Went to the beach and all I got was this stupid self-reflection
It’s one thing to delete (and eventually cave and redownload) the Metaverse from your phone; it’s another to throw your phone away and drive hours out of the city and refuse to return (for a bit).
It’s one thing to delete (and eventually cave and redownload) the Metaverse from your phone; it’s another to drive hours out of the city to a beach shack, silence and throw the smartphone in a drawer, and walk into the beach every time the urge to scroll nags at you.
NOTE: This is truly waffle-length writing. I’m looking the other way and jumping off the cliff re: this more personal form of writing. If I edit too much I won’t post etc. but my ~intention~ is to get more concise in future. Yay! Love y’all. xx
SOMETHING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO INDENTED HEAD
It’s not the most accessible mode of enforcing boundaries: heading off on a quick holiday. I know that all too well having not gone away or taken meaningful time off for the last five years. But going on a writing retreat with a group of peers – forgiving the odd mouse living in the kitchen and the accommodation being more shack than house – was invaluable to me as a professional writer and chronic over-worker. I hadn’t been on a holiday as an adult since 2019. I’ve actually only been on two holidays in the past decade (three if you consider living in a van a holiday… whilst it did include occasional coastal views, it was the result of prolonged economic duress).
Before we left for the retreat I became very concerned (see: obsessed) with organising how we’d spend our time. I’d found and booked the accommodation, and between email chains and group chats and phone calls I found dates, a location, and a budget that worked for everyone. This apparently was not enough control for me. I spent quality time with a spreadsheet organising when we’d write alone, when we’d skill-share, when we’d read each other’s work, and even when we’d eat. Some people pushed back on the rigidity, and I <3 feedback, so the schedule was updated and some events were made non-compulsory (benevolent ruler, I am). For some creatives scheduling can be stifling, for others it provides a sense of safety and placates the daunting overwhelm of unallocated hours in a day.
Luckily the long-rehearsed dance of 21st century grind culture is no match for sea air and a commitment to leave the emails alone!! Within 12 hours, my tabbed and colour coded spreadsheet had been (at my own behest — huge) thrown away and was not thought of again. For all the wonders of modern medicine… the most common prescription of the 19th century romantic novel could not be beaten. It felt so ridiculous and obvious a discovery that during that first day I did indeed start wandering aimlessly, hands on hips, wonder on my face and an occasional shake of the head – much like a middle aged man checking out a well-stocked man cave.
Occasionally the mise-en-scene of various bodies sprawled across the property – adorning couches and dining tables and sun-drenched grass with writing implements and a sense of serenity – was punctuated with the gentle service of peppermint tea or kombucha . This existed alongside intuitive breaks for rest and eating, spontaneous trips to the beach to float in the water, drinking coffees and stretching together on the lawn. I did take a few timelapses of these events (you cannot completely reform an iPad baby in just one week) but resisted the urge to post them (you can reform them a little).
Because we were all there as writers, with individual goals, there was a helpfully dispersed energy of motivation and accountability that replaced the need for an internalised and shaming pressure to work. But pressure has been my engine for more than a decade. Pressure against a clock, pressure to not let down a team, pressure to fill the CV, pressure to make quotas, pressure to impress, pressure to prove I deserve what I have, pressure to outrun the feeling I’m a fraud. A decade-long dance and something as simple as time away helped me re-work the steps. It feels so laissez faire to write it like that, to put it so simply. I guess if things are easier said than done, it obviously follows they’re more meaningfully done than said. I felt I had stepped into an alternate universe where I was bolstered by camaraderie, not rising tides of pressure. We were connected by a sense of community rather than any sort of direct accountability. There was celebration of each other’s achievements – even when they did not align with initial goals. I had meant to finish a play I’ve been avoiding for months. For the 12,000 words I wrote over the retreat, only 2000 were on that work. I instead found contentment and joy in spreading my time and attention over multiple pieces. I still wrote more in a few days than I have in months. Not because I’d set that specific requirement for myself, but because I let myself write without pressure.
I rediscovered the pleasure of handwriting, of refusing to schedule and calendar everything, of denying the fuel anxiety offers and committing to getting it somewhere else. After spending a sunrise on the beach watching a group of seagulls dance, I proceeded to write a short story about the bird of the area. Thousands of words poured out of me for no outcome other than the joy of imagining and the time to do it. I genuinely can’t remember the last time I let myself do that. Even though rediscovering that part of myself was exciting and enriching, I feel a sense of grief for myself too. For all the time I’ve refused to let myself enjoy things for their own sake, for all the time I’ve been convinced that it’s unattainable or wasteful to move slowly and with presence because I believe that it’s not possible or realistic. I’m reminded of a (probably Brené Brown lol) speech about success in which she says something like: you’re not stuck because you’re afraid you’ll fail, you’re stuck because you’re afraid you won’t. It is a scary thing to accept that maybe it doesn’t have to be all overwork and suffering, mainly because once I confirm that’s true I’ll feel a sense of betrayal on behalf of past me, who I willingly put through extra hardship under the assumption there was no other option. It is at this point of itchiness that I have to remind the utilitarian inside myself that I very well may have more years ahead of me than behind me, and also that present+future me versus past me is a 2v1 scenario.
SOMETHING’S GOTTA GIVE
So how do I reclaim a little of this mode of being without having to do the holiday to get there? How do I maintain this prioritisation of rest and creation at home? How do I resist the asphyxiation of the city crushing and pulling me in every direction?
Hope is a mix of fear and happiness. I am certainly afraid I cannot live the way I have been for a long time. Fresh off the back of sea air and laughter I am willing and able to leverage my residual happiness to action this renewed hope for another way of living. My first revolt: instead of catching up on emails, my first day back is spent writing this article as a means to reflect on how I might begin sincerely following the advice and teachings of The Nap Ministry and flipping the (sea)bird to the ‘grind’. I, much like most, cannot afford to run away to the sea every time I need to get things done. Even if it was as simple as adopting a holiday ‘mood’ in my home, incorporating rest and slowness into the ‘real’ world is not without consequence to my professional life. Resisting overwork will undoubtedly affect the way I work. A meaningful change in how I work could lead to a change in how others perceive my dedication and ability. This may affect the opportunities I’m afforded. That’s usually where the thought experiment ends and I go back to saying yes to things I shouldn’t. But the memory of what it was like to not be in constant distress is too fresh in my mind, and I’m able to push further. It’s a lot easier to see how bad things are after a bit of relief. As I push further I’ll throw in a lot of ‘perhaps’ qualifiers so I don’t spook myself right out the gate. You can ignore them.
If the kind of work I’m protecting, by not looking after myself, is resulting in my continued exploitation and suffering, perhaps it is not work that is healthy or safe to do long term. If the work I’m doing is not healthy or safe long term, then perhaps the mitigation of opportunities and reduced quantity of that work is actually a positive thing and not a negative one. Any work that requires extreme and prolonged cortisol-production to complete is not compatible with meaningful anti-capitalist rhythms of living. Perhaps I need to refuse the mode of working I don’t believe in, to cultivate a life I want to live in.
I also hold the reality that it is exploitative work, with the reality that it is not the sole fault of myself and my peers for participating in and exacerbating that exploitation. Better processes are the most ethical way to operate within the independent arts industry, but ethical values don’t change the reality of how the industry must function for its current upkeep given its current resources. The industry maintains its current existence on the back of volunteer labour out of necessity, given the lack of public and private spending in the arts. It should exist regardless. If it must exist without our nation’s leaders' belief in the arts as a valuable public good and a real job by way of their continual reduction of funding, I refuse to treat it like a part of the system of capital. I refuse to overwork to earn validity in what I do.
The myth of the arts is that we are ever repaid for the unpaid labour we give. The myth of capitalism, much like the myth of institutionalised religion, is that if we are good enough and we overwork enough that there is a heavenly reward for us at the end. That if we don’t make it it’s because we didn’t try hard enough. This encourages extreme and prolonged suffering on the false hope of belated gratification. It’s easy to shake my head in pity at medieval peasants for believing it, but I have found myself operating under the very same patriarchal ideology and I can’t participate anymore. I have to refuse.
This refusal doesn’t necessarily mean that I will only work for Money, although that requirement is one of the easier ways to express a boundary against exploitation, but rather that money as an ideology should not define the way my work functions. I will participate in projects and with people because of my values and my skills and my joy of the thing itself and the people around me, but I won’t suffer through an experience because I believe it is some rite of passage that moralises and justifies my success later down the line. I will not work myself to death to prove that I’m a working artist of merit, just like I wouldn’t emotionally damage myself to prove I’m an actor of dedication (sorry for the stray bullet, but method acting makes me cringe lol). We place those conditions and judgements on ourselves and each other in the arts (unless, horrifically, it’s just me but… I've been on the clock app enough to know there are no original experiences), when it is a culture that only serves to reinforce exploitation. This only bolsters the ability of the government to mismanage arts and culture, because we let them say we don’t matter and then work ourselves to death in hopes that we will prove otherwise and they will act accordingly. Spoiler alert: heaven doesn’t exist and the government won’t back-pay you in 20 years because you did 10 unpaid indie shows. They won’t even back pay you for the grant application you wrote.
Creative arts are not important or worthy only if the government spends money on them, but spending money on things is the metric by which the government communicates value to a nation. If they’re wrong, which they are, we have to fight them collectively and in a separate and meaningful way. Protest against unpaid labour and underfunded industry should surely challenge the conditions we operate within, not reinforce them.
OH, AND BY THE WAY
Sharing this personal revelation does not imply or suppose that I am the first to meaningfully engage with this thought (or action). I only want to use this personal discovery and commitment to reiterate that it is possible to have anti-capitalist belief and feelings but still maintain its ideology (ugh!!). Writing about it has clarified it for me in a renewed way, and posting about it holds me accountable to the rejection of it. It’ll be slow and steady, like the rest of my life (I hope). I mean, even in my celebration at the alternative sense of work and achievement on the retreat I still measured that against word count. I’m not cured, just reinvigorated. I’ve already agreed to do way more than I should have already this year, and financial need will require me to do even more, but seeds are being planted etc. By practicing no and refusing to measure my self-worth against my ability to perform labour ‘better’ than others, I have to believe that the needle is moved a little in the right direction. Even if just a little.
Flick is a multidisciplinary artist most well known for creating the staged lesbian sci-fi series SLUNTIK™. They look to create and collaborate on new works that embrace spectacle as political movement, that are bold and experimental, and that think specifically about the impact of process. They’re gamifying their aspiring return into voracious reading by using storygraph. They’re reluctantly posting a meaningless mix of selfies and professional news on instagram. Flick’s written work has appeared on stages and on pages. You’ll find out more by visiting the website flickflickcity.net.