tunnel for long periods of time (time in the tunnel passes at much higher speed than real life) makes me a bad partner to deborah and friend to my friends and makes not listen to the pangs of my body even as it grows knotted and hollowed out, tank running on empty. then to overcorrect for that, i will try to go into "rest" mode where i forbid myself from doing "major" creative tasks and instead become mostly a consumer (of books, magazines, tv, video games, etc.) but then while doing the resting and consuming, i inevitably feel this slowly growing background dread that i am "accomplishing nothing" with my "free time" (sorry for all the scare quotes in this issue, a textual enactment of gently "challenging myself").
you could call this a midlife crisis except this is how i've always been! whenever i feel overly busy in "adult life", especially in the summertime, i look back through rose colored glasses to the graduate school summers of my mid twenties, where i lived off the leftovers from my school year teaching stipend and didn't have classes and didn't have to do anything at all, just that broad rolling expanse of no expectations or responsibilities from may to august, pure unfiltered time. this rendering is true in some sense (that summer, the first one in which deborah and i lived together and the month when we watched battlestar galactica full time) but is also nostalgia, since during both of those summers of "not doing anything", i actually did ambitious writing projects that i felt constantly stressed out about trying to deliver (from the first summer, here are relevant wheel spinning blog posts (1, 2; from the second summer's proto substack, a midsummer backer update and a concluding one). i don't know why it feels good to (re-)recognize historical previous dark patterns even though i haven't resolved them yet, but maybe it's another form of narcissism; even if i have not solved the problems yet, i still appreciate recognizing the traces of my past self in the person i am now and appreciate am thankful to you for reading these notes, since i would never be able to convince myself to write them (and thus be able to see myself from the outside) if you weren't there reading them, and since the practice of writing them, though of course a form of labor and one which can lead me into the tunnel (i started writing three hours ago in bed right after breakfast on my "last day of vacation" and have not left bed or even really shifted position since then and i'm still not done), also serves as a way to show me all the light that always exists around it, to be both inside and outside myself at the same time.
Previously:
- 2016 (the concept of the decisive moment in photography, benadryl, "benny and the jets")
- 2017 (from c) (none of my students died today, shacharit service, to have learned j too tried to start a revolt in sunday school)
- 2018 (that because i had to work on saturday, i'm off today; muscat grapes; s5e03 of bojack)