So Much to Celebrate

I am writing to you from a place of astonishment and gratitude. This summer, I experienced major physical and physiological wins in my recovery from long covid. Only nine months ago, I ate my first salad in two years, after enduring organ meats and liquid medical diet for two years. I could only tolerate one salad a week, but it was progress. This summer, and hopefully until I die…I am eating cups and cups of fresh garden veggies and fruit every day. My body can digest this food and use it for energy…for LIVING. I have to take a lot of pills in order to consume and convert solid food, but I can do it – and it feels exquisite to experience these small (huge!) pleasures each day.

This played no small part in my ability to write 39 new pages on the novel (slow and steady peeps – it’s only been, what, four years since I started? But who’s counting…). The end of my first draft is within sight.

I share these personal metrics, not because it’s particularly comfortable to be that public about it, but because I think it’s important to normalize the ebb and flow of productivity in our lives as creatives. Those years I was sickest and not producing pages, I was busy producing many millions of helpful and unhelpful cells in my body, busy producing countless work-arounds to keep business and family going while my body fought and fought and fought, and busy cultivating and deepening this community of writers and readers that means so much to me.

In what ways are you productive in your life? How might you measure productivity in a way that centers your humanness?

Let’s reclaim and reframe this concept of productivity in a way that enlivens our sense of purpose:

• At first glance, how would you say you are productive in your life as a creative? (Or as a caretaker, as a leader, etc.?)
• Did you decide the metrics for measuring that productivity, or did someone else?
• If you were Madam President (🤞) for a day, how might you redefine productivity in a way that centers our humanness?

Comment below and share your vision with me. I want to know, and I’ll be sure to write you back.

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