Dear Kate,
We started this newsletter on the Fourth of July in 2020. Two years ago — long, long years. So much has changed. I moved to Texas, quit my job to write, fell in love, and bought a couch. (The couch still feels like the biggest accomplishment on that list.)
I’m so grateful for our writing. Putting pen to paper helps me in so many ways: I remember details as I document my past, shape opinions as I refine my present, and clarify longings as I write about the future.
Writing opens me up to the world. Everyone I meet becomes a character. Every experience becomes a story. Being a writer is my favorite way of being in the world.
And yet, even now, I doubt myself. What if I actually suck at this? What if I never publish a book? What if everyone thinks I’m an idiot and this little hobby of mine is just one big joke? I live with this voice in my head.
Cheryl Strayed calls this voice “your invisible inner terrible someone.” (And yes, she is terrible!)
But interestingly enough, as I reflect back, these last two years have given me a gift, something to use against my invisible inner terrible someone: perspective.
People who once belonged in tidy boxes—offices, houses, schools, daycares—now flow freely. We’re all mixed up, and my favorite mixed-up place is the local coffee shop: corporate types on Zoom, elderly people reading paperbacks, moms splitting a muffin with their baby.
I love to watch it all. Most mornings, I spend $2.75 (or $6.75 if I get a snack) for the privilege of working somewhere other than my house, somewhere away from the dishwasher, the laundry, and the empty pantry. As explained by Simon Sarris: “This is expensive if you treat it as a coffee habit, but very cheap if you understand that it is buy-in for one of the few accessible spheres of public life.”
Public life is important: getting a glimpse into other people’s lives can offer much-needed perspective for your own. These days, I need that perspective more than ever. So I wake up, go to the coffee shop, sip my drink, and answer my emails. Then I eavesdrop. I eavesdrop on everyone. Absolutely everyone. (I’m a writer!)
Here’s what I’ve learned: Everyone’s work is silly.
I listen to social media managers chat through “Influencer Check In” calls. Hilarious!
I listen to sales managers set “Must Hit” milestones. Absurd!
Even the most important job in the world, motherhood, looks silly most of the time: playing dinosaurs, tossing kids around, wiping stinky bottoms. Admit it, it’s funny!
It’s so easy to become mired in the over-importance of our work. We put so much pressure on ourselves. As if the rest of planet Earth was waiting for us to accomplish something magnificent! We work not for the pleasure of process but for the final accomplishment of some invisible, impossibly hard result: “Someday I’ll be a millionaire. Someday I’ll be famous. Someday my child will be president.”
Someday I’ll write a novel.
With such perilous destinations in mind, the journey is all but worthless.
Living this way gives your “invisible inner terrible someone” the keys to the castle. It’s dangerous. Author Kevin Power let his terrible someone keep him from writing any good pages of fiction for five years! Day after day he sat at his desk, and day after day he produced nothing but anxiety. Why? He was writing not to enjoy the act of creation but to achieve an outcome — that impossible goal of “becoming a writer.”
“[I was writing] not out of an honest attempt to understand my own experiences and to communicate that understanding to others, but out of ambition, undiluted: the ambition to be a writer,” he explained. “I was unable to write about the things that had happened to me (growing up; falling in love; flailing around in college and after: all the stuff usually taken by young novelists as their material) because I never thought about the things that had happened to me. I was too busy trying to be a writer.”
The way out was through humility. He began again as an amateur. He became curious about his work rather than demanding. He realized his novel was “not a means of redeeming my life. More like: something to work on, while I lived.”
The words began to flow.
Working from humility and curiosity is freeing. Even Cheryl Strayed calls herself an amateur. She defines the word as “someone who does something for love.” What a beautiful idea. What if we all approached our passions as amateurs, motivated by nothing but love?
This still requires responsibility, lots of it. Strayed, who wrote the Dear Sugar column for years under a pen name, explained it well.
At first, she felt a wave of creative freedom at the idea of writing an anonymous advice column.
“I could boss people around without consequences,” Strayed wrote. “At last, for once, nothing was at stake.”
But ten minutes into her first day on the job, she changed her mind. Free from constrictions, writing only for love, her work felt more personal, more intimate than ever before. The stakes weren’t lower, they were higher. But in a good way. “Something is always at stake,” she explains. “Our integrity. Our internal sense of peace. Our relationships. Our communities. Our children. Our ability to bear the weight of the people we hope to be and forgive the people we are. Our obligation to justice, mercy, kindness.”
What if we all decided to begin again—at the beginning? Perhaps the answer is to take our work seriously, but not ourselves. We’ve got to be able to laugh. We’ve got to be able to enjoy. I want to relish every second of the journey and forget all about the destination.
I want to treat my writing—my relationships, my passions, my loves—not as my life’s work. Just something to work on while living.
XOXO,
Ali Montag
My Book Rec:
Our dear, beautiful, elegant friend Nikki Erlick published her debut novel. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s a banger. It received a rave review from the NYT, and was selected as July’s book club pick for the Today Show. I can’t say this enough: buy it, buy it, but it!