constellations #105: keep showing up

Hi again.

• In January a friend told Matt and me that she had chosen a theme for the new year. She wasn’t in the habit of making resolutions, she said, so much as focusing on one guiding word. This year—in which she intended to buckle down on bringing some personal projects to fruition—her word would be discipline. Oh, Matt said immediately. You should talk to Riss. She’s the most disciplined person I know.

• I’m a little embarrassed to repeat that story here, to admit how flattered I was by his comment—how automatically and earnestly he said it, and what that meant about his impression of me. Though of course it didn’t (doesn’t) actually feel true; I thought instantly of my marathon-runner friends who log sixty miles a week, or my sister who’s a black belt in jiu-jitsu(!), or all those women I follow on social media who post every December about having read a hundred books that year. That’s discipline, I thought. What, exactly, do I have to show for my supposed rigor?

• I’ve been dwelling on that question lately because I feel both underbooked and overwhelmed, and mostly because I am trying to work on a big creative project and have been stalling out repeatedly. I can’t seem to find the time is what I keep telling myself, though I know that’s not really the truth.

• I think back to nine years ago, perhaps the busiest stretch of my life: interning full-time; finishing my last semester of grad school; writing my Master’s thesis. Plus my band was playing shows. And I was going out all the time with my friends. And I was making a podcast. I was busy, and I never missed a deadline.

• I have few of those exact same demands on my time now, plus very few new ones (no pets, no kids). So what, exactly, is stopping me? I feel like I lack discipline. Like I lack rigor. Like I lack commitment. I keep thinking I ought to dig out my journals from grad school, to figure out how I spent my time and how I structured my days. If it could work for me then, I think, maybe it’ll work for me now?

• I haven’t ventured into productivity hacks yet, but maybe that’s for the best. An essay I read recently says: Ask any particularly skilled person about the keys to their success, and you might get any kind of answer. Every artist has their own practice, their own secret knowledge of the path to success—their own career timeline or guiding principles or daily routine or communication style or vision-boarding practice or therapist or what have you. Aiming to replicate their path, the essayist argues, is a mistake. “We start to think that it is the components of their commitment that will save us from our discomfort instead of the principles of the commitment,” she writes. In other words, it’s not any specific aspect of their practice to which these people owe their success; it’s just that they keep doing something, anything, over and over. “The true secret knowledge,” she writes, “is to simply commit to something.” (The essayist loves italics.)

• I’m not really a practicing Catholic but I like the tradition of giving something up for Lent. (Discipline.) So this year I’m trying to minimize my time on social media. But it’s not going well, and this has only added to my sense that I’ve perhaps lost my capacity for rigor. (But then I remember that years ago, in my overbooked grad school days, I gave up Diet Coke for Lent and, as a result, dipped into sugar-free Red Bull for the first time ever, chugging cans of it before playing shows with my band—a workaround so comically self-defeating and undisciplined that it erases some of the guilt I feel about checking Instagram before bed now.)

• A friend who’s one of the best guitarists I know recently told me the story of how he learned to play. The formula was simple: As a teenager, he practiced for hours every day after school and all day on the weekends. That’s commitment, I thought. He loved it and he wanted to be good at it—and frankly, he said, he didn’t have a ton else going on. He was obsessive, and it paid off. Lately, another guy we know—in his 30s with a job and a band and a rich social life—said he wanted to get just as good at guitar and my friend thought to himself, Good luck.

• “The secret knowledge is that the richness of your experience is a function of the depth of your commitments,” the essay about commitment says, which I keep turning over in my head. It feels profound, if not entirely relevant to my situation. The essay is, in actuality, about committing to where you are right now in your life—physically, emotionally, creatively—rather than thinking that a deeper sense of fulfillment lies somewhere else, outside you, if only you could get there. I think this wisdom would probably be very helpful were I to really heed it, to sit down and think it through, but ultimately I just need to get my work done, and I did kind of hope that essay would provide one weird trick for sticking to your self-imposed deadlines. But then again, maybe that’s my problem.

• Last year my friend Madeline made a photo project about devotion, inspired by the altars they saw dedicated to various saints while on a trip to Italy (and also all around them back home in New York). When the project started they weren’t entirely sure what direction it would take; they just knew they felt inspired by the altars, by saintly devotion, and they trusted that if they followed this instinct the project would take shape. It was devotion to devotion, commitment to practice. That moved me.

• Anyway, even knowing this secret knowledge—that there is no magic trick, that the only way to get this work done is to simply do it—hasn’t quite fixed me. The answer, the essay would argue—I think—is to just keep showing up. For years at my old job I sat next to a brilliant friend with a Post-It on her desk that said exactly that, inspired by Des Linden’s 2018 Boston Marathon win. (I made my friend write about this advice in 2020.) Incidentally, my friend has the best handwriting I’ve ever seen, so I retained a crystal-clear mental image of the Post-It through our remote-work years. But then when I stopped by our old desks a couple years ago I took a picture of the Post-It as a keepsake. Maybe I need to post one on my desk at home now. Maybe this time I’ll really commit. Maybe this time it’ll all stick.

thanks lyndsey <3

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Here are some other things I have been consuming lately: Super Pedestrian by Annie DiRusso; Sinister Grift by Panda Bear (via Matt, of course); 45 Pounds by YHWH Nailgun; Billboard Heart by Deep Sea Diver, which I reviewed for Pitchfork; Moby-Dick at the Metropolitan Opera; The Secret History by Donna Tartt; the Valentine’s edition of the Drug Music zine; a solo drive through central Florida, which was unexpectedly beautiful; a chocolate cherry espresso tonic from Botani in Bed-Stuy (wow); macarons from Ladurée, as a gift to my sister; this TikTok of a farmer taking care of a newborn calf that, for reasons I can’t fully articulate, moved me so much I fully wept; a French manicure (not sure if it suits me); the first crocuses of spring

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This time last year I was: going through my personal archives (when am I ever not doing that); and before that, getting laid off (lol); and before that, giving and getting compliments, reading my friend’s love letter to spring, and moving out of a city I loved

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Thanks for reading. We’re all hitting our deadlines this month, ok?! I have faith in us.

xo,
M