Hi All! As you may know, I’m on pause here until early May-ish as I focus on book writing, but I was asked by
to join her and for a live call about mental health and creativity, and I couldn’t say no to that.This was my first Substack live, and I loved it. It makes me want to play with it on my own channel when I’m back.
Sarah asked us some great questions, including:
What does mental health mean to us?
How do we know when we’re veering into an unhealthy space?
What practices help us stay sane?
Watch the full session above.
While we’re here…
A brief update on book writing: it’s going! Slower than I want (always), but it’s going. I’ve definitely needed the respite from writing regularly here. I’ve had to make other tough decisions to carve out more time, like taking a break from leading the Tuesday morning sobriety support meeting at The Luckiest Club, which I’ve hosted for almost five years, hiring someone to manage the social media at TLC because I’ve been doing it for the last six months (and if I were being generous, I’d give myself a C+ on that assignment), and being less available to my team at TLC in general. Also: saying no to blurb requests no matter how badly I want to support the author or read the book, seemingly small asks for brain-picking, grabbing lunch to talk about this or that, and all manner of other things that come through my inbox, interesting or not.
And still, no matter how much I cut from my schedule or pull back on responsibilities, there are still 43,568 moments a day where I have to choose the book over something else; there are still all kinds of things I can’t control, like my daughter’s ride to a soccer game falling through at the last minute, my washing machine breaking (just happened), a friend needing an emergency ride into the city, and so on.
This is how it is for all of us, whether we’re professional creatives or not, whether our official job title includes "Author” or not, whether we have time during the work day to work on our projects or have to fit it in before the kids wake up or during our lunch breaks. We all have to fight to protect the time we have to create (I don’t know a single author whose only responsibility day-to-day is to write; certainly no female author). Most of us are parents, caretakers, friends, multiple-job-holders, freelancers, CEOs of one domain or another.
I bring this up because one of the comments I’ve received to sharing that I’ve cut back certain responsibilities is, Good for you for practicing self-care.
And maybe it’s just the squishyness of that phrase—self-care—that makes me bristle, but my reaction is: What???
It’s like when I was asked how I stopped caring what people thought when I quit drinking. How did I stop caring about what other parents might assume about me “having a problem?” How did I stop caring about what people at work might say when I stopped joining for happy hours? What if people thought I wasn’t fun anymore? If men didn’t want to date me?
My answer has always been this: it’s not that I stopped caring; it’s that I couldn’t care and get sober at the same time. Sometimes, like when your life is on the line, or in this case—when I’ve got a large sum of money and the potential cancellation of a book contract hanging in the balance— caring is a luxury. Sometimes, and more often than we realize or admit, there’s no way to do the thing we must do without dropping some big fucking plates.
I suppose what I’m saying is that I already have, and will continue to, drop some plates in this season. Not because I want to but because that is what is required to do the bigger thing. Maybe this gives you permission to drop some, too.
On that note, my friend
’s latest book, Permission: The New Memoirist and The Courage to Create, came out last week, and the timing for me is *Chef’s Kiss*. It’s a hybrid memoir-craft book, and it’s excellent.Until soon.
Laura
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You are reading Love Story, a weekly newsletter about relationships, recovery, and writing from Laura McKowen. Laura is the founder of The Luckiest Club, an international sobriety support community, and the bestselling author of two books, We Are The Luckiest: The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life and Push Off from Here: 9 Essential Truths to Get You Through Sobriety (and Everything Else).
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