Setting Boundaries is the First Step to Becoming a “Real Writer”

“So I’m wondering if you have any advice on work-life balance.”

The glitch in Zoom, connecting me, in Kentucky, with a class of college students in Nebraska felt like a technological bit of divine intervention. The blip bought me a split-second to come up with a rambling answer that hopefully felt somewhere between practical and comforting: “It’s really hard; you’re not the only one struggling. It matters that you get to be a person, not just a writer or a student or employee. You matter regardless of what you produce or the timeline on which you produce it.”

These were all things I believed; and all things I’d name off as personal failures. I’d never been able to take the advice myself. My boundaries were too few and too flimsy. Anxious urges to prove myself manifested as habitual overwork, which fed the toxic machine of dues-paying with over-eagerness. The belief that writing—and more specifically, writing as work—was something that could vanish with a swipe of life’s backspace button lingered.

At the time, I was toggling between working on the first draft of a book, freelancing, and working a job unrelated to writing altogether. I’d gotten to do things—write things—that I’d worked for while simultaneously never imagining they’d actually come to fruition.

I had no idea what it meant to be a “real writer,” but I was sure I wasn’t one.

In phases, I tried to follow the structures I saw some writers I admire put forth in their lives: Every time I cruised through a few days of having specific writing hours, my chronic illness would flare and sideline me, there’d be a crisis at work, or I’d stare at the blink of the cursor, watch my writing time tick away, and wonder why I was fooling myself into thinking I was capable. I attempted to set rules like “No work on weekends,” but when else was the writing work supposed to happen, really? But I wanted to be a writer, and I thought my work-life balance was the price I had to pay.

That determination came with a cluster of get-out-of-boundary-setting-free cards I’d play myself with. “So honored to have this opportunity” became “I’m giving everything for this—and not in a good way.” I never said no or asked for an extension, all too cognizant of how replaceable I was. I “paid dues” that always felt too high when I heard about how writer friends negotiated their rates, and wondered why I couldn’t muster up the nerve to do the same.

You can love this work and it not be the entirety of who you are.

By the time I’d learned to pitch through trial and error, figured out the difference between a topic and a story (through pitching approximately one hundred thousand of the latter), and worn my immune system down to the nub of an overused eraser, I still hadn’t figured it out. Writing, and being a writer, was a gift. A dream. I didn’t critique my own structure of labor because I was so grateful I’d ended up in the metaphorical room, and could vividly imagine the day the door would slam behind me, and I’d be locked out for good.

Nearly a full year after the student in Nebraska asked me about work-life balance, a high school student popped up in the chat of a different Zoom. Amid questions on how to get ideas and what a pitch looked like, they’d typed: Do you think your work is who you are?

Before I could ponder and analyze and polish the nuances of “I find meaning in my work but not my whole meaning!,” the catch in the back of my throat had answered for me: I don’t want it to be. Not all of it. Not everything. Amid all the well-intentioned advice to pursue passions and make dreams realities and remarks that one of the jobs I was working—writing—wasn’t really a job because I personally enjoyed it, I didn’t remember ever hearing: You can love this work and it not be the entirety of who you are. Or how you matter. Or how you show up in the world.

It was the permission slip I didn’t know I was waiting for someone to sign. There is a tremendous amount of privilege associated with creating firm boundaries, even if that shouldn’t be the case. And often, that lack of boundaries—lack of ability to have any—is structural, not individual. It can feel like a series of impossible choices: Taking time off is challenging, knowing your job or shift or projects may not be waiting for you when you return; getting to turn down work assumes you have other work to support you financially. Tending to yourself personally—well, in a capitalistic wheel that praises employers for offering free meditation app subscriptions, rather than paid leave or vacation days, and glorifies overworking as a signal of inherent deservedness—that’s just out of the question altogether.

My hands froze above the keyboard, unable to articulate the epiphany this high schooler had given me. I thought about all the chronic illness flares, laptop balanced on my knees as I hid in the bathroom. I pitched as a means of coping with trauma and anxiety—determined that if I couldn’t control my life, I could control how words hit the page. My frustration with my inability to “juggle” it all centered mercilessly on my apparent lack of ability. It never occurred to me that no one was ever meant to juggle so many infinitely droppable balls, and more than anything, we were never meant to do it alone.

That it was never supposed to be all about work.

That work was never supposed to be all of me.

It’s a complex knot to untangle; the loose ends of shame that I couldn’t do it all, guilt that I didn’t really want to do it all, and unmooring knowledge of how replaceable I was as a freelancer knotted together. I thought of the time an editor I’d never worked with reached out to offer me a piece—only to revoke it because I hadn’t responded within a half hour. I thought of when an editor sat on an accepted pitch for a year, no payment given, no contract signed, only to lecture me when they got back in touch and I expressed I was no longer comfortable writing the essay. The writing world doesn’t need my personal complaints—that’s hardly going to fix anything.

But every now and again, I imagine that high schooler, someone teaching themself to pitch by trial-and-error in between school, extracurriculars, and a part-time job to save for college. If the structure of having a day job, writing, and “gratitude” for passion projects was hard for me, someone who comes to all of the above with so much privilege, then it was multiplied by one hundred in terms of difficulty for others. Even if I still struggle with guilt over setting boundaries, I’d want that student to know they mattered more than whatever they produced.

In a chapter of my book, An Ordinary Age, I quote research by the brilliant Dr. Erin A. Cech, whose work includes focus on the “passion principle.” The passion principle essentially states that the whole pursue-your-passion mentality can zap critiques of capitalism and labor structure—if you didn’t love the work quite so much, you might be more inclined to push for shorter work hours or more leisure time. It’s a reality that rarely pops up amid capitalistic quips about doing what you love and never working a day in your life, or work never feeling like work if it was part of who you are.

Not only do we know that pursuing your passion and chasing your dreams have never been accessible or possible for everyone, but parts of that approach—of thinking of labor as a type of gift—are outright damaging. I could clearly apply the critique to the industry of writing as a whole: I’ve watched, often via Twitter, as friends and writers I admired lost jobs (sometimes only to have their role re-posted with a lower salary weeks later), took pay cuts, and poured unpaid labor on top of their actual workdays (all among the many reasons to unionize). Freelancer friends toiled for hours on job applications, only to be met with radio silence and the pitches they’d included written by a staffer for the publication weeks later. Job listings—or freelance writing opportunities—often don’t include details on pay at all, as if hoping for the best and wanting it badly enough will pay bills.

When you never thought you’d get to do something in the first place, how do you let yourself decide to stop  doing it?

So many newsrooms and writing opportunities remain predominantly white, upholding systemic racism that makes it so there are stark disparities in pay, and who has the opportunity to pitch writing and get it published in the first place, including whose perspective gets viewed as interesting or valuable to begin with. Unpaid internships remain a norm, editor email addresses are often challenging to find, contacts hard to establish, and for individuals navigating caregiving, parenting, other jobs, school, and more, the barriers to entry remain too high. The labor structure of writing is so fundamentally flawed, sometimes it feels like it barely has one at all.

The tidy version of untying toxic gratitude from work ends with me quitting a job, or establishing a schedule that wasn’t “Well, I’ll figure it out,” and returning, triumphant and confident, to a classroom Zoom, eager to share the secrets of balance I’d unlocked through the grief of falling out with myself. I’d pass them along in concise soundbites, the same way I encourage young writers to avoid outlets that want to exploit their personal trauma via essay for too few dollars or too little support, or commiserate about a million and one job rejections.

The real version is much less neat. The first few times I passed on pieces—because I feasibly couldn’t write them, or simply wasn’t the right writer for them—or let my document of pitch ideas go untouched, the back of my throat clenched like the potential for exhale had gotten stuck, convinced that, because I’d been bold enough to say no, I was ungrateful, and the universe would make note of that. When you never thought you’d get to do something in the first place, how do you let yourself decide to stop doing it?

You stop—I stopped—because taking an hour out of the day to talk to a friend about their life made me feel like I was doing something more meaningful than staring at a laptop screen. That going for a walk, or shoving frustration up and down on the pedals of my bike, led to a level of clearheadedness that pondering and toiling and analyzing over how to create balance simply didn’t. That, if what I loved most about writing was getting to listen to other people, maybe I should try out listening to myself now and again. That, if I didn’t figure out how to find meaning in writing without it running me, I might be a writer, but I’d be a lesser friend, daughter, sister, learner, and listener—things I consider pretty important to writing, anyway. And more so: things important to life.

Maybe I’d never have a single job, maybe I’d never write full-time, maybe I’d never have the schedule of designated writing hours and a certain mug and a desk with afternoon light pouring in, lighting me up. I just cared about the writing. The listening. The thinking. The chance to step out of my life and into someone else’s—to hear their story, a privilege I still can’t comprehend. That distinction mattered: Focusing less on what the identifier of “writer” held meant I could say no when I needed to, because being a person who writes meant I’d just keep writing.

Maybe a writer would’ve established a plan for work-life balance. But I’m not interested in being a writer anymore. I’m just doing my best as a person who writes.

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