069: Don't Forget to Stake Your Claim

One single thought on my 33rd birthday + a birthday discount!

This has been an overwhelming week, full of problems I’ve never had to face before, so I apologize for forgetting to post an essay yesterday! I honestly just forgot about it.

But today is my birthday! I’ve done as much as I can this week to solve problems and today I’m trying to just take it easy—pretty soon I’ll go get a massage and maybe treat myself to the new Indiana Jones movie. I am trying to celebrate how far I’ve come and reflect on where I want to go next. How do I want my 34th year to look?

I think a lot of people try to do big “33 Things I’ve Learned on my 33rd Birthday” or “33 Things I’d Tell My Younger Self” type posts but I have always found those posts kind of forced, even vapid.

I don’t have 33 things to tell my younger self. I don’t have 33 lessons on writing to share. I guess I have one kind of good one though.

Listen to me very carefully: No one else is going to make time for your creativity. Once you graduate kindergarten and stop fingerpainting to learn fine motor skills, most of the people in your life are going to prioritize your productivity, your work, and what you can do for them. I’m not trying to be cynical in saying that—it’s just that they don’t know what you need. They don’t know what you do when you’re not with them. They can’t read your mind.

You want to have a creative practice? You have to stake a claim in your time for that. You have to draw the boundaries around your time strictly and you can’t let the anxieties of what you owe to anyone else get in the way of that, because they’re not going to enforce those boundaries for you. They’re not going to remember that you need to spend an hour a day writing, and they’re never going to say “Well let’s not meet until 10 am because I know you need your mornings for your creative practice.”

If you have a spouse that does this for you, that’s wonderful. Count yourself very very lucky because almost no one else does.

Image source.

Staking out your time looks different for everyone. Working moms have less free time than almost anyone else on planet Earth, but even ten minutes of sketching a day counts.

But you have to claim those ten minutes. No one else is going to set it aside for you.

That’s it, that’s all I’ve got. If you want to be a writer, you have to write. And to write you have to set aside time. The equation is simple, though it can be hard to put into practice.

You’ve got this.

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