Why I Won’t Commit to Weekly Posts
Photo cred: Lindley Ashline, Body Liberation Photos
Okay, so bear with me, this one will be pretty stream-of-consciousness about where my head is at on week three of my journey into the world of total self-employment. But I think the mindsets here could be helpful for others, as well as the unfiltered truth that I don’t have all the answers yet, but I’m still doing the thing.
As I sit down to write blog posts for the first time in like two months, I’m reminded of all the times that I started a project hoping for perfectly scheduled consistency and then failed at it and beat myself up about it. I have all the echoes in my head from every neurotypical business expert in my field who insists that the best way to build a following is by producing consistent content week after week. All the successful entrepreneurs who when asked for their top tips say something like “block out time to do the thing and guard it with your life.”
And all the times I’ve blocked out time to do said thing on my calendar, and when the time arrives I find myself paralyzed by massive resistance and a nervous system screaming for me to do ANYTHING ELSE. (Thanks, PDA profile)
Would I build my business most consistently if I were the most consistent? Eh, maybe. But also, my brain isn’t the most consistent, and trying to force myself into that neurotypical box is the whole reason that I just quit biotech and started my own business in the first place. Every time I’ve tried to force my nervous system into the thing it doesn’t want me to do, I end up irritable and exhausted and producing things I’m not even happy with just to check off the box so I can allow myself to rest.
So what if I just allow myself to rest first, and see what happens after that? The most common argument is “if I just let myself rest whenever I want to, I’ll never get anything done.” I thought that way too. But then I ran an experiment where I allowed rest more and more frequently. It took longer than I wanted it to, I’ll grant that (mostly because I was more chronically burnt out than I realized). But what I eventually found is that if I’ve rested for long enough, and actually ALLOWED myself to fully rest without worrying about all the things I’m supposed to be doing, eventually my brain gets antsy. To tidy, to create, to connect, to produce, to engage with my passions and my community. I don’t know if I’ll ever have a strong desire to do the dishes, but I do know that most fully rested human brains don’t actually tend towards perpetual rest. When we’re actually getting the quiet time that we need to recover, we crave movement and creation and LIFE.
Now, that’s not universal. Fatigue isn’t always solved by rest, health is complicated, all brains are different, etc. The difference for me is that my brain needs more quiet time for recovery than a neurotypical brain, and what recovery time looks like is different. Sometimes it’s legitimately curling up in a cozy corner of a dark closet and staring at nothing for an hour. Sometimes it’s full on “potato time” for a solid week of just consuming TV and books and TikToks and playing mindless phone games. Last week it looked like less than ten hours of actual work. It will probably look like that again. Burn out recovery is a journey that takes, like, five years.
What I also lean into is the idea that how much, and how consistently, I produce doesn’t define my worth. That journey took a solid two years of thoughtwork to internalize, but it released me from so much strife around feeling like I couldn’t check enough things off the to-do list, no matter how hard I tried or how many things I did. Who says working forty hours a week is what you need to be successful? Or even 20 hours? Who even defines what success looks like in the first place?
What if my version of success looks radically different from any of the neurotypical experts I look up to?
So here’s my secret: how I define success is up to me. And my most important success is my relationship with myself. My most loving relationship with me is how I show up as the most focused, grounded, and compassionate version of me for my friends, family, and clients. And my most loving relationship with me includes not holding myself to the high demands of a rigidly structured schedule and task list.
Then the question becomes (and I’m thinking out loud here, not pretending to know the answer yet): how do I run a “successful” business with a structure that works for my brain? How do I continuously come back to creating content and building social media following and marketing channels and income streams and all those complicated new skills… while also recovering from the burnout of masking in a high-demand field?
What I’ve leaned on so far is the fact that I trust myself to keep me safe and supported, to know what I need, and to always come back to the things that are important when I have energy for them. I lean on the positive motivations that I love this work and I want to help more people, but I can’t help more people if I’m not first helping myself. I’m only on week three and so far it’s… kinda working? I’m still human, and I’m still regularly in tears because I want to have more energy than I do. And although myself and my friendships could totally be enough, I’m also lucky enough to have a wife who holds me tight and reminds me of these thoughts when I can’t remember them for myself:
I am infinitely worthy no matter what I do or don’t get done.
Caring for myself is the most important thing I can do to show up for the people I love.
My body knows what it needs, I just have to have the courage and the patience to listen.
Journal Prompts
If you could use the prompts for your own brain today, consider the following:
Where am I trying to hold myself to neurotypical structures?
If I could trust my body and brain completely, how would this structure look different?
What reservations do I have about implementing those changes?
What one tiny step can I take today towards releasing myself from structures that don’t work for me?
As always, if you want help unpacking this and moving through it, I’m here for you!