No. 60 - How to Plan a Life
NOT
Planning your Life
One minute you’re a teenager laughing on the phone… next thing you know you’re in a care home getting your picture taken with strangers under a mantle engraved with the words “welcome home”.
I must have found this photo among my mother’s things. It breaks my heart. My mother’s familiar coat; that familiar hand. It looks like she’s holding a tissue—she always had a tissue. The Lewy Body/Parkinson’s stance. The fact that she can still smile for the camera—it’s automatic. The reminder that although we visited every weekend, her days at the care home were spent with strangers in a strange land. That strange land being her mind.
Maybe these men weren’t strangers to my mother, but I sure as hell don’t know who they are. Pastors? Residents? Admin? Even if she had “met” them previously, it’s hard to say who she remembered or recognized apart from family, living in her hallucinatory world the way she did.
Welcome home my ass.
When I started work on the show Life’s Work: A Visual Memoir I worried that it’d be disrespectful at best, exploitative at worst to tell my mother’s story. I was scared. Over time I came to understand that telling our stories is important—as much for others as ourselves—and that I needed to overcome my fear and press on. I even came to see the project and show as a tribute to my Mom, which I wasn’t expecting. This doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten the difficulties I had with our complicated relationship: it’s possible to feel ostensibly opposing feelings all at the same time. Indeed there are lots of different feelings mingling around this story. I think the tribute aspect speaks to the fact that her story/our story is as important as anyone’s. Her life was worth tribute.
I don’t know what my mother hoped for from her life or if she had any particular aspirations or plans. She worked as an accounting clerk most of her life, as far as I know. Certainly she was smarter than she thought she was, and always placed men above women as people of her generation—and others—are wont to do. She was held back. She became “spiritual” after giving up alcohol in 1981, but in the most pedestrian, New Age kind of way. It took up the slack where alcohol was no longer on the job.
She’d filled journals that I began to look through while clearing out her house, but I soon gave up because they were filled with nothing but mind-numbing New Age platitudes. I did find one single sheet of paper where she wrote about alcoholism and how she felt she’d failed my brother and I. She pretty much hit it out of the park with that one sheet of paper, in terms of honesty. The rest seemed like endless attempts to shore herself up with phrases and concepts she’d repeat over and over again. I don’t blame her for that. But it was very boring to read. I’m sure my journals would be boring to read as well.
Nobody plans to end up in a care home. But many of us do. It’d be disingenuous for me to rail against the care home system when the truth is that I wasn’t prepared to take my mother in—no sireee—plus she needed care we wouldn’t have been able to give. But it is sad. Anyone who’s walked through a care home can tell you how sad it is.
Planning to Achieve
I’ve mentioned my friend Jill Margo here so many times it’s bordering on creepy. Nothin’ I can do about that. Jill runs an online business called The Creative Good and she’s helped me so many times I don’t even think she knows. For example, she encouraged me to start this newsletter—I had no idea what it really meant, let alone how much I’d love doing it. And I’ve benefited more times than I can count from the incisive observations she drops like so many forgotten diamonds. Lol—spontaneous analogy but I’m keeping it.
This past October, I had an official consultation with Jill—what she calls a Shine Session—and she set me straight in no time flat, as only she can.
I was overwhelmed at the time with a pressure to attend to a million perceived imperatives at once. I was supposed to be working on the artwork for Life’s Work as Graphic Memoir, as well as finishing up the writing for it, but I was doing neither. I was supposed to be researching and coming up with ways to improve Feed the Monster, including a plan to serialize my progress on Life’s Work as Graphic Memoir. I was supposed to be coming up with ideas for new revenue streams such as a BA-style journaling workshop, or maybe something like Feeding the Monster for Introverts (oh shit I just came up with a workshop title, ha ha). To my panicked brain, these things needed to happen immediately, and all at once. And triumphantly, successfully. But my mental health felt precarious, or at least much less predictable than it once had been. I couldn’t manage to focus on a damn thing.
In case it’s not already obvious, I wasn’t achieving my imperatives.
I was trying to go from zero to sixty in a second, but was frozen in place, spinning my wheels. Jill’s advice, in a nutshell, was that I needed to start by soothing my nervous system and getting back to a baseline of health, as “we can only expect ourselves to show up within the limits of our present capacity”. She said it was a punishing way to move forward, not taking care of myself and flogging myself for not being productive. I needed to give myself some supports, feed myself some inspiring things, “reclaim my creative practice as a form of self-care”, and basically be kinder to myself.
In other words: dial it back, bitch.
This is a very abbreviated synopsis of my session, and it doesn’t convey the great impact it had to have Jill point these things out. I was expecting everything from myself, but was giving myself nothing. Jill helped me see the light. Literally—a lightbulb above my head snapped on, and I immediately dialed it back even further than she was suggesting. And what a gigantic relief it was.
I know many readers of this newsletter are interested in learning to navigate “the creative life” with all its attending pitfalls and danger zones. Every possible mental block you can run up against trying to be an artist, I’ve hit them all. Jill gives wonderful, insightful, clear-headed guidance in this arena. For that reason I highly recommend everything she offers through The Creative Good.
Planning Your Days
So, about Jill 😂. She also produces a seasonal planner that I’ve been using for a few years now. This planner has magical powers because it embodies a system she’s developed for daily tracking as well as weekly, monthly, and quarterly planning and reviewing. Specifically for “creatives”, but I’m sure anyone who’s trying to get their life into some kind of order could use it.
I won’t lie—when I first saw this planner my eyes went wide and I basically freaked out, saying NO WAY can I submit to such organization. But I could, and have, and do. Granted, I don’t use every last helping hand the planner offers—I use what works for me. And sometimes weeks will go by where I’m outta control and the planner falls by the wayside. I eventually get back on the horse, because I now understand from experience the benefit of tracking, accountability, and review.
Below are my planners, beginning with winter 2020. They start out like the one at the top left, but I always glue something to the front.
Below is my notebook for 2023—what some might call a commonplace book. Here I keep notes and ideas for this newsletter, whatever projects I’m working on, books I want to read, quotations I want to remember, etc. I make and decorate a new one for each year.
So there you go—now you have all the tools you need to plan out your life.
NOT.
Addendum: It’s the morning of January 31st and I’m about to hit “send”. Speaking of planning: I woke up with a start an hour too early, in a panic that this post wasn’t fleshed out enough and that I should have mapped it out better. I fell back to sleep and dreamed that my friend Katy advised me that people who write articles for The New Yorker use spreadsheets to plan what they’re going to write. Aaah, okay—I’ll know for next time. Thanks Katy.
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Love this! All of it, from discovering your mom’s journals and finding them boring—but for that one raw and illuminating page—to admitting that your own journals are probably boring. (Mine are too, I think.) Also love love your shoutout to the magical Jill Margo, whose contribution to my creative practice has changed my life. I write in my planner DAILY and have done so for 16 months straight. I am happy to have my beautifully-crafted coil bound book to accompany me on my creative journey.