Giving ourselves a break
Here is a partial list of things I did today before I started writing this newsletter: read several chapters of Lauren Oyler’s very good Fake Accounts. Made breakfast. Did an at-home barre video. Went grocery shopping. Did laundry. Made an extensive spreadsheet inventorying all the condiments and spices in my pantry, and then ordered spices I was running low on. Made an elaborate dinner. Posted on Instagram asking if anyone wanted my old dining table, coordinated with a friend to pick it up, and then disassembled the table for her.
By the time I finally ran out of things to do and sat down to write, it was 7pm — much later than I usually send the newsletter, let alone start writing it.
In her very excellent newsletter Maybe Baby, the writer Haley Nahman answered a question today about dealing with writer’s block. She wrote:
Sometimes your inability to express yourself creatively isn’t something you can fix through individual action. Writing may seem like a widely accessible hobby, but it takes a surprising amount of time and energy that not everyone has. I can write as much as I do because I have three full days every week just to write, not including the weekend. Which means that if I wake up on the first day and feel totally incapable of writing, I can choose to do something else that day and revisit it the next. I’ve never had that kind of flexibility before, and now that I do, I understand it’s the ultimate privilege—one our work culture often doesn’t account for, let alone encourage. I protect that time even when it means sacrificing more money, which sometimes feels counter to my instincts. I also can comfortably pay my bills and generally feel supported in my work, which isn’t something many writers have, and I still get blocked and burned out. We live in a mentally taxing time and writing itself is mentally taxing, but it can also be deeply satisfying, so you just need to check in on where you are.
And:
Modern life in the West has done so much harm to creative pursuits—by working everyone to the bone, by making commodification the only goal, by glorifying the hustle—that blaming only yourself for struggling to keep up is not only unhelpfully harsh, but inaccurate.
This is something I’ve thought about a lot: that we have a tendency as a society, especially in America, to see all problems as individual rather than questioning whether they’re systemic or societal. Nahman makes a good point: we are living through a very taxing time right now, and that makes creativity and productivity harder than ever — so perhaps we should all give ourselves a break.
So with that, I don’t have an essay for you this week, but I do have lots of good links to read, and recipe recommendations, as always. Happy Sunday!
Good things to read
What is the dining table really for?, Vox. A lovely deep dive into why the dining room is dead.
HGTV is getting a renovation, The New Yorker.
I found Annie from Annie’s Mac and Cheese. Here’s her story, SFGate.
Being a child prodigy didn’t mean I could succeed in this economy, Gen/Medium.
You probably don’t remember the internet, The Atlantic.
A bestselling author became obsessed with freeing a man from prison. It nearly ruined her life, The Marshall Project.
The beauty of 78.5 million followers, New York Times Magazine. How beauty influencers are changing the industry.
A brief anatomy of outdoor dining, The New Yorker.
How crying on TikTok sells books, New York Times.
On Teen Vogue and the “cancel culture” hell we can’t seem to escape, The New Republic.
Good things to cook
This week I made: Burger bowls. Miso chicken. Vietnamese lemongrass salmon bowls (with my new Omsom starters! Highly recommend!)
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