Slowing down

A few months ago I was at a conference for work and ended up reading a few of my coworkers’ human design charts, as one does. I got into a deep discussion with one coworker in particular, and at one point I mentioned she has a 6 in her profile (which describes the role you tend to play in the world).

Most numbers in the profile have a fixed role—for instance, mine are researcher (1) and experimenter (3). But 6s are different. They go through three phases: experimenter until around the age of 28, observer until the age of 50, and then role model (assuming you’ve done all the work you need to do to get there).

After I explained this to her, she asked me: Can you speed up that process?

This is a question I’m highly familiar with because it’s the question I ask the universe almost every single day. How do I get to my end goal faster? That’s the interesting part. I don’t want to spend time on the messy middle!

Unfortunately for those of us who yearn to reach our goals faster, what I’ve come to learn is that the messy middle is kind of the point. It’s where all the learning and experiencing occurs. The end goal is just the thing that drags us through the stuff we wouldn’t face otherwise.

Some of you know I attempted to write a book ten-ish years ago. It was my reprieve from a job I didn’t want to be at (the story of my life) and at the time, I sat in so much anguish trying to figure out how to be a full time author as fast as possible. I wrote many drafts of that book, then scrapped it, then reworked the idea, and scrapped it, and eventually gave up. It was so painful to not be able to figure out how to make that story work that I didn’t just give up on the book, I gave up on writing altogether.

Eventually I started to pick writing back up because it just wouldn’t leave me alone, but part of the reason I was able to do it was was because I had convinced myself I wasn’t a fantasy writer. The only way I could write fantasy was via fan fiction as it took place in a world someone else had built. Eventually, I convinced myself that maybe I wasn’t supposed to write fiction at all. Maybe I was supposed to just write non-fiction. That is what eventually led to this blog.

While I do enjoy writing my blog and intend to keep writing it for a long time, I never stopped wanting to write fantasy. And finally a couple of months ago, I had a coaching session where my lovely coach Fiona dared me to consider that maybe the reason I couldn’t write that book once upon a time was because I wasn’t ready to write it then. And maybe now I am. All I have to do is give myself permission to try again.

In our logic-driven, linear world, we tend to assume that if we put in a certain amount of effort and follow certain steps, we can achieve anything. And technically we can. I could have gone through the motions of putting words on a page and then hitting publish on Kindle Unlimited the moment I had a semi-viable draft of 80,000-ish words.

But the truth is that if I had released the book I wrote ten years ago, I wouldn’t have been happy with it. I stopped, not because it was hard, but because I could sense that I was lacking something that felt important to have. I wouldn’t have been able to even name it at the time because I didn’t have the experience to know what it was. The last ten years were necessary to become the person I needed to become to tell a deeper and more fulfilling story.

It’s very similar to that Ira Glass quote:

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

Except that in addition to working on craft via a volume of work, we also need to understand ourselves, work out some of the things that are subconsciously holding us back, and gain the right experience. That can only be obtained through living a certain volume of life.

That isn’t to say we should wait to attempt our dreams until we feel we are “ready,” because ready will never come that way. It just means that if things aren’t working out the way we hope they would right now, it doesn’t mean you’re a failure. It could simply mean there’s a little more life you need to live before you’re ready for that particular thing.

There are several interviews where Guillermo del Toro talks about how he wanted to make Frankenstein since he was 11. He didn’t make it until he was in his 60s. And it wasn’t for a lack of trying—he had pitched it many times and something always made it not work. But because he had been forced to wait, he had the opportunity to tell this really rich story filled with personal experience, technical knowledge, historical and artistic inspiration, and a maturity he wouldn’t have had even ten years before. It was a film that could live up to the expectations he had for the story that inspired him to go into film because he had waited 50 years to tell it.

It’s not just about experience, though. It’s also about energy. I used to show up to the page anxious to contort my work into the most engaging, most creative piece of work I could. I would do anything to make that happen, even compromise what felt true for me because I thought it would make for a twistier plot twist. These last few weeks, I’ve shown up relaxed and confident in my point of view. I sink into the flow and the fun. If there’s something I can’t figure out yet, I take space and trust it’ll come. That energy is only possible because of the self-work I’ve done over the last ten years. So taking a break and then slowly working my way back to fantasy didn’t just mean I could create a better book. It also meant I could enjoy the process so much more, which to me is so incredibly important. A dream job isn’t a dream job if it makes you miserable.

The other day I had an energy reading with Fiona and she told me that it was likely my first book might take a few years to write in order to really hone my voice and write the story I want to write. And just like my coworker, I was like, ummm can I speed up that process please?

The answer was yes, I could speed it up. But it would be a better book if I allowed it the space and time it really needed to blossom.

So I’m writing a fantasy book for the first time in years. But it’s probably going to take a few more years before it goes out into the world. I’m trusting that it’ll be worth the wait.