on new chapters

diss diary #6: in a writing groove, and thinking about productivity again

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Dear Weed-ers,

These days, I have been feeling more inspired and motivated than usual, and it feels really nice. Like…REALLY nice. A couple reasons for that:

• My article is published!!!! It’s an excerpt a dissertation chapter about the relationship of Blackness to online plantcare movements. The article is in an open-access journal, which should be accessible to anyone with internet, but let me know if that’s not the case. Here is a link!

• I submitted my Visa paperwork and had my biometrics taken earlier this week. I’m a bit less nervous now that I’ve done all I can and feeling hopeful about everything (emphasis on “a bit”). What a time…

• I am 85% done writing a conference paper for a conference in early September. Current me is grateful for past me’s abstract because I allowed space for the paper to re-interpret earlier material or try out new ideas. I’m happy with the balance I’ve struck between the two modes! This will also be scaffolding for a diss chapter and contribution to an edited volume of essays that needs to be done by the end of 2024.

• I’ve finished 8 books, and am allowing myself plenty of time to indulge in late nights reading. It felt *so* good to channel the summer vibes of my teenaged years, spent with moody music and crinkly hard-cover library books. Gah I love the library.

consumption

As I draft this, it is a Saturday evening. I am waiting for my salted caramel Betty Crocker brownies to finish baking, and watching YouTube vlogs, and the vlogger is wearing a tank top that I have been seeing everywhere, and then I had the urge to browse online for clothing I don’t need (and frankly, don’t even want), and then the oven timer beeped incessantly for 2 minutes.

“creation > consumption,” whispered a voice from somewhere within me, yet outside of me. That kind of thing happens to me all the time, and sometimes I pay attention to the voice, sometimes I don’t. These days, it crops up because of feeling out of alignment with myself. Which, like, I already know I feel off-kilter, I don’t need the reminder, thanks.

I groan and get up to check the brownies, which have finally finished.

I went back and read my last diss diary and was like “Girl, you good?” I will say, that I did stick to some of my goals (daily journaling) and good habits (outdoor enrichment time) to re-ground me. As a result, the farmer’s tan on my legs is pretty gnarly.

But I’m done with summer travel, and I’m having a lot of alone time these days. This is on top of the usual sense of dread I feel during the twilight of summer. That mood is putting me in a space where I want to buy little trinkets and putz around on my phone.

I’m clearly trying to distract myself from the awkwardness of listening to thoughts clank around in my brain. And it is always easier to look outward. What skincare or groceries should I buy? What can I clean, organize, or declutter? Who can I text? What can I watch? What should I eat?

This urge to distract myself is coupled with the itch to be prolific this month. Usually, the whole “throw yourself into work as a distraction” thing doesn’t work for me because I’m already prone to overworking myself. I also feel a little guilty for not having more to show for my efforts during the 2023-24 year (Cana, you literally just promoted your article like 2 minutes ago, what the heck? And you read a TON last month!), and so I already feel compelled to overcompensate.

Part of me wants to bury my head in work because I feel like I’m falling behind, and it’s activating those perfectionistic pieces of me. But also, I genuinely want to enter a season of ever-flowing creation.

sunset view overlooking the Charles River from the Weeks footbridge. this used to be a daily pit-stop for me, especially in the depths of pandemic social distancing. i felt so nice revisiting this place again recently!

creation

In addition to writing a conference paper, I have been working on my novel-in-progress for the first time in awhile. I call her Murphy, after the main character. I find that I don’t need a particularly compelling title in order to get started, probably after years of generating academic paper titles in the final hours.

With the novel, I’m trying a new thing where, instead of aimlessly dumping stream of consciousness words on the page, I actually sit down and think about what I want to happen, and then I write. Revolutionary, I know. (For reference, I’m using a version of this one-page novel scene spreadsheet to help identify how to be more purposeful with my words.)

Murphy has sat with me for over 10 years. She first came to me when I was 16 or 17, and I’ve gone through phases of loving her story and finding her insufferable. Part of it is because I used the project to work through my thoughts about learning to have big emotions, what it means to grow up, what it means to live without people you thought you’d live with forever: the usual stuff of lit-fic that I’ve been working at for most of my writing life.

I’ve since learned a lot about who I was then, what I wanted, why I needed that story. And then one day in July, I realized that the novel needed to be more than just for me.

Like, sure, making this rambly tribute to my adolescence will be meaningful to me once it’s done. But I realized that I want to finish Murphy’s story so that I can give someone else a worthwhile experience, too. Creation is a gift, as they say, and creation is ultimately about connection.

I am excited to be excited about this sense of direction. I am excited to have a new thing to do with my downtime that isn’t scrolling, and I am excited to feel a newfound sense of purpose apart from academic work!

creation > consumption

Harvard Square is emptying out of tourists as the semester approaches over here in Cambridge. And my relationship to working and making is shifting.

When I look back at last month’s conversation about thought loops, I realized that a lot of my overthinking was a result of living out of alignment from the what makes me feel like me. Coincidentally, these are the same basic things that are my job: reading things, listening to things, and writing original thoughts about those things.

we sing, we dance, we steal things.

I’ve gotten advice that goes “bury yourself in work” when things get stressful. That logic never worked for me because it feels like creating (i.e., writing, reading, research) becomes a distraction from my humanness, the sensory parts of life that I am working to stop away running from.

But, at the same time, I am realizing the value of keeping myself occupied. It gives my brain fewer chances to think its way into a black hole. And as a result, it seems like staying busy means something different to creatives, knowledge workers, culture workers, etc, than to the everyday worker.

That realization comes out of my patchy engagement with Cal Newport’s new book, Slow Productivity, where he argues for productivity needing to be considered at longer timescales than the day-to-day. He asks that we stop glorifying busywork, and that we acknowledge the benefits of how creatives measure their output over a longer durée. He also says that we be honest about the fact that the normalized 9-5 is not as maximally productive as we think, and that creative lives are more productive than we think they are.

We all spend a lot of time mucking about, and doing so is not not productive: we can’t be On all the time. But it’s about the quality of the mucking we do in relation to the quality of the “productive” stuff.

In my efforts to divest from hustle, I am learning how to work sustainably and with less perfectionism…and without too much mucking around with things that don’t directly contribute to creative growth. How to stay busy doing meaningful things that support my craft without just filling time mindlessly. How to live with the fact that creative work needs to get done, even when my brain is not at its best.

I am learning how that, even when I feel like I’m “distracting” myself from real life, I can instead see that act as me taking steps in a direction that gets my closer to my goals: of being a solid academic, of being a successful writer, of being smarter and more confident than the day before.

action items

I find myself asking:

What can I do today to make my tomorrow self proud?

In that spirit, I’m trying to fill my days with more creation. I’m forcing myself to do things I can do on autopilot (coloring, crocheting on the couch, puzzles) so that it primes me up for the harder, big-brain-energy stuff. I mainly want to give myself opportunities to show up as who I want to be: an abundant creative.

So my main goal for August is to write for 30 minutes every day. This means sitting at my desk for at least 30 minutes and generate at least one new, original thought.

My only rules are that:

—Morning pages do not count.

—Monday to Thursday, something dissertation related must be the priority: a conference paper, drafting a chapter, outlining, generating prose for a literature review, writing up analysis from a secondary source. Lord knows, I have things to write about.

—My evenings and weekends can be for Substack and working on fiction. I am in a big writing mood, and I’m grateful that it’s during a time when I need to channel my nervous energy about the future into something other than an self-perpetuating cycle. Onwards and upwards, y’all.

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thank you dearly for your eyes and ears. if you feel so called, please share this diss diary with a friend or leave a one-time tip!

oh, and don’t forget to check out my first big girl article! i am so grateful to be witnessed in this journey, and honored to live out this happy writer life. :)