19.52: End of Year Reflections: Navigating Speedbumps
Today, we’re reflecting on 2024. Individually, all of us went through a lot throughout the year—we encountered myriad speed bumps that slowed us down in different ways.. How do you balance your workload with your own personal life and its needs? How can you help make navigating these speedbumps easier by knowing your own limits and needs? We give you specific questions you can ask yourself in order to locate your problem points and figure out how to rearrange your life (and your stories about your own life) in order to not over-exhaust yourself.
Thing of the Week: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Homework: Once a day for the next week, identify and write down something that is causing you pain. At the end of your week, look through your list and identify the one that is causing the most pain, and try to bulldoze it.
Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, and Howard Tayler. It was produced by Emma Reynolds, recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.
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Transcript
Key Points: Life’s speedbumps! Career, body, circumstances… Slow down, and rattle and shake over it? Rent a backhoe and scrape it off before driving? Break everything into smaller pieces and celebrate any progress. Sometimes you do it to yourself! Choose to move, and… disruptive, cascading issues. Depression and panic disorder? Brain shingles! In a grocery store without a cart, just picking up items and juggling! Strategies! Self-medicating with sugar? No, talk to everyone about it and talk about how to do something more healthy. Don’t go too far with ergonomics, but if something is causing you pain, is there a quick and easy way to fix it? Identify obstacles. Beware, your brain confuses happy off-balance and frustrated or sad off-balance. Having trouble with decisions? Lists! Two hand choices. Eliminate repeated options that aren’t working. Pie slices! How big is it, and how many do you want? Think of yourself! Move from triage dealing with fires to sustainable, balanced approaches. Replace “you can’t have it all” with “you don’t actually want it all!” Focus on what you want most, and ignore the rest. Be honest with people about what you need, and can do, before you hit a crisis. Count, and give yourself time before you answer. Say not to the projects that you don’t want to do, because sometimes you’ll have to say not to the ones you want to do. Give yourself a restorative.
[Season 19, Episode 52]
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
[Season 19, Episode 52]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] End of Year Reflections: Navigating Speedbumps.
[Erin] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you’re in a hurry.
[Howard] And we’re not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I’m Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I’m DongWon.
[Erin] I’m Erin.
[Dan] I’m Dan.
[Howard] And I’m Howard.
[Mary Robinette] As the year comes to a close, we’ve been talking about a lot of things, but one of the things we haven’t really been talking about is kind of how you keep going when life has thrown you speedbumps. This can be a lot of different things. It can be a career speedbump, it can be your body, it can be circumstances around you. So we’re all going to just kind of talk about some of the speedbumps that we’ve been encountering and some of the strategies that we’ve used to navigate around them.
[Howard] You know what, I… The speedbump metaphor I think may have been mine when we originally set this up, because as a younger, healthier man, speedbumps were things that I would just maybe slow down for a little and then just rattle and shake on my way over them. I’ll just plow through it. I’ll just muscle through this. I will just… I’ll put in the extra hours. I’ll put in the less sleep, whatever. Over the last couple of years, I’ve realized that that approach is no longer the option. The vehicle I am driving over the speedbumps is now a 72 station wagon…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] That does not have… Well, 68 station wagon, if we’re actually talking my model year, so it does have wood panels on the sides, with a bad suspension, and the back of the station wagon is full of poorly packed glassware.
[Laughter]
[Howard] If I decide to hit the speedbump at 30 miles an hour, I am going to break things, and it’s a mess. So, my life over the last couple of years has been built around activities that look a lot like, metaphorically speaking, pulling up to the speedbump, stepping out of the car, renting somebody’s backhoe, scraping the speedbump off the street, getting back in the car, and then driving forward. If it sounds like I move more slowly than I used to… Yes. Yes I do.
[Mary Robinette] I have been dealing with an emotional speedbump. Last year, 2023, is what my family has taken to calling the year of five deaths. Which… I’m not going to go into a great deal of detail about that, because as you can tell, it’s a little bit of a downer. But I kept… It was… My life is badly paced and badly plotted and maybe that… The author kept reaching for the same trick. It’s like, come on. But we couldn’t wait two months. My mom was one of the people who I lost last year. Each time, I kept thinking, okay, I just have to get through this, and then after that I’m going to be able… And there was never an after. So what I had to do was come up with ways to be able to keep moving while things were falling apart around me. I turned in Martian Contingency a week before mom died. I had to have my cat put down on my birthday. I mean, it was like… But it sucked. And I had deadlines. So it was… I… The renting of the backhoe, it’s like that is a strategy to get around the thing. For me, because it mostly messed with my executive function, making decisions, any of that was just incredibly difficult. And I had competing priorities. I wound up having to break everything down into smaller and smaller pieces in order to make any progress at all, and learning to celebrate making any progress was hugely important. This year, which I thought, ha ha, has been a different set of things. We had an unexpected move this year because of different family health things. And the coping skills that I learned last year have been very, very useful with these speedbumps. It’s been… Yeah. So, there you go. I could keep talking…
[Laughter] [garbled]
[Howard] Breaking things down into smaller and smaller pieces… Would you like to peer through the boxes of glassware…
[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.
[Howard] In the back of my station wagon?
[Laughter]
[DongWon] It’s funny, because speedbumps, in these cases that we’re talking about so far, can be very hard things, very difficult things, and sometimes they can be something that you do to yourself. So, in my case, I made the bright choice to move across the country this year. I packed up my life in New York and I moved to Southern California. And it’s been a really wonderful decision for me. It’s been the right choice, and I’m really, really delighted by where my life is at in a lot of ways. But also, talk about a god damned speedbump.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] It was so much more disruptive than I anticipated, and it definitely caused a cascade of issues in my life, some of them professional and some of them personal. There’s a way in which all of this has been really joyful to do, but also, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a speedbump. It doesn’t mean that I didn’t need to make space for myself, make space for the people around me, and adjust to certain realities of what it was going to be to go through that level of disruption. Right? So, how you plan for, and how you respond to speedbumps is, like, hugely important and I maybe learned a small lesson of I’m not in my twenties anymore, or even in my thirties anymore, and I need to maybe make more space for certain disruptions that I needed to even five years ago. So, it’s been an interesting moment of reflection as I’m looking at building a new life here, building a new community here, things like that. But also, how to keep plates spinning, keep balls in the air, while doing multiple things at once.
[Dan] My major speedbump this year, and last year, has been a recent diagnosis of depression and panic disorder. Both of which recently upgraded… We’ll use that word… To severe depression and severe panic disorder. Which is just delightful. That’s… Like DongWon was saying about planning for disruptions, that’s the reason you haven’t really heard from me throughout the year. I was on a few episodes that we recorded very early on, but I did hit a point, actually and 22, where I realized that my choices were to either back away temporarily from this podcast or quit it all together. Which I did… Absolutely did not want to do. But that’s the state that my brain was in and to some extent, continues to be in. I hope to be on, and will be on, many, many more episodes next year. But… Yeah. We call this the brain shingles. I got the brain shingles.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] [garbled]
[Howard] And it’s not the good kind of shingles that keep rain off of things.
[Mary Robinette] No.
[Dan] No. Not at all.
[Erin] It’s interesting, listening to all of this, because I feel like I… Knock on wood… I, in 2024, like, had not had as a huge, like, speedbump of that kind. Whether unanticipated, whether…
[DongWon] Self-Inflicted?
[Erin] Self-inflicted.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] I… Like, so is somebody who does not drive…
[Laughter]
[Erin] I like to think about something that I do in my life where I create my own sort of speedbumps or cracks in the sidewalk to be tripped over. Like, somebody in a grocery store who doesn’t get a cart and starts getting items off the shelf. Right?
[Laughter]
[Erin] It works a bit. Like, you’re like, okay, I can hold this can, I can hold this soda, okay, what’s… Okay, if I just rearrange this, I can put this thing on top. And you never know what will be the either item, obstacle in your path where it’s a very small obstacle, but you’re holding a lot of things, and it’s a very delicate balance, and if something can throw it off, and now, all of a sudden, things are going everywhere and you’re trying to hold on to everything and not drop any of the items and create a spill on aisle five.
[DongWon] I feel personally attacked and called out right now.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] I don’t think you even… [Garbled]
[Howard] It’s not so much that you are your own worst enemy as it is that we are all our own that exact same worst enemy.
[Mary Robinette] Erin is, I will say, an extreme example of it.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Having been in a bar with her, watching her continuing to work…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] While on a cruise ship. I’m like, no, no. Erin has a bigger capacity for stacking things and believing that she can continue to carry them then I… Than anyone I’ve ever met.
[Erin] Yay?
[Laughter]
[Erin] Like, on the plus side, there are things that you can do to, like, learn yourself. You know what I mean? Like, I know this about myself. So, thinking about what are the strategies… Like, to figure out… Like, what are the things that we need to do? I know that we are coming up on a break, so maybe the time to talk about the strategies is on the other side of it? Question mark?
[Mary Robinette] That is exactly what I was thinking. So, let’s take a quick break.
[DongWon] So, my thing this week is I want to talk about the movie Furiosa. Which I really love. I sort of feel like there aren’t enough people talking about it. I feel like it didn’t get quite the love that I hoped it would. Mad Max: Fury Road, one of my favorite films, I think we can all agree that it’s an absolute masterpiece of action cinema, and finally, they released the follow-up to that which is actually a prequel, but tells the story of Furiosa’s childhood and early life as she sort of becomes the imperator that we meet in Fury Road. One thing that’s really interesting is this movie is structured so differently from Fury Road. I think a lot of people went into it with the expectation of getting that same hit, getting that same high, and instead, it’s a slower, quieter, more traditional drama in certain ways as we watch this person grow up and develop into this… Into the sort of force of nature we meet in the future. And Chris Hemsworth is also in it, playing opposite Anya Taylor Joy. Chris Hemsworth plays the villain, a character named Dementus. It’s some of the best performances I’ve ever seen from him, that he brings a weirdness and a humor to it, but also a deep unsettling menace by the end of it. So, I highly recommend Furiosa. Remind yourself that this isn’t Fury Road, it’s its own thing. Manage your expectations around that. But just some absolute killer action sequences that I really love, some great character work, and great performances. George Miller is like nobody else out there and anything he does, I will show up for.
[Mary Robinette] Hey, friends. The 2025 retreat registration is open. We have two amazing writing retreats coming up and we cordially invite you to enroll in them. For those of you who sign up before January 12, 2025… How is that even a real date? We’re off… [Background noise… Friend?] As you can probably hear, my cat says we’ve got a special treat for our friends. We are offering a little something special to sweeten the pot. You’ll be able to join several of my fellow Writing Excuses hosts and me on a Zoom earlybird meet and greet call to chit chat, meet fellow writers, ask questions, get even more excited about Writing Excuses retreats. To qualify to join the earlybird meet and greet, all you need to do is register to join a Writing Excuses retreat. Either our Regenerate Retreat in June or our annual cruise in September 2025. Just register by January 12. Learn more at writingexcuses.com/retreats.
[Mary Robinette] Strategies are one of the things that actually keep us going. I think all of us have strategies that are probably overlapping and some things that are wildly different. I would love to hear about some of the strategies that you’ve found that have kept you functional while you have been trying not to drop things in a grocery store.
[Laughter]
[Dan] One of the strategies that I learned accidentally was, the beginning of this year, I decided, as a New Year’s resolution, that I was going to stop eating sugar. Because I was snacking on sugar constantly, especially at work. And the depression skyrocketed over the course of about two or three weeks. I realized that without knowing it, I had been self-medicating with sugar as a way of getting through the day. I’m still kind of sort of trying to do that, but sweeter. The lesson to learn from this, the way this turns from an accidental thing into an actual coping strategy, is, once I realized that that had become an important part of my process, then that became a thing to discuss more directly with my family, with my employer, with my psychiatrist, and say, well, this is what I have been doing. What can I do instead that is healthier than that? Well, what are ways that I can manage this depression without just sugaring up and muscling through it?
[Howard] Years ago, we, on this very podcast, we would joke about the… It may have been an April Fools episode… The excuses we make instead of writing. I think one of them was, oh, gosh, I sure need to vacuum my keyboard. I’ve looked at, this last couple of years, I’ve spent a lot of time rebuilding literally where my keyboard sits. Where my monitors sit. Where I sit. I didn’t get very much writing or much work done, because I was spending so much time paying attention to a very small pain point. Oh, I have to reach for this thing, and I’m reaching further than I think I should. How do I fix that? I’m going to take the time right now to fix it. And I ended up building an entire 2C stand, two big… Three boom rig surrounding a zero gravity chair where I don’t have to turn my head much, I don’t have to stretch my arms much, but I can do everything I need to do from that chair. It took a long time to build, and the strategy really amounted to, Howard, if you don’t make time to move that piece of speedbump now, then you’re going to wear a hole in yourself reaching a little extra far or having to get up and do a thing. It’s sort of like ergonomics, and I don’t counsel everybody, yeah, look at your workspace and go fully ergonomic contextual inquiry. But, at the same time, if something is causing you a little bit of pain, there might be a very easy way to make it stop doing that so you can get more work done later.
[Mary Robinette] That’s been one of the strategies that has worked well for me, is identifying the obstacle. What is the thing that is causing me problems? I also want to say that, while we’re talking about speedbumps, I just want to quickly put a flag in this, that the speedbump can be a happy thing, as DongWon referred to. That sometimes, like, if you just won an award or had a short story accepted for the first time, that can become an obstacle, because your brain is very bad, it will just say, you’re off-balance. But it cannot always tell the difference between happy off-balance and frustrated sad off-balance. So I identify obstacles, and one of the obstacles for me, the biggest one, was executive function. That I was just having a hard time making decisions and holding things in my brain. So because of that, I started doing lists. When the lists got to be too much, I backed off of that, and started doing something that I called two hand choice. Which is actually a trick that I learned from… Through animal stuff. When you’ve got a nonverbal animal, you can offer them two hands, each hand represents a choice. Do you want to go inside or do you want to go outside? I learned that with my mom during her last weeks, when she became nonverbal but still quite present. I could offer her a two hand choice and she could still respond, even when she got to the point where she was only looking at the thing. But if I offered her… Like, if I said, what do you want to wear and I showed her a closet full of things, she couldn’t… She had no way of letting me know. But if I held up two things, she could let me know blue dress, then, just looking at the left-hand. With that, the other piece that I learned was that if she never chose the gray dress, I stopped offering it to her. So what I started doing with myself was when I came up on a thing and I’m… I was tempted into procrastinating or having difficulty making a decision, I’m like, which of those two choices has served me before? That would be the choice that I would go with, and I would stop offering myself the choice that wasn’t serving me. That got me through some times where things were very hard.
[Erin] Yeah, I think… I love that. I think… I’m thinking about pie, all of a sudden, and…
[Dan] That happens to me a lot.
[Laughter] [Yeah]
[Erin] And it’s always…
[Howard] The food or the infinitely repeating irrational number?
[Erin] Both. No, just kidding. The food. The food pie. Because I’m thinking…
[Howard] Now I’m sad.
[Erin] Sorry. I think about a lot as like… Thinking back to the past, like, what have you been able to handle also. So, what has served you, and also, like, where… What was the one slice of pie [committed?] Like, when the pie’s delicious, you want to eat all the slices. Sometimes, it takes time to figure out. Like, okay, two, and I really wish I’d had more. Like, I actually did have enough room for a third piece of pie.
[Mary Robinette] The dessert pointer.
[Erin] But, like, 10, it turns out, was not good. Was not a good idea. So, somewhere between 10 and three is, like, the right thing. I do that with projects. It’s, especially, when you repeat projects, I know, like, sort of how big a slice it is. Like, this thing, if I do this one thing, I’m only going to have room for one or two other things. When I’m teaching a college class, like, that is something that takes a lot of time to prep the lessons and talk to students. So, early on when I started teaching, I was like, oh, teaching. It’ll just take a minute. Then, later, I learned, no. That’s big. I can only do, like, maybe one or two side projects and teach and still get sleep and still…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Drink water and still work at other things that make me happy. I think… For me, that’s a second lesson, which is, like, think of yourself. Like, you are an important part of the equation. If you are not here, you cannot carry the same… True story, you cannot eat the pie. So I think that it can be easy to neglect the you in the equation, and think, like, I will just outwork it, I will out do it, I will under sleep it, I will figure it out. But ultimately, like, when you take the time for yourself, I think it gives you the strength sometimes to be able to do more by taking a pause and putting yourself first. So when I bring work to a bar, while that sounds wild, part of that is me saying if I finish this amount of work, I really like socializing with my friends, and I’m going to get to do that after I finish this. As opposed to doing it in my room and then just working and working and working and never leaving the house.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] So it’s a way for me to keep myself in mind if only by moving my location.
[DongWon] I’m completely in agreement with everything you’ve just said, and I’ve been going through a similar process, probably starting in… I’m thinking of the last two years, as whenever I think of as the triage years. Like, starting in 2020, kind of up until sometime this year, has been a real era of, like, me realizing how overbalanced I was in terms of the worklife balance, and how much I needed to keep up with the current treadmill I put myself on. Right? So a lot of it was… That’s why I’ve been closed to submissions for a long time and things like that, of figuring out, okay, how do I rebalance in some way that moves from this triage mode of taking care of what’s on fire in front of me to being able to approach my life in a more sustainable and a more balanced way. Right? So the kind of thing which is a little similar to what you’re talking about in terms of like now what slices of pie can I actually handle, and how do I make space for the things in my life that are restorative to me that aren’t just work focused. Right? How do I have friends who aren’t just publishing people, how do I have hobbies outside of the space that I work in, and how do I have other kinds of creative projects that sustain me? Right? So, balancing all of those things has been really important. And, maybe even more importantly than all of that, being patient with myself even as I know that this has been a multiple year process, and that I can say now, coming up on the end of this year, of, like, oh, I moved out of triage, I’m doing this. That’s probably not true, there’s probably still going to be moments when that comes up, where that may extend further. As I build towards sustainability, that’s going to require all of these different kinds of shifts in myself and checking in with myself. How do I feel about this? How does my body feel when I’m working at this level? How, emotionally, in my balancing the needs of my clients versus my own needs versus the needs of the people I care about in my life? Right? So, juggling all of these things has required a lot of therapy, no small amount of medication, and a lot of just work on myself to figure out how to approach that in a healthier way.
[Howard] In many cases, for me, I think it comes down to the graduation from the early wisdom, which is you can’t have it all, to the later wisdom of dude, you don’t actually want it all.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] That second piece of wisdom is incredibly liberating. The realization that, hey, you know what, I… A lot of these things that I’ve been reaching for, if I stop reaching for them and just reach for the things that I want the very most, I will be happier. Because I didn’t really want those things. Maybe other people told me I wanted those things. Maybe TV told me… I don’t know what the psychology is behind it. I just know that by narrowing my focus a little bit and saying the thing that I want most is the thing that I’m going to keep in front of me, and the thing that I’m going to keep aiming myself at, and everything else, I’m going to let myself ignore if I need to.
[Erin] I think, as you do that… It can be really difficult.
[Howard] Yeah.
[Erin] Because I think we’re taught that anything we let go of, A) will never come again, B) was the best thing ever, C) that our lives will never be the same without it. But I think a lot of times, like, once that decision moment is past, you move on with the life you have. That is something that’s really important, and also, to remember that other people are often much kinder to you than you are to yourself. It can be hard to say, like, I need to step back from this, I can’t do that. I think a lot of times you think people will judge you. But, people are kind of, like, if you tell people, hey, I need X. Like, 99 out of 100 times, they’ll be like okay, great. Like, let me know what I can do to be a part of that. Let me know how I can help. The one out of 100 is somebody who you don’t need in your life anyway.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think telling people that before you hit a crisis point also helps you not need more. Because you are in a healthier place. And it also places less emotional burden on them.
[Howard] The shopping cart teaches us that we are our own worst enemy.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Writing teaches us that we are our own worst critic.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I learned also over the past year because… That I’ve been applying from last year. My mom… Parkinson’s slows the brain down. So it just takes longer to answer something. The temptation when you ask a question is to fill the gap, to feel that… We’re so trained in conversation that there shouldn’t be a silence or… So you want to help. What I realized was that I did ask mom a question, and I would have to count in order to give her time… In my head, count… To give her time to respond. I realized that I actually needed to do that with myself so that other people… My anticipation of what they wanted didn’t fill the voids. So I set a rule for myself that I’ve been deploying for 2024 which has made things much healthier for me, that when an exciting opportunity comes up or when I’m getting… Actually, I set the… I do what Erin’s talking about, is, I tell people what I need right at the beginning. I sit down to have a conversation with someone about, like, this new project, and it’s very interesting, and I tell them at the front, I’m like, you’re going to hear me talk about it in ways that make it sound like I want to get involved, and I do, in the moment, but I’m not allowed to give you an answer for 24 hours. Because if I do, my sense of FOMO, my sense of excitement, is going to override my sense of what I actually need. I have been doing that this year, and I have felt like, as were coming up on the end of the year, have felt much, much better.
[Erin] I would say, just the last thing on this, is like… It is, in project terms also, I have been shocked like that a lot of times, people would rather you be honest than it turn out you can’t do it.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Like, people would rather you say…
[Mary Robinette] So true.
[Erin] Somebody comes to me, they’re like, come on, write 10,000 words of this game. I’m like, actually, I think I’ve got like 1000 words in me. So many times, they will be like, okay, that’s fine. We’ll find somebody else…
[Howard] Half of them are bad words right now.
[Erin] For the other 9000. Then, like… Then the next year, they’ll come back and be like, oh, can you do 1000 again? Or, hey, maybe you can do more? Versus if I tried to take the 10,000, it’s 10 years late, and then they are feeling like they are in a worse situation. So if you can, always be honest. But, yeah, before a crisis point, and really knowing yourself is… You said something once a long time ago, I think it was Dan, at a… On a cruise. You said, say no to the projects that you don’t want to do because at some point, you’ll have to say no to the ones you want to do. I love that wisdom.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, with that, let me take you to your homework. I want you to use this time, the end of the calendar year, the end of the season, to think about what would be the restorative for you. Don’t think about what other people think are restorative. Like, if you don’t like the beach, beaches are not restorative. Think about something that would be restorative for you. And then take a step to actually doing that. Yes, I am in fact giving you a writing excuses.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. Now go rest.
[Howard] Have you ever wanted to ask one of the Writing Excuses hosts for very specific, very you-focused help. There’s an offering on the Writing Excuses Patreon that will let you do exactly that. The Private Instruction tier includes everything from the lower tiers plus a quarterly, one-on-one Zoom meeting with a host of your choice. You might choose, for example, to work with me on your humorous prose, engage DongWon’s expertise on your worldbuilding, or study with Erin to level up your game writing. Visit patreon.com/writingexcuses for more details.