I submitted this essay to a couple of places!
NO OTHER LAND | East of Eden
Writing a Book is Scary AF. Promoting Your Book is Even Scarier.
WritingWriting a Book is Scary AF. I think the scariest part is when it’s finished.
When I first shared Welcome to the Millennial Age: An Infographic Guide with friends and family, I wasn’t sure how they’d react to it. I mean, it’s kind of a weird book, and, you know … I wrote it.
Every stage of a creating a book is challenging, both emotionally and practically speaking. Deciding to put the pen to paper (well, fingers to keyboard). Deciding to keep going even after you ate the first draft. Deciding to finish the bloody thing after you’re soooooooo sick of looking at it. Deciding to have friends read it and give you feedback. Deciding to accept the valid criticism and make more edits. Deciding to pitch it to literary agents. Deciding to keep going after getting rejected. Deciding to pay for a copy editor.
And then, the hardest part, in my book (no pun intended): deciding to promote your book. Deciding to share your Amazon link with friends and family.
Any author will tell you it’s 100 times easier to promote literally any other author’s work than to promote your own work. Unless you’re a classic narcissist, the self-doubt is part of the process.
Self-doubt is that annoying and sometimes toxic yet well-intentioned friend who checks in on you every now and then, usually right after your other friend self-confidence has been visiting for a while. They just want to stop by and make sure you aren’t running off into the sunset with ambition. Before they leave, they’ll want to see that you’ve got a good grasp on the real potential for your hopes and drams. They can occasionally offer excellent insight. But they often don’t actually know what the fuck they are talking about. It’s best to treat them like an unreliable narrator, like a suggestion from ChatGPT that you might want to research yourself, because it might be hallucinating. Chat GPT is only as good as whatever shit is on the internet. Self-doubt is only as good as whatever shit your subconscious mind believes about you and the world around you.
My approach has been to not kill self-doubt, nor to totally ignore it. But I don’t really trust it either. They have a seat at the table, for sure, but they aren’t running the show. Self-doubt likes to sometimes partner up with other visitors like pessimism, laziness, and MY MOTHER’S VOICE IN MY HEAD, so it’s not always easy to know where they really stand. Are they trying to help me, or sabotage me? They’ve been known to do both.
A book is such a personal creation, something that really comes from WHO YOU ARE (I mean, it should be, I think, if it’s a good one). That makes self-doubt super interested.
Before I was even close to publishing Welcome to the Millennial Age, self-doubt came around to ask some questions: Would anyone actually read it? If someone actually did read it, would they like it? Would anyone laugh at my dumb jokes? Would they think it was stupid?
Self-doubt brought some friends, like existential dread, who wanted to know if there was meaning in all of the work I put into this book?
Broke-ass money lover was pretty sure I should stop trying to make books happen and… get a job at Amazon instead of using Amazon to try to sell books.
Both fun-love and easy-going wondered if the time I spent creating the book would have been better used getting high at the beach?
Real question.
But here I am, having had about 27 visits from self-doubt on the journey with Welcome to the Millennial Age. And even though Eternal Optimist’s biggest dream’s have not (yet!) materialized, self-doubts biggest fears have also not materialized. No one is laughing at me, but a few people have laughed at my book. Which was the goal! So far, everyone who has read it has told me they liked it: it made them laugh, they learned things, it made them smile. Since I like to surround myself with honest people, I think it’s a good sign.
My cousin told me she was literally dying of laughter alone in the living room for two hours. It sounds so funny, but it actually made alllllllll the work feel worth it.
Julie’s mom was super kind about the process and helped with some basic edits to the draft. She bought her book club members copies, and one of them took the time to find my website to message me and tell me they loved it.
Sometimes when you write things, you wonder if the words will go anywhere but into a void….a big, cavernous void, a black hole. When even just one person reads it and tells you they like it, it’s just a confirmation that you aren’t in a black hole, you are still in normal space-time.
So far, three local bookstores have confirmed that they will sell my book, which is awesome! Fingers crossed they sell copies and it can stay on the shelves. But I’m just happy that I made it this far with Welcome to the Millennial Age. Even if I don’t have a traditional publisher, and even if I don’t ever sell more than 200 copies, I finished the book, and I got it onto a bookstore shelf. Self-doubt was wrong about all those steps. They will duke it out with Eternal Optimism regarding what happens next.
Available in Paperback Now! Welcome to the Millennial Age: An Infographic Guide
Welcome to the Millennial Age, where conversations on dating apps outnumber conversations with neighbors; where our phones are our soul mates and our human soul mates are taking longer and longer to find; where we owe an average of $40,000 in student loan debts and rent one-bedroom apartments that cost almost that much per year.
This book is as much data-driven as it is funny. It makes fun of millennials, social media culture, political apathy, and — most of all — baby boomers. Whether you’re a millennial or not, this book might make you laugh, ponder, or even post something emotional to Instagram.
Author’s Note:
I started making these info-graphics in 2019. After the pandemic broke out and I was locked up alone in my tiny studio apartment, I had nothing better to do but get really into putting this project together. This book is autobiographical, and about the "millennial" experience, but I don't claim to represent everyone who fits into my generation, and I also believe other generations may relate.
Now available in paperback and e-book for Kindle!
On Doing Nothing
Writing, Acting1 CommentQuitting my job last September was terrifying. It was scary partly because I actually quite liked my job; I liked my boss, my team, my day-to-day work, the purpose of what I was doing, and, of course, a regular paycheck and all the benefits of a good government job.
Because I graduated college in the height of an economic recession and have moved between different countries quite a few times in my life, I am acutely aware of how long it can take to find a job, especially a good job.
What if I run out of money before I get a job again? What if I end up having to go back to work in some boring $20 an hour admin job and then I’m stuck in a place I’ve been before, where I am working full-time and so drained from the immediate work I’m doing that I don’t have energy to apply to other jobs? What if I have a medical emergency and I end up with hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical debt because I don’t have amazing insurance anymore, and you know, this is America, where we pride ourselves on capitalizing on everything including disease.
Julie really wanted to go on this trip around the world. I was terrified. In my twenties, I wandered the world. I lived out of suitcases. I lived through financial uncertainty, sleepless nights, cheap food, and unstable relationships. But I’m not in my twenties anymore. I’m supposed to be a grown-ass adult now. I am going to be FORTY in two years. I already have occasional spirals over not having some of the markers of adulthood that I sometimes think I should have by now — marriage, children, pets, owning a home (Julie does, I don’t), paying off my student loans, weeding the garden… Now, I’m quitting the one facet of adulthood that it seems I actually do have: my job.
The compromise that came out of joining Julie on the trip was what came after — a plan to spend time working on my creative projects. She has been incredibly supportive about paying for the major bills during the travels and for the three months after. I was going to spend the winter finishing my next book, revamping my first book, applying to acting jobs. If I was going to quit my job, it needed to be connected with pursuing something else that would feel like moving forward. If I ended up broke and desperate to get ANY job, I wanted to at least have successfully completed another manuscript and added some roles to my acting reel.
When we got to LA, I got to work applying for acting jobs and working on my book. And then something else happened. I started napping. I started lingering on my morning walks on the beach (which was, by the way, the nicest place for a regular morning walk I have ever experienced). I started spending more time cooking. I wanted to read at the beach. I wanted to hang out with my cousin. I wanted to meditate. I wanted to play games on my phone. I wanted to do nothing.
Nothing was even more terrifying than not working.
The inner critic came out on full-blast:
What do you think you’re doing laying around and sleeping while everyone you know is working?
How are you playing on your phone when there’s kids being bombed to death in Gaza?
You’re going broke just to spend time sleeping.
You’re wasting time.
I started defending my naps to Julie, who actually didn’t give a shit or even notice that I was taking naps every afternoon. She could have cared less if I was literally sleeping all day. But I felt guilty. I felt like I was failing. I felt like I was wasting time, and wasting money.
And why? Do you know how un-productive it is to sit at your computer and work at 10% productivity when you’re too tired to actually do your best work? Do you know how dysfunctional it is to believe you don’t deserve to sleep when you’re tired? Do you know how bad living in constant “shoulds” is for creativity?
Somewhere deep inside I understood that what I was doing (nothing) was part of the process for me. I hadn’t had a chance to deeply REST in a long time. It was like my body was saying “OK, you want to do all these creative things, but we need to take care of me first.” I had been operating in go-go-go mode for a long time. Hustle, grind, work hard. Time had started to feel like a precious, limited resource. Every hour doing one thing was an hour not doing something else. There was always something to do. There was always more to do.
Because in our society, that’s all you are — what you do. Doing nothing is un-American. It goes against the core tenants that underpin our democracy. Whether you’re a fan of the American Dream or you believe it’s late stage capitalism sucking all it can out of you, we all agree that work defines American society.
It’s not like I don’t know that I am more than what I do. It’s not like that’s a foreign concept to me. I spent several years in my twenties deeply involved in meditation groups. I identified as Buddhist for almost a decade, and I read a lot of philosophy. I also lived in other places, where how much you DO with your time isn’t as emphasized. When I came back to the US after spending most of my twenties away, I remember the shock to my system. This country has a toxic fixation on doing. When I lived in the intentional off-the-grid commune in Oregon, I was reminded that there is another way. When Julie and I were in Costa Rica last fall, I was reminded again that our way isn’t the only way.
But society is like a matrix. You are part of it, and you become it. It’s incredibly difficult to live in the US and not fall into the trap of productivity-grind thinking. It’s in the air we breathe.
Even the self-help gurus that are so prolific on social media, and in podcasts sell you rest and relaxation as a tool to ultimately get back to being productive. Doing nothing, even when it is validated, is validated as another “hack” towards being your best (read: most economically productive) self.
There’s some feminist theory that all of this is deeply toxic in an especially patriarchal way. Women literally need slightly more sleep, and half as much exercise as men. Did you know that? Women also have larger rhythms in energy and mood than men. Hence the recent trends in women talking about managing work schedules for their menstrual cycles, in using our “Monthly Periods as a Productivity Tool.” Some people in spiritual circles — including some voices that I listen to — talk about the “divine feminine” and “divine masculine.” The female energy, according to this ontology, is receiving, manifesting, dreaming, while the masculine is physically working and building.
I don’t know if I like the use of gendering language, but I like the point that our humanity works on different levels and only one part of that is what we physically do, in materialistic terms.
Put another way, we need to go to sleep and dream to function and “do” during the day. Nobody questions this; even the tech-bros who pride themselves on waking up to “crush it” at 5am are interested in getting at least some sleep. Sleep is a crucial physiological process. When we go to sleep, we process and recombine the things we learned during the day. Some studies suggest sleep literally cleanses the brain of toxins. We regenerate in rest. The dreaming mind is different from the waking mind, but without it, we would fall apart. Many cultures and shamanic traditions refer to something like “dreamtime,” a place where some spiritual traditions say all of creation and consciousness arises.
Trees live by reaching their roots down into the soil while also reaching their limbs up to the sky. Their roots cannot exist without their limbs, and their limbs cannot exist without their roots. We are kind of like them in a sense. If we don’t sleep — if we don’t dream, relax, process, reflect — we will struggle to achieve, to make, to work. We must reach up and out towards the sky, but also down and deeper into what nourishes us, the soil beneath us that isn’t visible from up above ground.
Our economy is based on a model of consumption rather than one of relation and community. Old growth forests were long-ago stripped bare for the wood they contained, and so much of our land is now farmed for one objective; the production one thing. Food crops in themselves have been broken down into constituent parts and packaged into supplements that we are sold.
Maximizing what can be taken from the land in the immediate time horizon is more important in this model than the continual health of the land. Agriculture does not care about the roots, it cares about the fruits and the timber. Trees aren’t economically viable if they live for 1,000 years, so why would we invest in their deep, microbial networks and in the communities of mosses and vines that they live with in “wild” forests? Untamed and old trees are, economically speaking, doing nothing. Even environmental conservation must use economic language to validate their right to just be. How much carbon can they store in their trunks? How much will people pay to visit them for a day?
Too many workplaces see their employees as timber rather than trees; as individual units of production rather than functional parts of an eco-system. Humans weren’t meant to perform like computers, with “on” buttons and no real needs besides a power connection and occasional software updates. We can do so much more than computers can, and yet we are forced to compete with them on the menial but complicated logic tasks that they excel at. When computers go to sleep, they are not working, nor are they doing anything. They don’t dream. They don’t create visions of what the world could look like. They don’t snuggle into someone they love at night while they sleep. They don’t go home to make dinner and play with their kids after they’ve bene working all day. Even when they are creatively productive, it’s because they have been trained to algorithmically recombine our dreams, our visions, our art, and sell it back to us like a parrot selling a story about a cracker to a child. The reason that AI is so scary and that mechanization of work in general is so scary is because humans aren’t seen as more than the work that we do, even if that is work that a machine can be trained to do.
All of the nothingness is where our humanity is. Dreams. Love. Spending time together. Cooking for each other. Playing games. Maybe it’s a sacred, divine feminine energy. Maybe it’s where our souls live. Maybe it’s just human nature, striped from its commitments to serve the Gods of our economy. But I suppose that’s a philosophical debate, one we can leave to the likes of Rousseau and David Graeber.
I didn’t even sleep that long before I started finding a deeper motivation. As a processed things in my naps and my long walks at the beach, I started to find more clarity and certainty than I had felt in a long time. I started working on my books with a different kind of focus. I had figured out in my dream-time what it was that I wanted to say, and therefore writing it down was easier. I was more certain of what I wanted, and also my identity as someone who could do it. Some people call it inner work, or shadow work, those times where we go within and reflect, change mental patterns, decide we want to be different. You can’t do that when you’re busy “performing.”
I am so glad that I spent the time I did doing “nothing” this winter.
Studying Spanish — Estudiamos Español
Costa RicaCommentJulie has been out of school for two decades, and Nicole has been out for more than a decade. So we were a bit apprehensive about Spanish classes. We needn’t have been.
We spent two nice weeks at Manuel Antonio Spanish School, colocated with Hostel Plinio, where we rented an apartment with a mini=kitchen. Our class ended up being just three people - Nicole, Julie and our new friend Mike. Our teacher Karen had moved from Nicaragua to Costa Rica about five years earlier and was a very good teacher.
We had class from 9 am to 1 pm every day with two fifteen minute breaks. We’d have about a half hour of homework per night. We focused more on vocabulary than on grammar, though we did learn both. Nicole’s vocabulary is bigger than Julie’s, probably because she watches many Spanish TikTok’s (with subtitles). Julie has always struggled to learn vocabulary in foreign languages, though seven years of Latin means that the grammar is more intuitive.
The focus was on conversation. If we got off-topic, it was fine; so long as we were telling a story or discussing something in Spanish, Karen would draw us out.
Rebecca runs the school. She came to Costa Rica from Ireland after college and never left. She started the school with her husband Daniel, who also teaches there. She arranged lots of cool tours for us — from visiting a bee keeper on his farm to kayaking in the mangroves and touring the national park.
We only got stung a couple of times at the bee farm…
Rebecca also organizes social activities and connects students to the community. We really got.a feel for Quepos and Manuel Antonio in a way most tourists don’t.
On Monday nights, Rebecca runs a board game evening for school students and community members for students to improve their Spanish and for community members to improve their English. Julie (a word-game affectionado) decimated everyone in the Boggle round where either English or Spanishh was allowed; but she struggled and the game was quite fair when only Spanish was allowed. The set was with Spanish letters (e.g. ñ and ll). We’re planning to get such a set for ourselves.
On Tuesdays, Rebecca leads a hike to one of two hidden beaches for students. See Nicole’s blog about this in particular.
On Wednesdays, Daniel goes to Latin dance lessons and encourages students to join. (We almost did both weeks but never made it.)
On Thursdays, Rebecca goes to trivia in English with the ex-pat community, and we’re all invited. The first week, our team (Rebecca, Julie and Nicole) “The Snuggling Sloths!!!!!” won the night, though only three teams attended. The first set of questions was Star Wars or Star Trek, so Nicole shone. The second week, there were more teams. We had a team of six (now called the Studios Sloths or Perisosos Estudiosos) including our teacher Karen, another student, and a college student who was doing an internship in the area. We did win one round but lost the evening.
On Fridays, Rebecca and Daniel brought the students to the local farmers market. We got to taste lots of local fruits that we’d never heard of and some we were more familiar with. Julie has loved rambutan (mamon chiné in Spanish) since her time in Thailand, and it was in season in Costa Rica. We each enjoyed our own young coconut to drink the water from -- a “pipa” Our bee farmer was there.. Julie attended both weeks, but Nicole only went the first week and then left with Mike (our classmate) and his wife Diana to go to arial yoga. She’s now hooked and wants to do it in Seattle.
We’d practiced Spanish a tiny bit before coming to Costa Rica, mostly playing our favorite game “Hanabi” in Spanish and calling it Spaniabi. Nicole also keeps her phone in Spanish mode. But in the week before we started the Spanish school, we barely used our limited Spanish Once we started school, we were using it when we could. Waiters and uber drivers would talk to us in English by default, but they were happy to help us practice our Spanish and would correct and teach us. We had guides our last week who spent 2/3 of their time talking in (slow, basic) Spanish and translating into English as needed. Reading bilingual signs in both languages its also a very good practice.
We questioned how much we’ve learned, sInce everyone in the tourists hubs speaks English and would usually default to It with us. We had already decided we’re going to do another week of Spanish lessons in Merida Mexico in November. We did a Zoom interview with one of their teachers on one of our last days win Costa Rica. It proved infinitely easier and flowed much better than our similar Zoom before our trip. We both have a ton still to learn (including past tense) but we’ve definitely come a long way.
We have just arrived in Mexico. They speak faster, so it’ll be more of a challenge. It’s hard enough to understand Costa Ricans when they talk amongst themelves. But it’ll be a good challenge. Hopefully they’ll be as patient and helpful with us. We’ll also be in less touristy places, so we should have more opportunities — and more of a need — to practice.
