Learning to Let Go: How to Unplug From Your Writing

​The summer before my sophomore year in college, I worked two jobs so I could buy myself a Ford Fiesta. I was moving off campus during the coming fall, unappreciative of public transportation, and that tiny car was the only thing I had any hope of affording. By the end of the summer, I was pretty far away from the amount I needed to get it. So my parents took pity on me and agreed to top off the difference between what I had and the cost of “a real car.” I’d been aiming for something cute, round, compact. But after just a few days searching the used car ads at the back of the Maryland Gazette, my dad and I came home with this sleek little Celica GT I’d had no idea I wanted.
 
It was low to the ground. It had a spoiler and a sunroof. Its headlights flipped up when you turned them on like a long-lashed crush looking up to focus their gaze just on you. This car was way cooler than I was ever gonna be, and I loved her.

Greta, as my BFF named her, took me everywhere throughout college and most of grad school. She ferried us to countless meals and parties and classes. She sheltered me through Chicago’s brutal winters. All the while surviving my spotty maintenance efforts and antipathy toward car washes.
 
But like all dear things, Greta eventually started to run down, finally dying one morning with a spectacular bang we at first mistook for a gunshot. When the day came to donate her, I was so bogged down by my dissertation that when the tow truck guy called to say he was on his way, all I felt was annoyed by the distraction. “Can’t you just take care of it?” I asked my soon-to-be husband with testy fatigue. And he did.
 
I hadn’t thought, before then, that I’d need to mark the departure of that vehicle. I loved Greta, but she was just a car—undrivable at that. But when I stepped outside the next day and saw the empty parking pad, I realized that the car that had literally carried me through every important experience of the last 10 years of my life was gone. And I hadn’t even noticed.
 
I didn’t cry—it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t a well of emotion. It was an unsettled feeling in my gut, a dawning realization I didn’t want to see. Something had happened--it was small, but it mattered. And I’d been too busy to give it my attention. 

* * *

I thought about Greta recently ‘cause it’s that time of year that asks us to choose whether we’re going to keep our attention on our writing, or redirect it elsewhere. I say “choose,” but these moments don’t necessarily feel like a choice. To me, they feel like a civil war: Part of me wants to pull on my sweats and pull out unfinished knitting projects. Binge watch holiday movies. Spend hours planning, shopping for, and cooking elaborate holiday dinners complete with themed decorations.
 
But that’s just one half of me. The second half looks at her unfinished semester plan and wants to smack the first half across the face. Hard. Doesn’t my first half remember that the whole point of any break is to get some writing done?

Maybe you face a similar situation, where it’s all too easy to slip into the mode where life’s most pleasurable and meaningful experiences feel like obstacles to work. Perhaps, like me, you have a sneaky little habit of reinterpreting life’s joyful rest stops as burdens. (I poured out the Shitty First Draft of this very post on the morning of my 15th wedding anniversary, frantically typing out my ideas while muttering under my breath that we both had too much to do to take the weekend trip we were prepping for.) The problem is that if we give in to this feeling, we end up doing what I did with Greta—we let the most important things go by without noticing them because we’ve donated all our attention to our work.
 
You’re tired. You need the rest. You want to hang out with your friends and family. Or maybe all you want is to spa your day away. You know intellectually that focusing on something other than work is a good idea. But still, it feels impossible.

* * *

One reason taking a break feels impossible is because we tend to think of it as an act rather than a process. Technically, that’s true. If your last class of the year ends at 3:45 on Tuesday, you could conceivably be on break at 3:47—just to give your students a couple minutes to get out the door. For those lucky souls who transition easily between one role and another, such a quick shift might be possible.
 
But for many people, there’s an internal shift you have to go through before you can detach from your work fully enough to give yourself true respite. It’s not just that you have to stop one activity and take up another. It’s that you have to be OK with the fact that that’s what you’re doing. You have to give in to the situation, to the choice that you’ve made and its implications. Without that internal shift, it’s hard to get out of your head, get out of your office, and get into the rest of your life.
 
What I’ve observed in my clients and myself is that this shift has multiple stages. Just knowing that these stages exist, and that others are going through them with you can alleviate the frustration you might feel toward your initial inability to unplug. More importantly, bearing them in mind can help you get through them more quickly. When I watch someone move from an unbending focus on work to a willingness to take a break, here’s what I usually see:

1. They admit that they want and need the break. We’ve talked about this before. Many scholars are uncomfortable about wanting to rest, feeling that the desire not to work makes them a lazy person or otherwise unfit for the profession. As a result, saying aloud that we’d like to stop working can sometimes feel like a terrible confession. “I’d like to do less, without guilt,” a coaching client once confided to me. She’d proven herself a thousand times over: she was tenured, endowed, and running her own research institute. It took several weeks of coaching for her to trust me enough to speak these words aloud. But it was only when she did that we were able to seriously consider how the break she was looking for might happen.
2. They struggle against their desire to rest. Wouldn’t it be lovely if admitting your desires immediately enabled you to fulfill them? Not so among the scholars I’ve observed: once they speak aloud the truth of what they need, many do everything they can to deny it. This denial can take many forms: sometimes they insist that, however much they want it, a break from work will cause their world to fall apart. Often, scholars attempt to take a break, but they continue working intensely at the same time. In an essay on academic guilt, Giussepina Iacono Lobo describes how, even with a supportive department and dean, she struggled to fully embrace her maternity leave, because “the prospect of putting work on hold for an entire semester seemed impossible.”  Iacono Lobo’s newborn soon helps her realize just how possible it is, and she eventually relents. But only after she actively resisted her new reality: “I churned out pages of my manuscript up until days before my son’s birth, and I wrote my annual update while in Labor. During my leave, and often with a sleeping baby nestled into my shoulder, I revised an article for publication, averaging a sentence a day.”* While this step might seem irrational, it actually makes a lot of sense. The reason we struggle is that we have two competing desires and we need some time to wrestle with them both, before we can choose between them.
3. They polarize their options. After fighting against themselves for however long they need to, those who are successful at detaching from work eventually experience the key to unplugging from work: they admit the fundamental incompatibility of their desires. I went through this just a few days ago, having returned home from several weeks of travel with a growing to-do list and a hacking cough. While trying to strategize with friends about how to handle the situation, I heard these words come out of my mouth: I can’t have time with my family and get all this work done. People, this was not a new realization. I’d been fluttering around the truth of it for days. But there’s something about saying “I can’t have my cake and eat it too” that frees you, even if it doesn’t feel good right away. Putting it in those terms makes the choice, the cost, and your willingness to bear that cost spectacularly clear. Enjoy my people or write another paragraph? No contest.
4. They wind down their work. Once they’ve accepted what they want, scholars who detach from their work don’t just drop everything. They spend some time bringing their work to a close, so that they can end with a sense of satisfaction and feel truly free to focus on other things. It’s tempting to skip this step, I know. When I teach this skill in my writing retreats, it’s the one that seems, at first, to be the least important. But it also tends to have the most impact. Think about it this way: jugglers don’t end their routines by letting all their balls drop to the ground. Instead they practice what’s referred to as a “finish,” cleanly gathering up all their balls before taking a bow. That’s how they signal that they’re done.

All of this takes time. It takes patience. It takes flexibility. But I promise you, it’s not impossible. Try it out and see if it works for you. The best part won’t even be having quiet time for yourself, or laughing with your friends, or connecting with your family. The best part will be looking back on those things when they’re all over, and doing so with a heart that's free from regret.

*Giuseppina Iacono Lobo “Academic Guilt,” in How to Build a Life in the Humanities, eds. Greg Colón Semenza and Garrett A. Sullivan,  (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 88.

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