On being ruthless

and knowing the difference between being ruthless and being a jerk to yourself

Dear friend,

I’m back. Against all odds.

I’ve put aside the photos of Miles I find myself looking at when I’m away from him for more than 10 minutes. I’ve stopped calculating the number of continuous hours of sleep I did or did not get to be here with you and this word document. For the past five years, despite what is going on in my life, or maybe because of it, I’ve insisted on coming back to this blank page and saying what I have to say.

Julia and I are watching the TV series Wednesday at the moment. In it, the protagonist, Wednesday Addams, a thirteen-year-old girl with killer eyeliner and destructive psychic powers, is also a young novelist. She’s fierce about her writing time. When her roommate tries to interrupt her during her writing, Wednesday tells her roommate repeatedly to shut the hell up. She doesn’t let anything, even her roommates dancing and singing, get in her way.

There’s been many a time in our household, when Julia walks in while I’m writing, and I shoot her daggers with my eyes until she backs out of the room with her hands up mouthing “Sorry, I didn’t realize you were writing.” If a friend I’ve been playing phone tag with for weeks calls, I won’t just pick up during writing time. I turn my phone over and let it keep ringing even though a phone chat seems like more fun than a blank page.

I recently read Elizabeth Strout’s 2016 book, My Name is Lucy Barton. It chronicles a mother-daughter relationship told through several days spent together in a hospital room. It’s also about Lucy Barton’s struggle to be a writer and a daughter and a wife. This character decides to leave her husband because she realizes she’ll never write another novel if she stays with him. She doesn’t elaborate on why she can’t write while married to him or how she came to know this. It’s the kind of knowing without explanation. She chooses her writing over her marriage. Yikes!

This character, Lucy Barton, said something that stayed with me. She said she learned that you have to be ruthless as a writer. I’ve thought of this many times in the past few weeks. Once I was feeling exhausted, and I had the choice of watching tv or writing. I really wanted to watch tv. And I thought, is this what is means to be ruthless? To write even though I’m tired and feel like crap? No, I decided. That’s called being a jerk to yourself. Being ruthless when it comes to writing means saying no to the hang out you don’t feel like, or the work out you feel you should do, or the phone call that comes in just as you’re sitting down to work. Sometimes it even means blocking out the intriguing conversation at the coffee table next to you. Being ruthless means listening to what you want to do, and if that’s writing, then blocking out everything else that gets in your way.

So please, this week, go be ruthless in pursuit of the thing you feel like doing, the thing you feel you have to do to feel like you. Be like Wednesday Addams and tell the world to shut the hell up for a while. They won’t listen of course, but that’s when you turn the volume up a little more on your Airpods, and strap in for the ride.

Lila

P.S. It’s my sister and her courage to start sharing creative things online that inspired me to start a substack of my own. You can check out her wonderful newsletter here.

P.P.S. If you’re new to my newsletter, here’s the first post about where I’m headed with this whole endeavor and what you can expect from week to week.