I looked up the definition of inspire today. I wanted to know, if I were to answer the question, “Who inspires you?” that I knew precisely what question I was answering.
Before looking it up, I had two thoughts about what it means to feel inspired. The first is an onrush of awe and a sense of enormous potential. That kind of inspiration comes with a feeling of tapping into to the divine, and it fills me with gratitude and wonder.
I wasn’t sure if that’s actually inspiration, though, because it doesn’t necessarily come with any sort of change after it happens. For a question like, “Who inspires you?” I thought inspiration might not be what I was thinking at first — a feeling of awe and beauty and wonder — but instead that it should include an element of action. If someone inspires me, it seems like they should make me change my behavior.
It turns out that inspiration is both of those things:
in·spirev.1. To affect, guide, or arouse by divine influence. 2. To fill with enlivening or exalting emotion. 3.a. To stimulate to action; motivate. b. To affect or touch.
The American Heritage College Dictionary Third Edition
So, that’s not helpful! Except in the sense that it bought me some time because I’m really terrible at answering questions like “what’s your favorite” or “who inspires you.”
For the first type of inspiration, the one that fills with enlivening or exalting emotion, creators inspire me. Being moved by beauty or excellence is one of life’s greatest pleasures, and people who create are my heroes. When I experience an exquisite work of fiction, painting, cinema, drama, musical composition, songwriting, photography, writing, or comedy, I am filled with wonder. Artists inspire me. They help me see the glory of the human mind and how we fit in with each other and with the world.
For the second type of inspiration, the one that stimulates action and motivates, this one is as important as the first, but in a completely different way. People who spark change lead by example; they are role models simply by existing in the world and being who they are. They exhibit behaviors we can observe, be affected by, see the consequences of, and then emulate ourselves. I have dozens of role models who are close to me in my life who inspire me in this way. I will not name them here because the list would be too long, and each person inspires different parts of my behavior: humor, humility, candor, tact, communication.
But the people closest to me, the ones who live in my house with me, and who I’m lucky enough to have in my life on a daily basis, are the ones who inspire me most. My husband inspires kindness and generosity. Our kids inspire humor and honesty. All three of them motivate me to be a better person. And when I say inspire in this case, I mean that every day, I edit my behavior to act differently and better because of them.
Today’s Bloganuary prompt is “What is something you wish you knew how to do?” I glanced at the prompt before bed so it could percolate overnight. Only, since I glanced instead of really focusing, I read it as “what’s something you’d like to learn how to do,” which completely changes my answer.
Wishes require no effort. “Know how to do” means you’ve already learned something. So if I don’t have to put in any effort, what is something I wish I already knew how to do? A million things! Play an instrument, paint brilliant works of art, master calligraphy, sing, dance, knit sweaters, write short stories, skateboard, be brave, take risks.
If I really truly wanted to do any of those things, though, I’d learn them. There is nothing stopping me except time and will. That’s where the wishing part comes in: if I don’t have to do anything, and I could just wake up able to accomplish these things, then heck yeah, give me all of them. Or any of them. I’m not picky.
The fact that I don’t want to spend my time or energy learning how to do those things tells me I don’t really want them that much, though. I’ve tried most of the things on this list, and while I might want to have written beautiful calligraphy, or have knit a beautiful sweater, or be able to make music on an instrument, I don’t enjoy the process that gets me to that end point. I don’t want to have to actually do the thing.
What I’d like to learn how to do is quite a different question. “What’s something you’d like to learn how to do?” includes “what do you want to spend your actual precious time trying at even through a steep learning curve, even through frustration, even if you suck at it?” For that question, there are a couple of things on that list I still want to work at, like writing short stories, or maybe even singing (but probably not).
The thing I thought about as I let the wrong question percolate, though, is conversation. I’d like to learn how to be a good conversationalist. I don’t mean that I want to fill awkward silences and chatter away about nothing just so that it’s not quiet. I like quiet. And mindless chatter is the opposite of good conversation. What I mean is that I enjoy rich, meaningful conversation, and I want to understand better what makes good conversation good so that I can have more of it in my life.
We had our windows open Saturday. On New Years Day, in a part of the Northern Hemisphere where it should have been cold, if not freezing, it was warm enough to air the house out. I walked the floors in bare feet and short sleeves.
What I wanted to do was cup a warm mug of cocoa in my hands while I snuggled under a blanket next to a fire with my book.
The past few years, I’ve been done with winter. I didn’t want it anymore. I like April flowers and August butterflies, swimsuits and sunshine. I wanted eternal summer. But as September came to a close last year, and I prepared to brace myself for winter, I decided to surrender instead.
When October came, and the air smelled different, and we moved the wood pile and I cut back the annuals, and we pulled out the sweaters and slippers, and I watched the plants and animals prepare themselves for the lean times of winter, I stopped resisting. If we do it right, winter is a time of much-needed rest. The days are short and the nights long. The natural world slows. It’s a time to hole up, to appreciate and honor resources, to be cozy, to be quiet.
Nature works in cycles: night and day, birth and death, growth and decay. Seasons. These rhythms comfort me: everything is forever, and nothing is forever. I like both the constancy and the change — I can rely on the sun rising, on the crocuses pushing up in the spring, just as I can rely on the seasons changing to keep me from getting bored, and on contrast to keep me grateful. My appreciation for the warmth and vibrance of summer exists because of the cold sharpness of winter.
❆
After a spring-like New Years Day, we went to bed Sunday night eager to wake to a world blanketed in white. The forecast called for 5 inches of snow.
At 3 o’clock in the morning, I woke to the sound of rain lashing the window. The wind howled, and I smiled as I snuggled deeper into our down comforter, knowing the mercury would fall.
When I woke at 5 to exercise, the street outside shone black, shiny, and wet. No snow. I listened in the silence of the sleeping house and heard the click of sleet against the window.
An hour later, when I emerged from the basement and looked into the darkness again, I still saw no sign of snowflakes. I made coffee and sat at the table to write. When I finally looked up, after the sun had risen, the soft morning light showed the back garden under 2 inches of fluffy white. Fast-falling snow filled the air, so thick it would cover me in a second if I walked out in it. It stuck to the trees and bushes and porch railings, transforming the world as it painted a magical winter scene before my eyes. I leaned back in my chair and watched it rush down.
Data scientist Martin Remy once gave a talk about how we can grow our capability. He drew a picture with a small center circle, then another circle around that one, and a third, larger circle that encompassed both. The center circle he colored yellow and named it the comfort zone. The outer ring, he colored red and called it the panic zone. The middle ring, between the comfort zone and the panic zone, he colored green. He named it the growth zone.
Credit: Martin Remy (he has not published this yet but gave me permission to use it. And I quote, “Open source ftw.” Thank you Martin!)
The comfort zone is a place where we know what we’re doing and we’re comfortable doing it. It’s where we feel natural and capable. It is safe. It doesn’t require a lot of effort to occupy the comfort zone; the comfort zone is a place where you can coast. The thing with the comfort zone is that it can be a place of contentment, but it may also be a place of complacency. If you only hang out in your comfort zone, you may feel a sense of stasis. For me, staying inside my comfort zone manifests as a sense of feeling stuck in a rut.
The red panic zone, by contrast, is a place so filled with risk and unknowns that by entering it, there’s a good chance you will careen off the road, crash, and burn. In the panic zone, you are far enough outside your element that have no tools to navigate it; you have no control. You’ll make poor decisions that will be hard to recover from. We should all avoid the panic zone.
The place in between, though — the green place, the place that’s outside our comfort zone but not so far outside that we cannot handle it — is where we grow. It’s where we build on what we do know and are already skilled at, but we push ourselves a little further, into new territory. When we do that, when we push into the growth zone, we add to our knowledge, we add to our confidence, and we make our comfort zone even bigger: we are more capable at more things after we venture into the green growth zone.
In my writing life, writing in my journal is 100% inside the comfort zone. It is the center of the comfort zone: it doesn’t even come close to the edges.
Yesterday I went outside my comfort zone when I published my Writing in 2021 post. It’s one thing to confess fears and attempt to dispute them in the privacy of journal pages, and especially to write cheesy affirmations for yourself. But to publish all that? That’s uncomfortable. There’s nowhere to hide.
Because it was going to be public, though, I analyzed my negative self-talk more thoroughly than I likely would have if I’d just dashed off examples in a journal that I’d never look at again. This meant I was able to find relevant evidence to dispute those stories, and most importantly, to formulate affirmations that address the specific things I worry about. Writing for publication made me really process what I think so I could understand it myself. Only then could I express it clearly to others.
Now it’s out there for me to hold myself accountable and refer back to. If I hadn’t pushed myself to publish that post instead of secreting it away in my journal, I don’t think I’d have gotten to the point of how to move beyond the stories I tell myself, and to identify things I can do differently to change the narrative. I’m in the growth zone! And the thing is, since I’ve pushed myself into this uncomfortable place before, it’s getting easier each time. “Publish embarrassing stuff on blog” is still not in my comfort zone, but it’s now nearer the line between yellow and green, and I understand myself a little better to boot.
I generated a lot of negative self-talk about my writing in 2021. I didn’t blog as much as I wanted to. I didn’t write as much as I wanted to. I don’t know what to write about. I write about the same things over and over again. I write too much about myself. I’m boring. I don’t write anything useful/interesting/thought-provoking/beautiful.
And so on.
In 2021, I also listened to a lot of podcasts about happiness. Because, see first paragraph. I was on the rowing machine at the aquatic center in December when a particular episode on how to squash negative self-talk made me stop rowing to pause the podcast and take notes. The advice I noted was this:
Monitor negative self-talk
Dispute
Affirm
I felt bad again last week about my writing rut. Yesterday, when I wrote my Reading in 2021 post, I thought about my writing in 2021. I remembered the advice from the podcast, and I wondered: what did I actually write in 2021 compared to the stories I tell myself about my writing? Can I dispute my negative self-talk with evidence? And if so, what’s a more positive story I can tell myself?
The first story I tell myself: I didn’t write much
One of the stories I tell myself is that, aside from my journals, I didn’t write much last year. I don’t blog like I did in my early blogging years, before I was, you know, employed full time.
Gathering evidence on “did I write much?” is pretty easy. The first step is to remember that I also write at work. I can grab annual stats* on word counts and posts published for my blog, we have similar stats at work (because I work for the company that makes WordPress.com), and I can calculate how much I wrote by hand during the year based on the number of pages I filled and how many words I average per page. Here’s what I found:
Personal
Professional
Handwritten pages filled 590
Handwritten pages filled 150
Handwritten words 265,000
Handwritten words 54,000
Blog posts 84
Blog posts 647
Published words 34,000
Published words 258,000
Total words written 299,000
Total words written 312,000
Words I wrote in 2021
The evidence shows that it is true I didn’t publish much on my personal blog compared to how much I journaled, but I still published 84 posts, which averages to about 7 per month. That’s not bad considering I work full time, I suppose. The word count of my blog posts is equivalent to the length of a novella.
The evidence also shows that I write a lot for work. Objectively, I would say that 258,000 words qualifies as writing much. For a sense of scale, that’s more words than Moby Dick (206,052) or Crime and Punishment (211,591), though of course, not as much as Lonesome Dove (365,712) or Anna Karenina (349,736) (reference). Sure, some of those work-related posts and words are meeting notes or notices of when I’ll be out of the office, but it’d be too much effort to remove those, and they are relevant for work: they are written communication, which is essential in a distributed workplace.
In total, I wrote approximately 611,000 words in 2021, which is more than the entire Lord of the Rings series (576,459), including The Hobbit.
Affirmation: I write a lot. Even if it’s not high literature or published work, writing is like breathing: I do it without realizing it.
The second story I tell myself: what I write isn’t great
I realize I am comparing the word counts of my personal journals, hobby blog posts, and work-related memos to great works of literature. This is not lost on me. It feeds into the second story I tell myself about my writing, which is that I don’t write the kind of stuff I like to read. What that really means is that is that I’m not an amazing epic writer. I am not a story-teller, I don’t have the imagination to craft narrative arcs, create characters, go deep with ideas and produce great works of art.
I don’t have evidence to dispute this. I especially don’t have evidence to dispute this if I’m comparing what I write to the novels and short stories that awe me. I really have to deal with this one, though, because otherwise I’ll never be happy with what I write.
If I go deeper, and identify what moves me in the art I admire, I think it comes down to three main things: connection (I can relate to what the artist presents and so feel connected to them or to humanity or to something bigger than all of us), awe (that such beauty and creativity exist in the world), and change (the work makes me see or think or act differently after experiencing it).
At a much smaller scale than the great artists I admire, I can look to some of my blog posts or ideas that I’m really proud of and see hints of those three elements in some of them: readers and colleagues will comment or message me that they can relate to what I wrote (thank you, it means so much when this happens ♥️) or that something I wrote was beautiful (I feel like I’ve done something good when this happens ♥️), and at work especially, I’ve written things that did effect change, like suggesting a writing coach program that has since been implemented.
Affirmation:My writing doesn’t have to be great. Sometimes what I write brings goodness to people, and that’s what I really want.
The third story I tell myself: I don’t have ideas
The final story I tell myself is that I don’t have ideas. I don’t know what to write about. I recognized myself in a book I read recently, Miss Iceland. The main character is a “real” writer, who churns out stories and poetry and novels because she is compelled to write: she is so full of ideas, she can’t not write, and everyone wants to publish what she writes.
She is not the character I identified with. Instead, the character I identified with is her poet boyfriend who spends all his time sitting around talking about writing with other would-be writers. When he realizes his girlfriend is a real writer, and comparatively he just wants to be a writer, he says to her:
The truth is I can’t think of anything to write about. I have no ideas. Nothing that’s close to my heart. Do you know what it means to be ordinary?
Audur Ava Ólafsdóttir, Miss Iceland
Ouch. I’ve written variations of those first two sentences dozens of times on my blog or in my journals. I am a cliche.
I know that a lot of what I write is just blathering about nothing, but in the 600,000 words I wrote last year, there are surely ideas, even if accidental. If I look through blog posts, I see some idea-based ones, like the benefits of journaling or how an empty morning feels full.
I think what’s really going on is that I have ideas, but it takes effort to develop those ideas. That I write at all shows I have plenty to write about. Time and mental energy are finite resources, though. If I’m worried about having publishable ideas, I need to remember my professional writing. That’s where the majority of my writing energy goes right now. My writing life at work is rich and satisfying: I outline, I sketch, I develop ideas, I think about structure and audience and outcomes, I draft, I refine, I proofread, I publish.
When I get down about not having ideas, it’s usually related to my personal writing. I need to affirm that I do have ideas, and remind myself that it takes effort to develop ideas. Having ideas and developing ideas is an important distinction. The distinctions puts me in control of how I want to use the time I carve out for my personal writing: I can continue to use all my writing time to free-write and just get stuff out, or I can allocate some of my time to developing ideas.
Affirmation:The fact that I write is evidence that I have ideas. Developing ideas requires effort that I can choose to dedicate if I’d like to. I dedicate considerable energy for publishable work to my professional writing. Also, Miss Iceland is a fictitious character.
What’s next
These issues are not new: I’ve written about them before. I have to remember these affirmations. Also, nothing will change if I don’t change something. I started a list of writing assignments for myself rather than using random prompts that don’t inspire me. I’ll change up my practice and see what happens.
*If you have a blog on WordPress.com and want to check your annual stats on how much you wrote, log into your account and go to wordpress.com/stats/day/annualstats/[yoursiteaddress]. For example, when I’m logged into my account, I can see my stats at wordpress.com/stats/day/annualstats/andreabadgley.blog.
My reading life in 2021 was rich and satisfying. I found authors who, after reading a couple of their books, I want to read everything they’ve written (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Lauren Groff). I delighted in Nigerian literature (I loved Tomi Adeyemi’s Legacy of Orïsha series). I read books that awed me with their execution (Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann, Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff). I read books I still think about, months later (The Line by Olga Grushin), books that sucked me in and nobody was allowed to talk to me until I finished (Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam, Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, Normal People by Sally Rooney), life-affirming books that brought me joy and a sense of rightness with the world (The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert).
I read books with friends (Evvie Drake Starts Over by LInda Holmes, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab, The Midnight Library by Matt Haig). Like many, I devoured (and sobbed through) retellings of Greek myths (The Song of Achilles and Circe by Madeline Miller). I read two books twice in 2021 (The Shipping News in January and December, The Secret History in September; I didn’t want it to end).
I read 70 books in 2021, and those alone would have been enough. But 2021 brought additional reading pleasures, like the launch of the online Pipe Wrench magazine, edited by a former colleague, and which always leaves me thinking, like right now, weeks after first reading it, I’m still thinking about the Greek meaning of the word apocalypse and why dystopian fiction is so resonant. I listened to some spectacular fiction in 2021 as well. I subscribe to the New YorkerFiction and Writer’s Voice podcasts, and the first of every month — today! — is always a joy because a new episode of the Fiction podcast drops, where one author reads another author’s short story and discusses it with the New Yorker fiction editor, Deborah Treisman. The stunner listen from this year that I can’t stop thinking about is Karen Russel’s reading of her story “The Ghost Birds” from the October 11 issue. I continue to be astonished by the creativity and beauty of the human mind. This, above all, is probably why the written word (and all of the arts, I suppose) bring me so much pleasure.
And with that, here are the books I read in 2021, in the order I read them:
Beartown by Frederick Backman
Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo
Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam ♥️
Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness
The Shipping News by Annie Proulx ♥️
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia ♥️
The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper by Phaedra Patrick
The Book of Life by Deborah Harkness
Open City by Teju Cole
The Seas by Samantha Hunt
Ghost by Jason Reynolds
Kindred by Octavia Butler
Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff ♥️
Memorial by Bryan Washington
Untamed by Glennon Doyle
American Street by Ibi Zoboi
Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann ♥️
Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi ♥️
Children of Virtue and Vengeance by Tomi Adeyemi ♥️
Interview With the Vampire by Anne Rice
In Five Years by Rebecca Serle
Circe by Madeline Miller ♥️
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
The Elements of Style by Strunk and White ♥️
The Line by Olga Grushin ♥️
All Systems Red by Martha Wells ♥️
The Freedom Artist by Ben Okri
Bitter Orange by Claire Fuller
Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor
Evvie Drake Starts Over by Linda Holmes
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller ♥️
Trust Exercise by Susan Choi
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab ♥️
Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know by Adam Grant
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan
HBR Guide to Better Business Writing by Bryan A. Garner ♥️
A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen by Dan Heath
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
Rules of Civility by Amor Towles
The Secret History by Donna Tartt ♥️
How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
Small Island by Andrea Levy
The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert ♥️
The Best Service is No Service by Bill Price
Matrix by Lauren Groff
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell ♥️
Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngochi Adichie ♥️
Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro ♥️
We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngochi Adichie
The Guncle by Stephen Rowley ♥️
Spell of the Highlander by Karen Marie Moning
China Rich Girlfriend by Kevin Kwan
The Turner House by Angela Flournoy
The Shipping News by Annie Proulx ♥️
Miss Iceland by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir
The Color Purple by Alice Walker ♥️
Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan
Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May
Conversation: What to Say and How to Say It by Mary Greer Conklin ♥️
Butterfly Mind 