Easy Versus Hard

When easy stops being so.

Photo by Lucas Alexander on Unsplash

A call to action

Sometime last summer, I told myself that something had to change. I was a year into a job that I had taken with an explicit promise to myself: I would not let work get in the way of my writing. I had gone so far as to be blunt with my manager-to-be during the interview process knowing that it might jeopardize my candidacy; I told him how important it was for me to maintain boundaries around work/life balance and my writing practice, which I had built on top of part-time and consulting work during the early pandemic. He supported me with enthusiasm, and I joined the company.

Then I happily put the writing on the back burner while I onboarded and learned the ropes on my new team, certain I would pick it up again as soon as I got my bearings.

Flash forward a year and two managers later, all writing had ceased. One busy quarter turned into another, and while I was building my sense of confidence, creating impact and gaining influence within the company, my writing habits completely lapsed. When a friend gently asked about how the revisions on my novel were going, I didn't have anything to share. But the sense of guilt around it at that milestone pushed me to commit to action. I decided I was going to wake up earlier each day to get the writing done. I set my alarms, I set up my writing space before I went to bed each night, away from my work laptop, and I bought a brand new "morning writing time only" candle that I lit as a way to set a ritual and intention.

Whoops, the candle is a metaphor!

It lasted all of two weeks last summer before I completely burnt myself out. The writing went nowhere, I was exhausted and emotionally empty, and I felt further away from a completed novel than before.

Resigned, I told myself this was the bargain I'd made. I convinced myself I'd taken the 'easy' path in my work and career -- I made a comfortable six-figure salary, in a role that I was exceptional at, and I was well-respected among my leaders and peers. This is what success looks like, in the tech industry, in the US, by most external standards our society validates.

Besides, hadn’t I encountered this advice over and over again from creative practitioners? “Make your non-artistic life routine so that your artistic life can be complex.” “Don’t ask your art to provide a paycheck.”

I was earning money so that I didn't have to ask my art to do it, I was living comfortably so that I didn't have to worry about health insurance and bills while addressing whatever craft issues remained in my current manuscript. In making the non-creative parts of my life ‘easy’, I was supposed to have the energy and emotional space to make my art complex and meaningful.

For a while I really thought I had this right: the easy part was to do good work that I'm good at, and the hard part was making time and space for the creative habits. And wasn't art supposed to be hard? All these stereotypes about suffering artists and writers' block and creative malaise during late stage capitalism. Of course the creativity is hard, I reassured myself. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.

So I took my foot off the pedal. I had an intuition around not pushing my writing to the brink for the sake of making something happen (which served me in the end), and I accepted that maybe the right time would come later — for now, I’d focus on the easy part.

The ease in ‘easy’

But this tidy narrative glossed over something big. Flattening work into "the easy part" hid all sorts of hardness. You know what wasn't easy? So many parts of the actual job. I loved my coworkers, I loved being proud of accomplishing something together. But the real source of burnout was never my writing. It was always the work. It was shifting company targets and fighting for my product area's prioritization. It was conversations with stakeholders who were pushing towards different objectives. It was the disconnect between what I had optimistically signed on to build, and what I ended up finding when I turned the rock over and looked at the data.

Sure, following a socially valid path of what success looks like is ‘easy’, if we accept that the goal is to follow that path. But where was the actual ease?

The last few months have shifted something for me, enough to cause this easy/hard framework to fall out of its equilibrium. Spending time noticing, sensing, and truly, truly recovering from years of low-grade burnout made me realize that my perception of easy vs. hard had been completely wrong.

Ease is having the time and space and energy to write, to draw, to paint, to engage in deep conversations about purpose and motivation. Ease is slowing down and noticing what my body is telling me I need — a walk, hydration, creative stimulation, a pen and paper for an idea, more sleep, less sleep. Ease is responding to the moment instead of a preformed structure. Ease is realizing that when my brain isn’t in constant overdrive with work, the creativity comes so, so freely. It no longer feels like drawing from an empty well. What it feels like is urgency, that there’s not enough time to possibly capture all of the things that I’m feeling and experiencing.

What’s hard? Hard is thinking about how I could mindlessly go back into a routine that has burnt me out time and time again, stranding me so far away from my creative instincts, fighting how tight those golden handcuffs get. Hard is being employed under the whims of companies that will come up with apologies and narratives for why they are undergoing layoffs, why your team will have to do more with less, why you must be patient and resilient and still remain persistent and optimistic. Hard is setting aside my awareness of other ways it could be. Hard is knowingly neglecting my own hard-won creative progress in the dwindling hopes that one day I’ll finally have time to come back to it.

No magic bullets

It’s not that simple of course. There are years of underlying grooves in my habits and my sense of identity that also require addressing and unpacking in order to really shift these ingrained mindsets. The truth is that neither full-time work nor free reign for artistic pursuits is easy; there is ease and challenge in areas of both.

But the shift away from that limiting binary allows space for me to actually consider what it is that I’m experiencing in a more detailed, specific, situational and conditional way. Allowing myself the space to say “work is easy when…” and “creativity is hard when…” is better, more honest, than settling for a simple framework that frankly makes everything harder since those rigid boxes numb what is actually happening. And I accept that this is what the practice looks like for now.

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Some additional notes:

• I put together a 2023 Summer Reading Challenge! Download/print the PDF to track your books, hopefully the categories will encourage you to find some new unexpected reading. I recently finished “Lessons in Chemistry” by Bonnie Garmus to fill out the “Movie’s Coming Out Soon!” category.

• Paid subscribers got access to my first audio post, a reading of the “I forgive you” story from early June.

• I really loved the movie Joy Ride — I was lucky to catch it as the opening night film of CAAMFest 2023 and was happy to see it again last week now that it’s in wide release — laughed and cried all over again. One conversation I’m eager to follow is about the representation of trans-racial adoptees — Patrick Armstrong in particular has been sharing some thoughtful commentary on it since the trailer dropped, and Kim Cooper shared her personal experience watching the movie (spoilers for plot revelations).

Thanks for reading, all.