This summer, I’ve been slacking off on some things.

Most people who know me, especially in the online world, know that I’m very bound by routine and rituals. Every month I sit down and make an ambitious list of what I’m going to do for the month, and I generally try to achieve it. One of my biggest work problems, and a motivator, is when I make these ambitious goals, I try as hard as I can to achieve them. That’s how I managed to produce about seventy new creative pieces a year despite being a full-time student and almost working full-time as much as possible. At the very least, I try to sit down at the end of the month just to write, even if the poems aren’t quality. Any writing time is good for me.

But when the summer of 2023 rolled around, I ended up slacking on these goals and processes. My usual goal is around seven or eight poems a month, and I barely even touched that when the end of July rolled around. I started a new job this season interning at Smithsonian Enterprises, and I also started taking this blog a lot more seriously when I saw that it was creating a decent revenue source—this is something that can support my writing career easily, and it’s also time sitting down writing, albeit in a different way.

Here are some lessons learned throughout the summer.

Humans, especially me, aren’t meant to be constantly working.

As I started graduate school after a gap year, and after working several jobs that require me to be in-person, I’ve realized that I simply am not cut out for a 9-5 life with commuting. I’ve only been doing it a couple of days in the past year, but it’s honestly been too much for me. I will probably end up in a 9-5 because of how I need to make enough money to survive in this economy and current world, but the end goal towards my mid-career is to consistently freelance and work for myself. I know as a creative writer, they tell us we need to constantly produce in order to hone our craft when we’re my age. 10,000 hours is the one I’ve seen thrown out in books and popular media, but I’m pretty sure I’ve hit that as someone who attended an intensive magnet program for high school in writing, continued my career throughout college, and now I work as a freelance journalist.

I come from a family of workaholics, and that’s where my work ethic comes from. As I’m writing this blog post, I’m sitting at my campus job writing blog posts in-between appointments. I see free time and end up using it to write, whether it’s articles, blog posts, or me trying to knock out schoolwork. But we simply aren’t made to constantly be cranking out content, which is pretty sad because that’s what ends up making money at the end of the day. Sure you’re going to learn craft by writing and reading as much as possible, but it gets to the point where if you’re not experimenting, you get too comfortable in the rhythm you’re creating.

Overcoming writer’s block every day made my writing more boring to me.

Creatively, I began to realize that when I was writing a poem a day, a lot of them started coming across as the same. It was beginning to get too repetitive when it came to images, subject matter, and even the form of the poem. I also wasn’t inspired half the time, but I did gain the valuable skill of creating a poem even when it felt like my head was very empty. Some pieces I’m really proud of, but haven’t had the chance to publish yet, have come out from the moments like these when I started with nothing. I also keep a poetry journal for scrap lines that comes with me to school and work, so when I’m looking for some time to find a muse, I look at these lines and see if a story expands from their depths.

Experimentation is something that is very important to me as a writer, as it makes me feel like I’m contributing in a way that is more productive. I try not to read a ton of poetry outside of realizing what’s on the market because I’m careful about how it influences me. I don’t want to be writing haikus because they’re trendy, or forcing myself to adapt to a style that’s popular right now and getting people published. As a former youth writer who ended up winning prestigious competitions because of pieces that pandered to their aesthetic, I don’t want to do that anymore. I want to make stories that I want to see told, and that’s ultimately what led me to pursue a master’s degree in Global Humanities instead of writing. I wanted to apply academic theories and understand people more to make me a better writer in that way.

I also stopped submitting, which I think made me a better writer.

As someone who is touchy about literary magazines, despite literally running one myself, I find them a major con when it comes to creating my own work. I think a pitfall a lot of young and emerging writers can succumb to is giving up the kind of content they want to write in order to get published. And, despite this being my opinion, that’s such a big shame considering the global systemic issues that are prominent in the writing industries. As a woman, BIPOC, and someone who considers themselves to be mixed race, I don’t want to be writing stories that ultimately are molded by the people who originally oppressed us. There’s still a reason why many mastheads and publishers are still alarmingly white, and if you look at the publishing trends, you’ll see a lot of stories being published by people like us can fit into molds sometimes.

So I often take breaks from submitting my work. I use these months to cultivate a new aesthetic and sit down, reading literature from all over the world. Currently I’ve been finding Turkish stories translated at my library, as well as some Southeast Asian authors. Without the pressure to submit, that gives us the time and leisure to explore who we are as a writer and our place in the world, and we are able to see by consuming translated literature that there are many different ways to write—there isn’t one standard at the end of the day. You really have to give yourself room to breathe and explore!

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