Twenty Eight Days of Taking a Break

I just graduated from an MFA program where everyone’s mantra was the same: work. Work every day, for hours a day, work when you don’t feel like it, when you aren’t inspired, work on Christmas, work instead of sleeping if you have to, work instead of eating (Psh. Whatever). In general, the people in my MFA program were some of the hardest workers I have ever met in my entire life. And the work worked, all my friends are slowly but surely making names for themselves. They are appearing in journals and on websites, winning awards and receiving fellowships. And this is isn’t just true of writing, I read everywhere in every field that the people who are the most successful are never the people who just happened to have a particular talent, but they are the people who worked hard for something they really wanted. There are all the famous examples of extremely successful people who pushed through failure and kept working: Stephen King’s first novel Carrie was rejected 30 times before it was published, Van Gogh never sold a painting in his entire career, Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. Even people who seem to be instant successes at an early age often still worked incredibly hard to get there, Mindy Kailing writes in her memoir about how after she graduated college she moved to New York and would spend days in Borders reading books about screenwriting she couldn’t afford to buy, then she wrote, produced, put up, and starred in a play with her best friend that got her noticed. (She also writes about how her best friend and her wrote that play while watching reality TV and eating snacks, which sounds like my kind of work.) I listened to an interview with Nick Offerman the other day, who talked about how it took him a really long time and a lot of work until he finally had some real success. He said “When I got the job of Parks and Rec I was 38. I had learned to be incredibly happy with my life as it was, I was working as an actor, I was unknown, but I had an incredible household, I had my wife, I had a woodworking shop. I was happy as a clam…and then I got my dream job. I was grateful I was able to become pretty solid before I had some success.” The point being, if you work hard enough at something you want eventually you will see results, even if it takes a long time. Unless you are Van Gogh in which case you will never see success and die alone with one ear.

 I’m all for hard work. But the problem for me is that even though I am willing to work hard, I'm not sure what work is the most important. For the last three years in graduate school and the last two in college before that, I’ve worked really hard as a writer and then as a teacher, but I don’t necessarily know if that is what I want to do forever. And now I've graduated, I'm unemployed and I'm not sure what exactly I'm supposed to be doing. I like a lot of things. How can I know which one is the most important? Which is the one I’m supposed to be putting all this hard work into? Writing nonfiction? Writing screenplays? Food writing? Or is it something entirely different? Teaching? Sewing? Working with animals? Cooking? Running? Everyone is always saying to work hard at the thing you are passionate about, but I think the trouble for me is trying to distinguish my passion from my hobbies. I listened to a radio story yesterday about a 23 year old guy who walked across the entire country asking people what advice they would give themselves at 23. In the end, he decided the most common advice was that "you already know what you want to do, do it." At firs this sounded nice, kind of mystical and important, as if I could just sit down and think really hard about my dreams and suddenly be guided in the right direction like a pointer on a Ouija Board. But then I thought "Bullshit." If everyone knew exactly what they wanted to do at 23 and worked towards it, there would be a lot more rockstars and like three mailmen. So for the next month, I’m going to do the opposite of what everyone has been telling me to do for the last three years: I’m going to take a break. Every day I’m going to do something I like to do, but that doesn’t contribute to a larger goal. And here’s the big thing: I’m not going to feel guilty about it. I’m going to stop feeling guilty for not writing enough, or not cooking enough, or not running enough. In fact, I’m going to do away with guilt altogether, because the guilt of not knowing what work I should be doing often paralyzes me to the point of doing nothing (Also known as watching Netflix while reading celebrity gossip/eating Greek yogurt). So starting on Friday I will be posting three times a week (On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays) about the things I did during my 28 days of a guilt-free break from attempting to be successful. I will not expect any of these things to provide me with a road map to a life-long fulfilling career and I will not feel guilty for doing one of these things when I could be doing another thing. Because hard work is great, but I’ve been in school since I was 2 and maybe breaks are underrated. Hopefully.

Zora: expert break-taker.