The Soul-Crushing Weight of Trying to Be “Practical”
When I was a little girl, I split the majority of my time between two places:
The gym and the library.
I started gymnastics training at the age of 9 and by the time I was 13, I was training 5+ hours a day, 6 days a week. Between my painful introversion and my general absence from any school social activity, I spent a lot of time with books. On weekends when I wasn’t training, my mother dropped me off at the library and asked, “What time do you want me to pick you up?” (This was pre-cell phone days #ancient) I shrugged, and she’d take that to mean that she should come back when the library closed many hours later.
Throughout my adolescence, I voraciously devoured my way through the kids section, into the young adult section, then made my way into non-fiction once I had read every major fiction series. I was transported to imaginative fantasy worlds, but also came face-to-face with the reality of the things humans fear most - betrayal, pain, humiliation, manipulation, death, loss - and experienced them as vividly as if I were the characters themselves. (Only later did it dawn on me how much my fascination with these themes were in shaping my observations of psychological incongruencies and forming my foundational theories around gender and power)
I fell in love with the way well-written pages were able to move me effortlessly, the way delicate juxtapositions of words could paint such vivid images in my head. I gained an admiration for the nuances of syntax, the colorful power of adverbs and adjectives. And I learned the intimacy with which a writer could touch someone when they conjured up the perfect storm of words at the precise moment in time when the reader needed them the most.
Writing was magic to me, and I always wanted to create magic… But then I grew up and they told me to “Be practical.”
Real life set in and the idea of being a broke writer did not sit well with my parents. I was told, like many kids are, to “be practical.” Ironically, my attempt to “be practical” caused me to just be horrendously indecisive and after trying out seven different majors, I somehow still landed in American Literature as my major, doing what I knew best: Reading. Digesting. Thinking.
After graduation, I tried to “be practical” again, and I landed a job at a hedge fund in New York City, playing with numbers instead of words. My only outlet for writing was through Yelp reviews, which I did religiously when no one was watching. By external standards the job was a “golden opportunity” (or so my boss told me), but to me it was soul-crushing. Because as much as I tried to convince myself that I liked it, as much as I knew it looked good on my resume, it just wasn’t authentically me.
Sometimes we use busyness to fill a hole of deep-seated discontent.
Since being fed the narrative to “be practical” many years ago I dove headfirst into practical business fields like finance, tech, venture capital - I did all the things that were “hot” and “on trend,” and I did them well. I learned to get over my perfectionism, to ship things fast, to network, to embrace the traits of my gregarious extroverted peers, I became a public speaker, I worked my ass off, I won awards… I became busy, busy, busy. But there was still something missing.
Sometimes we use busyness to hide the fact that we’re not actually being effective.
Sometimes we use busyness as a weapon to flaunt our importance.
Sometimes we use busyness to fill a hole of deep-seated discontent.
I won’t say that my busyness didn’t get me places, because it did. But there’s a point in everyone’s life, after they’ve been effectively busy for some time that they must stop and ask themselves,
“Why the hell am I doing this?”
Or perhaps it comes as a soft whisper that incessantly tugs at them asking,
“Really? Is this it?”
Jarring them out of their languid day-to-day trance to confront this uncomfortable question,
If you weren’t so beholden to what other people thought about you, how much more could you do?
Only recently, it dawned on me that I had been using my own busyness to blend into the “practical” world and avoid facing my fear of doing the thing that seemed most daunting: confronting the authentic me…
The authentic me hidden inside that always SCREAMED TO BE A WRITER. The authentic me that was not only happy and smiling but also ANGRY and SAD and JOYFUL to finally have the ability to feel and show A FULL SPECTRUM OF EMOTION without being labeled as crazy.
I had cautiously started writing years ago, but I always agonized over what to write about, I feared what other people would say about my writing, and I couldn’t stand the anxiety of hitting publish.
It is the hardest thing in the world to share your most personal creative work when you are constantly wracked by fear of rejection.
…but something changed in the last few weeks. I started listening to my intuition, and it started speaking to me. My head started filling with words and visions, and I’d wake up in the middle of the night, or be on an airplane, or be walking on the street and get SMACKED by inspiration to write. And for the first time in decades, I actually did stop to write. And once I started, I couldn’t stop. It was as if I was channeling something much greater, something supernatural that caused my fingers to fly across the keyboard, crafting the exact narrative that needed to be written. For the first time in over a decade, I felt proudly, fully, authentically me.
So why do I write? I write because:
To be a writer is to take the thoughts that everyone else is thinking, the feelings that everyone else if feeling, and have the courage to state it as it is.
To be a writer is to put language to the invisible forces that perpetuate inequality and injustice.
To be a writer is to exercise freedom of speech to fulfill my mission to change the dominant narratives that oppress women.
Words may well be the most powerful force for systemic change, and to that end, I encourage you to shed the weight of trying to“be practical” and instead focus on expressing your most authentic self, no matter how crazy or messy it may seem. The end result is always, always, refreshingly liberating.