Category: Creative Process

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WFH tips to get through coronavirus

I am not a rules person, so I have only a few. I have some tips that have worked for me.

To the tune of always wear sunscreen:

Show your face on video calls. Wear real (if casual) clothes. Take lunch without work notifications popping up.

If you have trouble focusing and must get through something that requires chunks of time, you can try the pomodoro technique, which is 25 minutes of work followed by a 5 minute break.

Take advantage of the perks: if you want to run laundry or listen to loud music or watch Netflix during lunch, by all means. Make sure you get outside for 15 minutes a day whenever possible.

Set a timer to get up and stretch.

Make an effort to say thank you sincerely in an out-of-the-ordinary way once a week, on a call, through a text or email or note.

Communicate your priorities with your colleagues and boss, including when you check email (it doesn’t have to be every hour, folks) and when you’re unavailable (you don’t have to explain yourself).

Have a ritual to start and end the day so you’re not “on call” all day (it can be as simple as closing the door to a makeshift office or putting a laptop out of sight). Stick to normal-ish hours, including a bedtime. Shut down the work computer/tabs/documents/spreadsheets by 6 (or within 15 minutes of whenever your shift ends).

Mainly, be gracious with others and extend grace to yourself—though we tell ourselves whatever we need to tell ourselves about our work, most of our jobs aren’t that important (in these times, literally life or death); some people are lonely and want more interaction, some are rearranging caregiving for parents and elders, some are trapped with family and roommates or even children and babies (did I say trapped?). Some people have never WFH before and feel the need to prove they are, indeed, working by sending 40 emails. Some people are swimming through everyone on their team sending them 40 emails. Some people can’t focus due to anxiety about all that and more; others use work to distract from anxious feelings and dig in. Some of us don’t even have toilet paper at the moment. Basically, it’s the things we should be compassionate toward everyone about every day but don’t usually have the imagination or capacity for writ large. If you feel yourself judging your colleagues, try not to be such an asshole. (Might I suggest yoga, meditation, virtual birdwatching, or going for a walk?)

Here are more free resources to help get through coronavirus weirds; here’s a gratitude journal prompt to quell anxiety and offer you some courage.

You are enough. You have enough. You do enough.

If you’d like to read more of my writing, subscribe to my monthly newsletter or read my book, Rodeo in Reverse.

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5 Steps to Stop Impostor Syndrome in Its Tracks

Social scientists David Dunning and Justin Kruger wanted to know whether people who are incompetent know that they’re incompetent.

Spoiler alert: they don’t. In the researchers’ paper “Unskilled and Unaware of It,” they write, “Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd.”

That’s right. Dunning-Kruger Effect shows that people who know more about a given subject think they know less about it and people who are totally ignorant of a given subject are overconfident.

We see it in the office, in the news, in overambitious home repairs. The people who know the least about a given topic tend to overestimate themselves in that realm.

But the inverse is also true: The people who know the most tend to underestimate themselves.

Taken to its extreme, veni vidi vici!, it’s impostor syndrome, the feeling you’re a fraud at something you actually excel at and, at any minute, you’ll be found out.

The sick irony? If you were, in fact, incapable or ignorant, an impostor, you probably wouldn’t have the sense to question your ability.

While many of us have wrestle with it, some of us are more susceptible. According to the New York Times, “women tend to judge their performance as worse than they objectively are while men judge their own as better.” Also according to the Times, impostor syndrome’s effects on people who are minorities is compounded because of pressures of discrimination. (It turns out, people treating you like you’re incompetent despite your competence makes you feel like you’re incompetent.)

And for those of us who make art, often ephemeral, often in isolation or without recognition or pay, these intrusive thoughts can be especially hard to beat back once they enter.

If you’ve felt the pains of impostor syndrome, you’re in good company. Even former First Lady Michelle Obama recently shared that she struggles with this feeling.

“I had to work to overcome that question that I always asked myself, ‘Am I good enough?’ … That’s a question that has dogged me for a good part of my life,” she said.

She felt that way stepping into the Ivy League. She felt that way again when she was becoming the First Lady of the United States.

Unchecked, impostor syndrome keeps us from sharing our most meaningful contributions with the world. Instead, we keep them in notebooks, on hard drives, in basements. When we let impostor syndrome lead instead of our gifts, we undervalue our work, we fake smile our way through parties, we bloviate or self-deprecate and often isolate ourselves. We’re never known and the world misses out.

Thankfully, Michelle Obama harnesses the courage to acknowledge her impostor syndrome without letting it run her life.

So how do we trust in our worthiness and make our mark?

Here are five steps to stop impostor syndrome in its tracks:

Step 1. Recognize it for what it is.

But it can be tricky to identify: Impostor syndrome may look like humility outwardly. But it’s actually a rejection of the gifts and talents you possess.

Humility is a virtue, and arrogance a vice. So, are you being humble or not giving yourself enough credit?

C.S. Lewis said, “Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.”

Do you hear your inner voice asking the question Michelle Obama asked: “Am I good enough?” Do you fear “getting caught” or “being found out”? Is there an anxious feeling attached? Is there an inward, negative focus?

If so, it’s likely impostor syndrome.

Or are you considering what you could give others with your knowledge, talents, or gifts? If you have an outward, positive focus, it’s likelier to be humility.

Once recognized, some of its power is diminished.

Step 2. Name it.

As shame and vulnerability researcher Brene Brown says, “Shame thrives in secret.” Tell a trusted friend or mentor what you’re experiencing. Often, in telling the story, you’ll see that the parts that made so much sense in your head don’t make sense out loud. In the telling, you might find the the feeling evaporating.

If not, it’s likely that who you tell will see your value and have an anecdote to share about a time they’ve felt like a phony. In sharing our experience, Brown says someone else can empathize with us and we realize we aren’t alone.

Why is naming so powerful? Brown says, “If you own this story, you get to write the ending.”

Step 3. Find the right people.

And, Brown emphasizes, it’s important who you choose to tell. You want honesty and compassionate support. In a “shame spiral,” you won’t trust the friend who you know offers effusive praise, and you don’t need the friend who you feel competitive toward or who might scold you.

As an aforementioned NYT article mentions, it may help to find a group based on an identity within your field (race, gender, sexual orientation, region, and so on). They’ll likely have commonalities, won’t require as much explanation from you, and can offer tips as to what’s worked for them in similar situations.

Bonus: being part of a group that identifies as a part of a profession gives you a little sense of verification. (For instance, I joined an online women’s writing group. Connecting with other writers helps me feel like a writer.) Find the person or community that you trust.

Step 4. Honor your integrity and do the dang thing.

Michelle Obama said she fought her impostor syndrome the way she knew how: hard work.

Worried you can’t make this presentation, do well in this promotion, parent your child well, make a painting as good as the last?

Then it’s time to begin.

Obama said: “Whenever I doubted myself, I thought, let me put my head down and do the work. I would let my work speak for itself.”

One way to prove to yourself you can do something is to do it.

Emmy winner Amy Poehler also takes this approach. In writing her best-selling memoir Yes, Please she admits she too has heard the voice that says “youaredumbandyouwillneverfinishandnoonecaresanditistimeyoustop.”

How did she combat it? She sat down and did it. Poehler says, “The doing is the thing. The talking and worrying and thinking is not the thing.”

Step 5. Celebrate your gifts.

Impostor syndrome seems akin to what Brown calls “foreboding joy,” the sense that any time something good happens, you’re waiting for the other waiting for the other shoe to drop. The antidote, she says, is gratitude.

You can’t experience joy or accept your gifts without it.

A friend reminded me recently that the data shows we just have to express gratitude, even if we don’t feel it yet. (Thanks, Jeanette!)

Write a list you’re grateful for in your planner or make a “successes” label in your email or file on your computer. When you feel impostor syndrome creeping in, read your success file. You’ll thank yourself. (Har har.)

Impostor syndrome may be a constant companion. The trick is to recognize it, confide in a friend, do your work, and celebrate your successes.

Still wondering if you’re good enough?

That needn’t stop you.

As Poehler says, “Great people do things before they’re ready. They do things before they know they can do it.”

(FWIW, I struggled mightily with impostor syndrome before pressing publish on this very post and have before, too.)

If you’d like to read more of my writing, subscribe to my monthly newsletter or read my book, Rodeo in Reverse.

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Monty Don’s “Big Dreams, Small Spaces”

Monty Don smiles in behind roses and in front of a water feature in a garden.
Meet Monty Don, British gardening guru.

If you’ve run out of new episodes of “Great British Bakeoff,” have I got a TV show for you. This holiday season, a friend has introduced me to my new favorite show starring British gardening guru Monty Don. In “Big Dreams, Small Spaces” (available on Netflix), I get my beautiful landscape fix, my pedagogy fix, my misty-eyed optimist fix, my accent fix. Served best with tea.

Don (who I’ll heretofore refer to as Monty Don because he requires both) helps people create the gardens they’ve been dreaming of (sometimes in crayon) in their actual yards. This is urgent pleasant viewing. He sprinkles in sage advice between practi- and techni- calities.

My favorite Monty Donism so far? A compliment he gave a couple on their gardening, that they had “seriousness of intent” and “pleasure in the process.”

Wouldn’t that be lovely, to feel those two things, that paradox, with our writing? (Related: What Julia Child says it takes to be a “good cook.”)

Most of us have big dreams and small spaces for our art. We write spent after our day jobs. We watercolor, but we have to choose between better groceries or a few new tubes of paint. We dance without a studio. We practice the fingerings for our electric basses unplugged after everyone else is in bed.

On “Big Dreams, Small Spaces,” one couple turns their plot into a “small holding” (British English for tiny farm) and develops an obsession with chili peppers. One man totally busts his hump to get a pond, a pergola, and more than 50 varieties of flowers in a lawn with the foundation of an air raid shelter and a ton of bricks under the sod. A widow replants her roses, what was good from the home she shared with her late husband, into a brilliant, wild-looking cottage garden. A couple figures out how to plant seedlings in the crags of Welsch hillside.

A million purposes: pragmatic, whimsical, heartfelt, rest, work, relaxation. But all for enjoyment. 

The mistake most make when they start out is forcing: forcing plants that aren’t suited, forcing plans too quickly, forcing a particular desire for a particular beauty where another is called for, forcing something to be hidden that needs sunlight. The forcing dampens the enjoyment factor.

Monty Don (or learning the hard way) convinces them to move greenhouses, to change plans, and most often, to dig. But all this to the end of resourcefulness: Growing not what we wish we could but what thrives. Funny thing, a thriving, well-tended garden is a beautiful place no matter what variety, no matter how different from what we thought we wanted.

Not forcing does mean “settling,” but “settling” has gotten a bad wrap. Feeling unsettled, I can tell you, is not great. Settling is setting down roots. Healthy roots make way for green, meaningful stretching—growth.

I prefer this show to its American counterparts because it features the work, the frustration (less often dramatic than stultifying), and the honest results of what the gardener is able to accomplish. By the end, the garden matches the gardener and her landscape; the hard work and resources blossom given the right conditions.

Often as a writer I’ve made the mistake of seeking right conditions (if only silence! and hours! and a writing group of great readers! and inspiration!) for what I want to be rather than assessing what I can grow well as who I am. When I first moved back (home again) to Indiana, I spent hours trying to find websites that would tell me I could successfully grow what I’d cultivate in Tennessee: cypress that require 12 hours of sunlight to maintain their blue, fig trees in the ground, noisettes acclimated to heat; I’ve wished I were a novelist instead of a poet. I’ve wished I wanted to be an accountant or lawyer or anything else really. I’ve applied to jobs and cried when I got called back for interviews because I didn’t want the job but felt I should want the job. I’ve drawn up many plans on graph paper of who I might be if not me, if only a different me.

But I don’t get enough sunlight for that; the fall’s too wet, the spring colder. Rather than seeking right conditions, I need to seek the right plants.

My friend, watching with me, kept saying, “You need to listen to this.” She was right.

I’ll save Monty Don the trouble this time and begin again with more openness to what is and more imagination as to what could be. I’ll first map the sun across the backyard, research native plants, figure out how to get rid of all that poison ivy on the slope, and, if I’m honest, try to think up a project that requires a digger, because those seem pretty sweet.

I’m considering now what I can cultivate in my writing that will thrive and lead to enjoyment. My 2020 wish for you is the same.

In 2020, I’ll be sending an Artist’s Devotional entry once a week to your inbox to help you explore your relationship to your writing. Like a religious devotional, we’ll consider the parables, lives, paths, and vows of those who have come before and consider how to construct our own; unlike a religious devotional, we’ll be faithful to our art, writing.

If you’d like to join in, simply email “Yes” and your name to Lindsey@LDAlexander.com, and I’ll put you on the email list.

If you’d like to read more of my writing, subscribe to my monthly newsletter or read my book, Rodeo in Reverse.

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The Artistry of Julia Child Part 3: Improvise, Salvage, Play

“A good cook is consistently good—not just a little flair here and there—she can turn out a good meal either simple or complicated, can adapt herself to conditions, and has enough experience to change a failure into a success. If the fish doesn’t moose [sic*]—it becomes a soup. Matter of practice and patience.”

*I love this typo.

Julia Child, one of the most renowned cooks of the last century, doesn’t define “a good cook” as someone who’s well-known, who cooks every day or has a cooking regimen, who cooks for many people or just for herself, who can make anything well every time. To Child, a good cook is someone who:

  1. Is consistently good (which we don’t start out as being—Child herself was a flop in the kitchen into her thirties).
  2. Isn’t necessarily showy (“not just a little flair here and there”).
  3. Creates simple dishes.
  4. Creates complicated dishes.
  5. Adapts.
  6. Can turn something around—“has enough experience to change a failure into a success.” (Sounds a lot like revision, don’t it?)

To me, these qualifications can be chalked up to experience (“practice”) and attitude (“patience”).

She emphasizes experience, firstly—a good cook isn’t a one-hit wonder or a wunderkind. No baby geniuses for Child. A good cook needs a track record; to me, this implies a good cook likely has a history of failure so that she knows when something’s not right. It also means that she has enough dishes in her repertoire—she’s tried a variety of meals—that she can turn one thing into another. Her experience cooking is transformational; experience transforms her into this good cook, and a good cook then can transform one plan into another, one dish into another.

This is a fairly democratic view: Anyone can gain experience. Experience is simply a matter of repeated effort.

But in points 5 and 6, she seems to land on a specific kind of experience—not merely the repetition of going through the motions or following a recipe, but repetition with play, what a musician or actor might call improvisation.

Masters and amateurs

So what’s the difference (besides product) between a good cook and all other cooks? Between a master and an amateur?

A master starts with an idea, some ingredients but lets the creation become what it becomes. Masters play. Amateurs force; they serve liquified fish and call it “moose” [sic] and feel disappointment and make others eat their disappointment and complain about how hard writing is (woops) and how much they hate doing it.

This reminds me what poet Mary Szybist has referred to as avoiding “willfulness” in writing, not forcing an ending (or a middle or anything else) before we start. She meant this in the context of a poem (e.g., if I want to write a poem about my mom but it instead jumps to the garbage man and a dog, let the garbage man and the dog in—don’t shoehorn an ending about my mother in). It can be applied to genre, too, though. If it starts out as an essay but I realize it’s better as a poem, it’s a poem now. If I sing a wrong note, I start singing the harmony rather than overcorrecting and drawing attention to what was once a mistake. I use my senses and feel my way through. And finally, the concept can be expanded to process: Some days are hot, some are cold, some days I mangle words (words? what are words?), some days I sing them, but no matter the situation or my skill level on a given day, I can show up and play.

When I’m playful, I’m a good cook. I can serve a disgusting mousse because the menu says mousse or a delicious soup because that’s what the meal became.

The special attention of play

Play requires much more attention, besides just laughs. It demands that I listen, observe what’s there—what’s really there—on the page or in the pan, not just what I want to be there, not just following a recipe with abandon. Play lacks a formula. So while play might sound childish, like a lack of diligence or responsibility, in fact it requires a different, if not deeper, attention than a workaday mentality.

Of course, I don’t believe in good cooks and bad cooks, good artists and bad artists. I believe in behavior. Some days I’m a good cook, some days, not so much. It has a lot to do with my sense of humor. The best days on the page (and in life) I am myself without apology but with humor.

Most of my materials are salvageable (ideas, images, music) or easily replaceable (paper, ink). Even if the work’s subpar, if I play, I learn from it. Or at least I have a good time. When I hammer it into something it’s clearly not meant to be, all I’ve learned is disappointment without the benefit of experiment. The next time I’ll be no better off.

The most electric performances, the best players, are those who’ve practiced enough, failed enough, to improvise and improvise well, which is a more positively connoted word for salvage. It’s Charlie Parker. It’s Julia Child.

And so in life: that balance between perseverance and the primrose path. Having a direction but remaining adept and open. Not forced—lived. “It’s a matter of practice and patience.”

Me? I’m gaining the former and working on the latter.

In holiday celebrations and in art, may you be creative enough and summon the humor to soup your moose.

In 2020, I’ll be sending an Artist’s Devotional entry once a week to your inbox to help you explore your relationship to your writing. Like a religious devotional, we’ll consider the parables, lives, paths, and vows of those who have come before and consider how to construct our own; unlike a religious devotional, we’ll be faithful to our art, writing.

If you’d like to join in, simply email “Yes” and your name to Lindsey@LDAlexander.com, and I’ll put you on the email list.

If you’d like to read more of my writing, subscribe to my monthly newsletter or read my book, Rodeo in Reverse.

P.S. Here’s my favorite writing about moose—no, it’s not Julia Child’s or Elizabeth Bishop’s.

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The Artistry of Julia Child: Late Starts and By Nows

“Oh, La Vie! I love it more every day.”
—Julia Child

childhed
Julia Child wielding a knife| from PBS (via Mental Floss)

If, like me, you sometimes (panic) Google “what age was [insert idol here] when they [insert formative experience or creation of work of genius here],” maybe you too have felt under the gun. That gun being one that exploded for a race right above you minutes ago, and people are making the third turn for that first lap, and you’re still trying to get your feet set right on the blocks. (And aren’t these blocks a little awkward? Are my feet too big or narrow or inflexible for these blocks? Whose idea was it to have runners use blocks anyway? Aren’t we beyond this, technologically?)

Shouldn’t I be in the town I’m meant to be in and settle down in and love and invest in by now? Shouldn’t my career make more sense to me by now? If I haven’t created a work of genius by now, does that mean my art ain’t worth shit? Shouldn’t my kid exist by now? Shouldn’t my marriage go more swimmingly? Shouldn’t I be married? If this person began playing an instrument when they were seven, why should I pick it up at 31? Ah, the “by nows.” I know them well. I can recite them by heart and improvise on their melody to add some spice to each of its dishes.

Hadn’t Wendell Berry always known he wanted to live in Kentucky? (No.) Hadn’t Johnny Cash known he’d wanted to be a musical icon since the death of his brother, Jack? (Not really. He didn’t even learn to play guitar until he was an adult.) Hadn’t Patti Smith been cultivating her eccentricity and black coffee and toast diet since birth? (I mean, maybe.)

Hadn’t everyone I look up to as an artist, just, well, kinda known? Or hit on something when they were younger? Or had more confidence in themselves or faith it would pan out?

So imagine, in the midst of an interstate move, pregnant, having to rehash my career plans to meet my spouse’s, landing on a cheery biography that makes the “by nows” seem bygone. Even the idols have them. No thoughtful person or interesting path comes without worries and regrets.

In that beautiful way libraries work, where something you’d never thought of reading is right against some sort of reading assignment you’ve given yourself, I found a biography I needed to read.

Might I introduce you to the slim Julia Child by Laura Shapiro?

Howdy do!

This is the first of a series I’ll call “The Artistry of Julia Child,” in which I share some of my favorite wisdom from Julia Child (care of Laura Shapiro), and how it might apply to creative life.

“‘I got an awfully late start,’ Julia reflected once. She wasn’t talking about marrying at 34, or beginning her life’s work at 37, or launching a television career at 50. The start she had in mind was the moment when her childhood finally ended and she could feel herself coming into focus as the person she wanted to be.” (Shapiro)

I felt so relieved reading this.

A friend and I recently discussed this unending thread on Twitter of middle-aged people sharing their hope and despair, the feeling that, in one’s thirties and forties, life seems like it’s really winnowing (for better or worse) for the first time*, and the decisions we make (or avoid making) really start to shape things. Reading them was case study after case study in resilience, people’s willingness and need to start over: people leaving or entering marriages, relationships, singledom; having or trying to have or not sure about having or not being able to have children; people starting over on careers, looking up from careers that they find are not what they seemed and not seeing anyone, people finding their right livelihoods; and so on.

Weeks later, I thought of Julia Child.

Or, as Child puts it:

“Cooking is one failure after another, and that’s how you finally learn. You’ve got to have what the French call ‘je m’enfoutisme, or ‘I don’t care what happens—the sky can fall and omelets can go all over the stove, I’m going to learn.’”

So with life.

This zeal for learning was essential to Child’s life, and I’d argue, to just about any creative person’s life (though many dress it up or down with some curmudgeonliness). It’s this spirit of learning that connects all of us, no matter our media, and so I thought it might be nice to share some of the nuances about how Child set about learning. Age didn’t factor in, which isn’t to say Child didn’t have her doubts.

“I am deeply depressed, gnawed by doubts, and feel that all our work may just lay a big rotten egg,” Child wrote after some of the recipes that would become part of her seminal work Mastering the Art of French Cooking were rejected by multiple American magazines. The book itself was sent back for an overhaul (basically a rejection); after tons of work, Child turned in an 800-page manuscript that only covered meats and sauces, with more volumes to follow.

Hell’s bells. I guess Child didn’t know by a certain age either.

Everyone has doubts (even deep doubts) about her creative work, even (especially?) years in and post-rejection. Continue to work anyway.

In Child’s case, the rejections led her to reconsider her audience—she had promised a book for housewives, who, at the time, were trying to limit cook times with frozen meals. But, really, harried housewives (in the marketing sense of that identity) weren’t her audience. How would she convince someone with barely enough time to thaw a freezer casserole to master a different country’s cuisine? Her audience, she decided, somewhat boldly—as this wasn’t a proven market, was cooks who liked to cook, regardless of occupation or gender.

Yet even the hobby cook, the enthusiast, likely would not want a Bible-length tome on two kinds of food with the promise of more Bible-length tomes to follow. (Even God must’ve had an editor.)

Thus began her revision, and in her revising, she became clearer on what was essential and what superfluous.

The book, of course, would go on to be one of the most transformational cookbooks (and really, philosophies of cooking) of the 20th century. But I like to imagine that even if her book had gone belly up, she’d still be the kind of person who enjoys life, because that, in my mind, is real success. And that kind of success is available to most of us.

I just tacked a note above my desk: Je m’enfoutisme! I don’t care what happens. I’m going to learn.

Who’s your favorite latebloomer? What’s their story? Share in the comments below. I’d love to learn from them.

Next month, I’ll share some wisdom from Child, poet William Stafford, and writer Anne Lamott.

If you enjoyed this post, sign up for my monthly letter, and get essays on the creative process, plus some sweet jams, poems I like, and other tasty tidbits. Order my poetry collection, Rodeo in Reverse, here.

*Yes, this reminds me of that bit in The Bell Jar where a young 20-something laments about all the fruits on her fig tree and not knowing which to pick. So it’s a feeling that probably has less to do with age, except, for women, the pressure of whether to have children, than with personality and culture and circumstance, etc. Feelings feel real and acute whether they represent reality or its opposite. A story of family lore: Me, coming home dejected from kindergarten? second grade? sobbing. “Do you think I’ll ever get married?”

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“Take the 🦆ing donuts,” or the Womanly Art of Becoming a DONUT PERSON

In high school, I worked at an unimaginably greasy spoon, The Donut Kastle, with my friend Cassie, and it remains one of my favorite ever jobs. We sold donuts, talked to regulars and fielded their (regular) complaints, cleaned (inasmuch as that was possible), glazed and dipped donuts, rolled out donuts, restocked donuts, listened to Death Cab for Cutie and the Jayhawks, and once, when we ran out of glazed and told our boss, heard our boss say, “If I make more, they’ll just sell out again.” So he didn’t.

Photo by Beth Truax (Armstrong) for the Manual High School yearbook. From the story: "Senior Lindsey Alexander mixes a chocolate glaze for her donut creations. Mixing glaze was just one of her many responsibilities at the Donut Kastle. 'The most fun I have is making the weekly donut burger, even though nobody has ever bought it,' Alexander said."
Photo by Beth Truax (now Armstrong) for the Manual High School yearbook | From the accompanying story: “Senior Lindsey Alexander mixes a chocolate glaze for her donut creations. Mixing glaze was just one of her many responsibilities at the Donut Kastle. ‘The most fun I have is making the weekly donut burger, even though nobody has ever bought it,’ Alexander said.”

I ate a lot of donuts. And whatever extras were left at the end of the shift, we were welcome to—so I brought them to theater practices and my then-boyfriend and my friends who didn’t wake up early enough to visit me on my shift. (Our boss took the rest to the homeless, because he may have been a god-awful businessman, but he was an excellent baker and a good person.) The tip money was negligible, and several weekends, Cassie and I spent it buying cheesy tots and slushies at the Sonic next-door.

Before a redesign, we also received the best shirts ever. Despite the pit stains only a teenager in a hell kitchen could create, I still have mine and wear it with no small amount of pride: “I AM A DONUT PERSON” it proclaims, rightly, above a stick figure drawing of donuts wearing crowns and capes on a stick figure castle.

Even after having to give up gluten (shudder), I remain a donut person. (Finding a gluten-free blueberry donut is what led me to work at a bakery in Knoxville. I follow the donuts.)

In a discussion of judgment of how artists make their money or pay for their art in Amanda Palmer’s book The Art of Asking, Palmer brings up Henry David Thoreau. She notes that some people call Thoreau a poser—he isn’t a true man of the wild; he got land from a friend, was close to town, had regular dinners with his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, and every Sunday, had the audacity to accept baked goods from his mom and sister, including the occasional unforgivable, totally decadent donut. This seems like the kind of gossip that floats along in art school (“She’s only able to do that because her spouse supports her/Her mom has a trust fund/She knows someone/That opportunity was only open to [insert often racist comment here]” and so on), typically out of envy, to negate someone’s work by saying they didn’t do it all on her own.

But who among us has done it all on her own?

Palmer talks about DIY versus “maximal DIY,” saying true DIY is doing truly everything on your own—no help, no donations, no phone calls, please. True DIY, she says, requires ingenuity. “Maximal DIY,” however, is asking for help and accepting it. She argues this requires ingenuity (knowing how to ask and what to ask for, plus balancing confidence with gratitude) and trust. (You’re not totally in control. You’re dependent on other people.)

Maximalist DIY-ers take the donuts.

Palmer’s point? If Thoreau had been saving to buy land, hunting for food, making meals from scratch, and starving, chances are he wouldn’t have been writing Walden … or anything else for that matter. Whether Thoreau fails some sort of grit test because he ate some donuts and went into town, he still wrote one of the important pieces of American literature of the 19th century.

If someone offers you donuts, in the words of Palmer: “Take the f*cking donuts.” If you can afford to take time off to write your novel, take it. If your friend offers to give you studio space to record your album, take it. If a pal Venmos you money for gas for your tour or for refills of paints, say thank you, and take it.

For a long time, I’ve tried to be a true DIY-er, which, frankly, is a path I respect but, for me, has been a lonely road. That changed with the publication of my book, which depended on an excellent designer, a fabulous editor, and a publisher I would work with again without question. It continued to change as I asked friends if they’d help me with my book tour—and, remarkably, they did, offering spaces to read, audiences to read to, classes to teach, couches and air mattresses and once a real bed to sleep on, their company when I was passing through, meals, interviews, sharing reviews of my book—you name it.

Maximal DIY is the way to go, IMO. And I did not come by that opinion easily. (Us hard-heads never do, unless we are bullshitting in the middle of a debate over drinks.)

There’s no glory in refusing a donut. Or in refusing gifts, which I tried to do several times in the publication process for my book Rodeo in Reverse.

I’ve turned down some pretty good grub in the past because I didn’t have the humility to eat—avoided opportunities or publications for fear of nepotism, not accepting invitations because people are “just being nice” (uhhh, let people be nice to you?), been resentful of my husband because his career lets me have the (lower paying) career I want (and then not got much writing done because of handwringing over my lack of financial contribution), and I could go on.

But you know what? I love donuts. Life is hard enough without refusing its most perfect circular treats. I want a t-shirt with Thoreau’s face on it that says “Take the donuts” (because I am too afraid to wear anything with the F-word on it in public).

High-school me knew what was up: I AM A DONUT PERSON.

What donuts can you take to get some creative work done?

What’s your favorite donut shop where you live?

Let me know in the comments below, or email me at Lindsey@LDAlexander.com.

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Seeking, Stopping, Finding: How My Word for the Year Changed Me

“What you can plan is too small for you to live.”
— “What to Remember When Waking,” David Whyte

Inspired by Susannah Conway, I now choose a word for the year, or a handful of words, instead of making a list of resolutions. For 2018, I chose “Connect.” I chose it because I craved connection; I wanted connection to guide my decisions. I sought connection, searched for connection, hunted for friends, for happiness, for purpose. I picked the word connect because it was scary and because I felt disconnected.

Truth be told, 2018 kicked my hind-end into outerspace and back again a couple times. A long-term friendship ended; my grandmother died the same week; six months of freelance work evaporated unceremoniously; I had two asthma attacks a day for 20-some-odd days. I couldn’t even stick with my breath. That was the spring. As I pulled into therapy one day, The Mountain Goats’ “I Am Going to Make It Through This Year (If It Kills Me)” popped up on Spotify. Uproarious laughter. I never lost my sense of humor, and yet, for a while, I was calling this year “my unwanted lesson in impermanence.”

I went on fabulous vacations and smiled and laughed and danced and ate oysters on the half-shell and learned and promptly forgot all the facts I could learn and forget about the Colosseum and drank wine under the stars and stared into dozens of famous stony faces and had my first book come out and loved my life and grieved and got angry for reasons I couldn’t explain and woke up in the middle of a few nights wracked with panic.

But some time, somewhere, with connect, something happened. I didn’t notice when it began, but later, driving long hours through the South, listening to the radio, singing so loud in the middles of so many nowheres I thought were just beautiful. I realized—twice—that as a song came on that touched me, I was holding my hand to my heart. ((It was this song.) Which, honestly, what?!)

Rather than seeking to connect, I saw all the connections I’d been unable to see before.

People who were already my friends, the richness of those friendships, the place I could call home, the interests I’d been too shy to claim, how writing connects me to the world, how all of it both roots and frees me.

For years, I thought my writing was part of what kept me lonely or maybe that I kept myself lonely to devote myself to my writing. But through others reading my writing, my small but intelligent, generous audience, I’ve found, especially through my book tour, that writing is what connects me to others, to kindred spirits—not what separates me from them. Writing brought me to New York, where I spent a whole afternoon talking with my cousin on a patio and a whole day walking with another cousin sharing our deepest selves; it brought me to Mary Corse’s work, to Central Park, to meeting a man who has kept a picture of his wife in his wallet for 40 years—since they told each other they couldn’t remember why they’d gotten married, so now he always remembers; it brought me to nachos and sushi with an old friend; a porcelain duck named Spinoza; to a dog that could dance; to my great-aunt’s property and finally meeting her llama; to recognizing my friends in East Tennessee, some of whom even braved a torrential downpour to support me. Writing has brought me close friendship with a baker-writer and weekly walks with her. It’s brought me to the mountains in the cabin of a country civil rights activist, watching squirrels shake leaves from the trees.

Without writing, I would’ve forgotten the details; without writing, I would’ve lived different details. Writing, in connecting me more with the world, has brought me back to myself, to my senses. I’m not one to say art can save you (or me). It can’t. But art can remind us who we are, and we can save ourselves and each other. Thank you for being here with me, for connecting with me and continuing to read. Thanks for being patient with me. I see you now.

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What Success Is (and What It Isn’t)

Poet Lindsey Alexander reading from Rodeo in Reverse at Union Ave Books in Knoxville the day Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford spoke before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Me reading at Union Ave Books in Knoxville the day Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford spoke before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

I have friends who would say success is getting your first book published, preferably with a prize. Have a prize? A more prestigious prize. Have a prestigious prize? A more prestigious award. You can see how the bar moves.

To me, success is a bar that is level, clearing that bar. A bar I choose. Success to me is about setting one bar at a time, not sitting surrounded by bars.

My success is not a cage; my success is what I leap toward. The past couple weeks on my book tour, success has looked like:

  • Talking to a student about her career path after a class
  • Having someone ask to see a copy of a new poem I’d written after reading it
  • Answering some questions honestly and pithily after a reading
  • Watching Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford testify and then making it to a reading anyway
  • Having a woman at that reading tell me I’d read her favorite poem
  • Connecting with my friends
  • With my family’s help, creating a livable space in my basement (it was just junk in boxes)
  • Scheduling an oil change
  • Not picking fights with my husband
  • Making a good meal from ingredients we already had in the house
  • Making my pub day a day to bake and spend time with a friend, rather than trawl social media or plan a big party that would stress me out
  • When I completely spaced an appointment, apologizing and letting it go

My favorite quote about success is from Maya Angelou. I’ve shared it before, and I’ll share it again: “Success is liking who you are, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.”

Yes, sometimes success is champagne floats. (I do recommend raspberry sorbet for that, by the way.) It’s effervescent and bubbling to the top, it’s beautiful and too sacred for Instagram. It’s holding a book in your hands, or a manuscript, or thirty drawings when you thought you couldn’t finish anything. It’s a scale progression you’ve finally nailed or transitioning between chords with ease for the first time. It’s a promotion, it’s talking to someone you don’t know at a party, it’s seeing your person succeed, it’s having dinner with your parents and realizing just then how much you love them and how much you are loved. It’s stopping to watch the butterflies on the bush you planted for them a year ago. It’s a slow dance in your dining room on a Saturday afternoon—just you.

We tend to write off our everyday successes (or I do), which makes us ill-equipped to see our big ones when they come. I’m trying to revel more in them. Especially the successes that might not look like success at all to someone else.

Sometimes success isn’t glamorous—and I don’t quite mean the hard work behind a finished product. I mean sometimes the world is ugly and success is ugly, too. Sometimes success is sharing with someone you love that you’ve been hurt. Sometimes success is warning women colleagues about your harasser when you hear he’s in their orbit. Sometimes success is having developed the tools to not have a panic attack when you hear an abuser’s name in passing. Sometimes success is faceplanting on the couch so that you don’t go out and self-destruct or self-medicate. Sometimes success is admitting to yourself that you’ve been hurt and that you didn’t deserve to be hurt; it’s letting yourself cry after years of promising yourself you wouldn’t. Sometimes it’s recognizing hurt you’ve caused and contemplating how to pay restitution. It’s laughing after all this when you accidentally break a keepsake, sweeping it up, and hoping you’ll glue it back together somehow. Sometimes success is “jumping in front of a train that was heading to where it was heading anyway.”*

In the American literary scene, we are in a season of awards and lists that people like to argue over. I understand why: They help careers, give visibility to writers, can give assurance that’s much needed when an artist feels at a breaking point, and also, most people have very little taste if left to their own devices—if something wins an award, they can feel comfortable calling it good. I’m happy for kind artists who win awards pretty much regardless of whether I like their writing—mostly because it’s nice when nice things happen to nice people. (And the inverse of this is also true for me—not liking when mean or cruel people or known abusers win these awards pretty much regardless of whether I like their writing.) Sometimes great works are awarded, sometimes they are passed over for lesser ones. An award doesn’t change the original quality of a work. And somehow, work keeps getting done with or without this validation.

If we come up with our own terms for success, as Dr. Angelou suggests, then it is maybe less surprising when worldly success is bestowed to those who are undeserving—the sycophants, the posers, and infinitely worse, our abusers, our nightmares, our Brett Kavanaughs—and that we must argue over who “success” is bestowed upon, whether it’s an award or an inevitability—an entitlement, and what success means. Often, success is just a word for putting bars around others, passing a bar, a baton, between only a few people. (The bars others set for us—by design or by circumstance—usually aren’t level.)

It can be painful to realize people I care about don’t share my definition of success—that a violent felony is a rite of passage, for instance, and not disqualifying, the strange idea that a personal failing should not affect a professional success. (Especially as I’m of the first Facebook generation, where we were urged not to post anything—even a questionable joke or a red Solo cup—as teenagers that might haunt us throughout our careers.)

Having a definition of success for myself doesn’t make the world more just—it doesn’t lessen my tears. It doesn’t make me a good person. (Dang it!) But it does lighten my load. It makes me accountable to myself.

How?

I like who I am, I like what I do, and I like how I do it. (And when I realize I’ve fallen short, I change what I’m doing and how I’m doing it to match the person I know I am.)

I may be wrong, but I do not think the Kavanaughs like who they are, what they do, and how they do it. (If they did, would they deny who they are, what they do, and how they do it? Do they even begin to know who they are?) This belief, this self-love, may be the only justice we get.

What is your definition of success for yourself? What is one success (of any size) you’ve had in the last week?

*What Dr. Blasey-Ford said of her reluctance to come forward sooner.

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5 Links to Help You Stop Impostor Syndrome When It Creeps In

After all, chances are you’re an impostor impostor. Acting with the knowledge from these articles, stave off impostor syndrome.

Leslie Odom, Jr., of Hamilton fame on wobbly steps and quitting before you’ve tried

New mantra: “‘What did you do in the absence of the ringing phone?'”

“How to deal with impostor syndrome when you’re treated as an impostor”

Impostor syndrome has a greater toll on members of minority groups because “a lack of representation can make minorities feel like outsiders, and discrimination creates even more stress and anxiety when coupled with impostorism, according to Kevin Cokley, a professor of educational psychology and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin.” This article also shares three tips for helping quell impostorism.

The #ShareYourRejections hashtag on Twitter

Started by poet/author Saeed Jones, this hashtag has individuals tweeting rejections that are inevitable with making art or living life. Many are about manuscripts and art that has been rejected (some of which you’ve heard of, some you haven’t), but some people are sharing life stories of rejection as well. In medias res, happy ending, and bottomless, this is time on social media that may actually make you feel less alone in your pursuit. Being rejected doesn’t make you an impostor—not doing the work does. (As an aside, I fully believe in that barstool aphorism: “Life’s rejections are God’s protections.”)

How I dealt with my own bout of an impostor syndrome freakout while trying to re-title my book

What is Rodeo in Reverse was Impostor from the Future. Yes, I even wanted the word impostor on the front cover, bigger than my name. On the spine, beside my name. I wanted everyone to know Lindsey Alexander = impostor, okay?

How to build a sense of a belonging to immunize yourself against impostor syndrome

Trust, playfulness, and writing down your accomplishments seem like they vaccinate against the worst of impostor syndrome. This isn’t to say you’ll never feel like an impostor again, but that you can manage the resources to move alongside that feeling rather than buying into it. Here are several ways (especially geared toward the workplace) to shake it off in the Florence and the Machine way. (Wo-oa-oah.)

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Ancestors and Self-Acceptance, Honor and Joy

Forested mountains

Then in my heart I wanted to embrace
the spirit of my mother. She was dead,
and I did not know how. Three times I tried,
longing to touch her. But three times her ghost
flew from my arms, like shadows or like dreams.

—Odysseus, The Odyssey trans. Emily Wilson, Book 11, lines 204-8

I come as one, but I stand as 10,000.

—Oprah paraphasing Dr. Maya Angelou

Joy is the happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens. And, usually, we have the idea, well, when something nice happens, then I’m happy, and when something bad happens, of course I’m unhappy. Well, you can be unhappy, and yet joyful. We don’t think of that. But there is a deep inner peace and joy in the midst of sadness. If we feel our way into it, we know that.

—Brother David Steindl-Rast (in this excellent episode of On Being)

Forested mountains

The other day, driving home from work, I was listening to our local public radio’s classical hour and thinking of my grandmother. It was a beautiful blue-sky day, and on my route, when the sky is clear, you can see the mountains both ways. Around the bend and the view revealed them, in their purple-blue relief, the road peeling behind me. My grandmother loved a view. Then, on the radio, something odd happened. Listening to this show on the way home was part of an old-pat routine: instrumental music, no lyrics (except occasionally opera, in languages I do not understand) to wind down, an occasional misplaced CD and the commentator trying to think fast in that way that makes local public radio even more enjoyable.

But as I moved in my hunk of metal toward the mountains, a chorus began singing “Morning Has Broken,” a song played at my grandmother’s funeral. (She wasn’t religious, but she did like Cat Stevens.) For almost a whole minute, I could swear to you she was there. We were there together. In that moment, I felt all-the-way-full—not overwhelmed but totally at peace and totally realizing joy.

Since my grandmother passed in April, something that has dawned on me is all the amazing places I’ve been able to take her. I don’t mean physically. I never took my grandmother on a vacation; I never even took her to dinner—when we ate together, she always made the food or footed the bill. Instead, I mean that once she passed, I realized that thing people say about someone living on in the hearts and memories of those they love isn’t just a saying. It’s a truth. She died practically a shut-in, but someone who loved views. Whenever I see a beautiful view, I think of her. I’ve felt so connected to her since she’s been gone—I’ve shown her rolling vineyards, embankments, and cliffs in a country she’d never been to, hills unfurling terra cottas against greens; to a fog-dense mountaintop where the deciduous trees stand, branchless, upright; to who knows where next. I truly believe she’s seeing it too. (Every person I’ve confided this to has said they also experience some version of this, and I don’t think they’re saying it just out of niceness.)

You see, in the words of Dr. Maya Angelou, “I come as one, but I stand as 10,000.”

The more time I spend with that sentence, the more I realize it is not a sentence but a blessing.

A gift of my grandmother’s passing has been a form of self-acceptance, acknowledgment of all the places I’ve taken and am taking her, and all the places I’ve taken and am taking my younger self—not to mention the women my grandmother loved and missed. It’s easy to dismiss accomplishments, shrug them off, belittle them or one’s self for not being enough. For years, I wished I were in a different profession, something that people got more excited about when I mentioned it at parties or that proved I was a hard worker or smart or caring, or a different kind of artist—a musician, or a different type of writer—a bestseller, or even a different sort of poet—Twitter famous yet award-winning, a professor or New Yorker, a homesteader or L.A. muse, the best homemaker or a single devil-may-care gal (which, just by writing that phrase, probably means I’m not built to suit).

But someone’s got hip New Yorker covered. And someone else has got single Nashville singer-songwriter covered. And yet another person has West Coast Instagram personality covered. Idol is covered (largely by pop icons and serial killers). “Famous poets” is covered: mostly by dead people. I’ve got to cover Whatever This Is, and, like an actor worthy of her salt, discover something new in the role every day that I can.

In accepting myself and my lot, I honor my grandmother and the places I take her. I would never demean her intentionally, or my younger self, and so I should not diminish myself because I carry them.

They see what I see. And art is an attention to, a way of seeing, and so they help me make my art.

I used to think honoring someone meant writing a poem about them, making something for them, dedicating something to them, or doing what they’d have me do. I’m beginning to realize (my grandmother is teaching me and I’m teaching myself) that honoring myself is honoring everyone I carry with me, everyone who carried me until I got here, where I could walk so far, so high, I could sit inside a cloud and remember.

Who do you choose to honor and how will you honor them today? Leave a comment below and let me know.

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