Work in Progress #13: Grace and Excuses

Talking about empty cups…

The overriding theme of 2023 for me was that I need to show up for myself.  I’ve talked at length recently about the ways last year played out that made it difficult to do that.  I talked how my cup being empty made it hard to fulfill certain promises I made to myself.

Except, that’s not the entire story.

When I talk about it from the frame of the last 12 months, it implies that I’ve been completely on top of my sh*t for decades, running my life with the precision of a Swiss watch.  It suggests a change out of nowhere, that stress suddenly showed up in and just like that I’m unable to write, work out, or prioritize my needs.  The truth is that I’ve been a bad combination of comfortable and scared, and when something disrupted the comfort, I became overwhelmed.

Let’s backtrack.

I self-published a novel in 2014 called The Favorite.  It features prominently on this site, and by a few accounts, it was a decent read.  It allowed me to have some awesome experiences, like book signings at a couple of independent bookstores along the I-5 corridor and meet some cool people.  It was a dream come true, and I don’t feel like it’s possible to overstate it.   Did I make a ton of money?  No, of course not.  But it was encouraging enough that people enjoyed my work that I wanted to continue and build on it with the Next Thing.

I don’t know if you’ve been to other tabs on this site, but if you visit the Books tab, you’ll notice that the first thing you see is a “Coming Soon” card.  I put that up in 2016, with a soon-to-be completed draft in hand.  I did a couple of rounds of self-editing, and I had let some people close to me read it before I sent it to a professional editor.  And while most people had nice things to say, my brain focused on the one person who told me they picked parts of it at random and giggled over the racier parts with friends over wine.

That was the moment I felt like a fraud, just a guy cosplaying as an author.

I told myself that I could handle criticism and that when you share your work, stuff like that comes with the territory.  I kept fussing with the story and self-editing until I lost the thread, and it no longer resembled the story I was interested in writing in the first place.  I knew the idea was solid—I still know that—but I told myself that I’d shelve it for a year and put the work in to make it perfect.  A year became two, then four, and now eight.

My wife often tells me not to be so hard on myself.  “Give yourself grace,” she says.  Permission to be imperfect.  And there is a ton of wisdom in that mindset.  Mistakes and imperfection are necessary components for growth.  Art, be it visual or audio, still or moving, poetry or prose, is really about growth.

That said, I find myself frequently at war with the concept of giving myself grace because of how close it feels to making excuses for not living up to my promises to myself.  I know that there’s a fine line between forgiving myself for being imperfect and not holding myself accountable when things don’t pan out because I didn’t make it work.  I don’t know how to find that line all the time.

And this brings me back to 2023.  The layoff, looking back, may not have been preventable, but it was certainly predictable.  As a matter of fact, when certain small things started going sideways in a way that spoke to organizational indifference, a thing I said out loud to a co-worker was “I may not see the writing on the wall, but I can hear the spray can shaking.”  Do I give myself grace for losing my job in a situation I couldn’t directly control?  Do I hold my feet to the fire for not being better prepared?

The crazy thing is, I think the answer might be “both.”

Giving yourself permission to falter, to fail, and taking ownership of and responsibility for your mistakes are not mutually exclusive.  It’s not strange to be bummed about a layoff you maybe could have seen coming and forgive yourself for trusting the company and not your instincts.  You can be bothered by the time it takes to heal from something traumatic (mentally or physically), while forgiving yourself for taking damage.  And it is totally reasonable to forgive yourself for being utterly exhausted and burnt out while accepting responsibility for doing what you need to do so you can eventually get back to feeling like yourself.

It’s somewhat fitting to talk about what went wrong last year at the beginning of this one, about habits and tendencies that need to be adjusted, changed, or done away with entirely.  It’s almost cliché that we think of these as New Year’s Resolutions, but if we’re going to call it that, my main one is to be kind to myself.

Well, kinder anyway.