First time here? Here’s what this newsletter is.
A note for you, if you’re having a bad day.
Hi Pal,
I love the honeymoon phase of a new project. The very beginning of writing a book, for example; or painting the first bird on a white fence where I intend to paint one hundred birds. (Yes, both are real.) I have an image of how the project is going to turn out. I daydream about a published bestseller or how the bird fence will be written about in a neighborhood newsletter.
But at some point, the project inevitably takes a turn. It isn’t coming to fruition the way I wanted it to. Maybe I get an idea for a NEW project that will be even better. Suddenly, it seems like there is a lot of boring, time-consuming work getting in the way of finishing the project. You know what I’m talking about: this happens to you, too. (I know it does, because it happens to literally all project-doers.) At this turning point, you make a decision: you are either going to abandon the project, or you’re going to grit your teeth and finish it. Most projects get abandoned partway through. That’s the fundamental nature of projects.
But we don’t get to see other people’s unfinished projects (unless they are both already famous and dead), and so we are surrounded by all the things everyone else has done well. There are walls decorated with whole (finished!) quilts, inked comics with all the pencil lines erased, Instagram photographs of sanded-down home-built bookshelves pristinely stacked with curated collections of all-blue-spined books. As much as you appreciate all these finished projects, they can seem a little gloaty; as if they’re saying, “Look at ME. I am a finished project. You will never be a person who has ownership over anything like me You are a failure.” But, of course, projects can’t gloat, and you’re making that put-down up in your head.
I have three messages for people who begin projects:
1) A person who started a project is a brave and optimistic person. Starting a project means stepping out onto a road that could lead a million places. It would be easier to stay put; to never venture out into the unknown of Project Land. But you have been courageous. You have been imaginative. You have chosen to believe, if even for the shortest time, that there was something out there in the world worth doing, regardless of the creative or emotional risk. Trust me when I tell you that you are in good company: for everyone who has finished a project, there are (probably exactly) 950,000 people who started something and abandoned it. I started knitting a pair of socks in 2012, and I just put the pile of yarn and dusty needles in a give-away pile today. I am not going to finish the socks, and frankly, it is a weight off my shoulders to let the idea of Finished Knitted Socks go. But wow: what an amazing thing that I started them.
2) It is not too late to finish something you started a long time ago. Please keep in mind that the thing does not need to be perfect, or even very good, when it is done. It’s a feat just to get to the end of something. Even if no one is going to publish that article or buy that beaded necklace or want to hang that calligraphy in a museum, finishing something is incredible, and it teaches you a lot about yourself. Starting the project is enough; finishing the project is an enormous accomplishment, and should be treated that as such.
3) Either way, you got to practice. Taking time to do a project means practicing not only in the highly specific field in which your project exists, but also with thinking, planning, trying things out, and exploring. With projects, I think there is no such thing as a failure. In the grand accumulation of Life’s Credit Hours, everything counts. Even burnt cookies.
Add this to your to-do list.
Intentionally smell something that you like how it smells. (Examples: a bottle of vanilla extract, the inside of a book, a mashed up mint leaf from your neighbor’s plant.)
A drawing.
If the text here is to be believed, I made this when I was age 6. But I am an unreliable narrator.
More drawings.
I asked you to send in your drawings of toilets that you created without using photo references. Many of you did, and WOW.
Isabella Lowry
Audrey Carlson
Carmen
Lisa Nuss
Caroline Wold
Stephen Heintz
What’s on my mind this week.
(This will be about pregnancy. Skip it if you don’t want to read about pregnancy.) I’m nesting. As a general maximalist, this has had a sort of weird inverse effect where I find myself wanting to get rid of everything in my house. My writing studio / study formerly had every inch of wall covered with scraps of paper that made me happy: set lists from concerts I went to; drawings of birds by my famous-cartoonist ex-boyfriend; greeting cards whose covers I particularly felt drawn to. But today I took all of that down. One card that’s been hanging above my desk since we moved here says inside “CONGRATULATIONS! You’ve won a year subscription to Harper’s Magazine!” I don’t remember ever winning such a thing, so maybe this card once belonged to Luke, or maybe I found it somewhere and took it? It’s hard to say. It can feel sad to look at an object that once brought me a lot of joy and think, “I don’t have any memory of where this came from.” That feeling knocked me over a bunch of times today. The flip side of that coin, of course, is that everything that feels so important NOW is probably not. Someday, whatever feeling I’m having right now won’t even strike me as memorable. Anyway, I don’t know precisely what I’m making space for (this forthcoming baby is not going to spend much time in my study), but my body is begging me to make it. I imagine that someday soon, there will be so many new things that fill me up.
Extras.
Luke has been into this latest album by Kississippi, and he’s right.
If you are interested in the topic of racism and sexism in Big Tech, this exhaustive story in Wired about Timnit Gebru’s ousting at Google is a really nice case study that dives into a lot of the minutiae of what goes on behind the scenes.
If you aren’t subscribed to the ToonStack Substack — a newsletter with cartoons by up-and-coming (as well as established) New Yorker cartoonists, I highly recommend it.
The timing for this is perfect as I’ve been ditching a lot of unfinished projects, lists, notebooks full of ideas etc. Good to feel free of them and also let off the hook for not seeing them through. Also, I know I will easily and quickly fill the empty space with newly started lists, projects, notebooks full of ideas…. Love this newsletter. ❤️❤️❤️