Wild Letters is a newsletter about self-exploration and building a right-fit life.
Thank you for being here with me!
My dear reader.
I’m almost four months into my gap year now, and I’m a little embarrassed to tell you that it took me until just a few weeks ago to stop feeling guilty about not working.
And it’s not even true that I’m not working! I’m still writing this newsletter each week — it’s just that I’m working significantly less than usual now that the rest of my small business is closed for the year.
Capitalism really got me good, is what I’m saying. Because even after years and years and years of intentionally studying and unpacking and trying to unlearn the norms and conditioning of white supremacist, imperialist, ableist, patriarchal capitalism, I still spent months (months!) feeling guilty about working less than I usually do. This is some serious bullshit.
What is it, exactly, that I feel guilty about when I’m not working? That’s a question I’ve been exploring lately, a question made more challenging because the guilt is amorphous and vague, a sort of generalized feeling of “being lazy” (which I don’t even believe is a thing) or “not contributing to society” (as if exchanging our time and energy for money is the best/only way to contribute). There’s even an element of “wow must be nice for you to take this break while the rest of us toil away” that creeps in, a sort of internalized self-punishment for doing something (taking a break from paid labor) that those in power would absolutely prefer the majority of us not do. Because it’s in taking breaks from the frantic pace of modern life that we gain space and peace and rest, which often usher in both clarity and imagination.
Clarity on all that is fundamentally harmful and factually impossible about the Business As Usual growth imperative of more more more on a planet of finite resources, and imagination of how we might live in radically different ways instead.
Now that the guilt of not working has fallen away I find that I feel free, only it’s not quite in the way I expected.
What I assumed, going into gap year, is that the freedom I’d feel would be that of time autonomy — being able to do what I wanted, when I wanted, since I’d no longer be constrained by a work schedule. And yes, I’ve definitely experienced that particular feeling of agency over these past four months, but what I’ve found to be an even more liberating freedom is that of my identity.
This identity freedom feels directly tied to the type of work that I do. I’ve had a personal-story-based public writing (and intermittent podcasting) practice for almost 18 years now. 18 years! That’s 18 years of personal branding, for better and worse. 18 years of making parts of myself and my life available and digestible for public consumption and commentary by many thousands of people. And when you do that for long enough, especially if you earn your income from it, you get very good at the specific skill of cultivating, highlighting, and packaging certain aspects of self (particularly the ones that “do well” on the internet) and making them easily accessible to (and maybe even desired by) others. I don’t know that doing this is necessarily a “bad” thing or a “good” thing, but it is a true thing, or at least it has been for me.
And so stepping away from solo self-employment for a while, and in particular from the marketing of self, has created within me a vast and beautiful void where I do not have to be legible or pleasing to others in order to earn money.
Instead I can simply… be.
One gift of this state of be-ing-ness is a great lessening of ego, of not caring about any kind of status or believing my own hype.
I went through an acute version of this same thing when I left Instagram almost two years ago, and I welcome the humility of being taken to an even deeper experience of it now, to see where I am still connecting threads of self-worth to the opinions of internet strangers who read my books or this newsletter.
Which isn’t to say that I don’t care what people think of my writing (I don’t know that I’ll ever get to that point, nor that it’s a necessary or even particularly worthwhile goal for me), and it also isn’t to say that I don’t experience real, meaningful, and delightful connection with readers and with creative peers (of course I do!) — it’s just that I’m no longer seeking any kind of public validation or fancy status or bright spotlight.
I used to care so much about having a “big” impact (whatever that even means), and I’m surprised by the extent to which this has now faded away for me. I care about my readership numbers only insomuch as that metric has a direct relationship to my ability to pay my bills, but otherwise? Being of service to one person feels like enough. A large following is unimportant to me — and I mean really, deeply, sincerely unimportant — in a way that hasn’t been true for the past 18 years.
Maybe it’s gap year, maybe it’s nearing 40, maybe it’s four months of not needing to stare at my own face on Zoom for hours at a time or maybe it’s something else, but I feel more connected to the web of life and less attached to myself (or, I should say, my Self) than ever before.
I couldn’t be more grateful.
Alongside my personal gratitude and internal freedom there exists another part of this experience, which is the fact that the start of my gap year will never not have coincided with the rapid shift of the US into a fascist state — a place where (among other evils) people are being abducted off the streets and disappeared into another country’s horrific prison.
One thing that feels clear to me is that I wouldn’t be able to engage with the stark reality of the current moment in any of the same ways I currently am if I had to focus on earning instead, which is of course an inherent part of the destructive and oppressive power of capitalism, right?
When every person needs to use almost all of their energy and attention and life force to try and earn enough money to simply survive in a violent system that has been almost entirely financialized, there isn’t much of that energy, attention, and life force left over for anything else.
Within capitalism (and all the other intersecting systems of repression and oppression), the exhaustion of the masses is a feature not a bug.