Going Softly

Welcome to Glimpse. Despite the fact that I’ve been online since I was 7 and obsessed with customizing my Neopets homepage with html and glitter word art, I’ve never actually had a proper blog before. (We’re not counting Tumblr. Reblogging aesthetic photos of girls in knee socks smoking cigarettes does not equate to creative output.) I’ve thought about it many times throughout the years but I always but so much pressure on it that I’d crack before I even started.

So, I say again, welcome to Glimpse! An exercise in imperfection, as many things I’m diving into this year are. I have a tendency to be incredibly rigid with myself, to make too many rules. A former therapist of mine told me I tend toward “all or nothing thinking.” Too true. (Wow, bringing up therapy in the first post? Guess so!)

That being said, I don’t know exactly where this will lead. I read a few posts about starting Substacks before realizing I was worrying too much already and repeating old patterns so I pushed all of that aside and decided to just write this, my first post. I know I want to focus primarily on art, music, writing, and culture and our ways of approaching these things in the world today.

A little about me in case you don’t know me irl, although I can’t imagine anyone reading this who doesn’t already know me. My name is Stephanie and I live in Nashville, TN though I’m originally from southeastern Pennsylvania. For work, I’m Music Director as well as a DJ and Projection Manager (basically an audio editor) at a radio station here in Nashville called Lightning 100. I interned there during my last summer of college and have stuck around ever since. Outside of work, I read, write, hike, cook, and spend a lot of time with friends and my husband. I’m sure I’ll be spending time writing here about each of those things so I’ll leave it at that brief description for now.

With introductions out of the way, I want to dedicate this first post to writing about ‘going softly.’ As I mentioned, I tend to put a lot of pressure on myself in ways that are incredibly damaging to any goals that I have, especially creative goals. This is not new information for me but this year more than ever before I’ve been trying to find ways to combat it. In the last two weeks, though, I’ve been coming up against this in a new way that has really had me thinking about this more.

I’ve been participating in a ‘write-a-thon’ through The Porch here in Nashville (who are fantastic, by the way) with the goal of writing 30 hours throughout the month of September. I’m not new to writing goals but in the past I’ve always taken a daily word count approach and I’ve been shocked at how different this has been. Last year when I started working on a novel in a fairly serious way for the first time, my goal was to write at least 400 words a day roughly 5 days a week. That goal worked really well for me and I actually managed to get about 28,000 words written but it was easy to phone it in when I was feeling lazy. I could knock out 400 words in about 20 minutes and just bail if I wasn’t feeling incredibly self motivated.

With this timed goal, it’s completely different. I’ve started working again on that novel (yay) but now on the days when my brain isn’t gelling with that world, what do I do? I sit, I stare, I try to force something out of myself. It didn’t take long to learn that the only way to make any meaningful progress in my writing is to…care so much less. Some days the world of my novel feels vivid and alive—fantastic, let’s dive in. Some days, like today, I’m feeling pulled toward something else and I’m learning I should let myself go there. Some days it’s all I can do just to show up for writing time and I open my Scrivener file I’ve lovingly named “shrug” and just basically do the act of typing for long enough to say I was there.

This has been such a different outcome than I expected from this write-a-thon! I thought I’d sit down with my novel’s outline (actually a different novel that I’ve already abandoned in favor of going back to the one I started last year but that’s a story for another day) and just type away, knock out a huge chunk of it over the course of the month. Instead, I’m learning I need to be softer. I need to ignore this urgent, itching feeling that I have to finish a novel now while I’m young, while I’m not a parent, while people still read novels, while I’m attractive, plugged into a social scene, on and on and on. My brain will come up with endless illogical reasons why this has to happen now or, preferably, 3 years ago.

It’s not about the timing. It’s about showing up consistently, having fun, and learning about myself and the world through the process of making art. Believing that is so much easier said than done but I do feel like I’ve broken through some thick walls already during this first half of this month.

I was talking about this with my husband last night—his name is Ryan, he’s brilliant, and I’m sure I’ll be writing about him much more in the future—and he said that the output is just the postcard, art is the trip. I’m working on internalizing that a little more every day because not only is that the only way I’ll ever complete anything but it’s also the key to living beautifully while I do it.

Welcome to Glimpse and thanks for reading. I’m excited to be putting myself out there a little more.