Go Unlimited

lizshine74by lizshine74

In Affirmations, Inspiration, On writing.

My teacher bestie/writing friend recently said to me, in response to my comment about being near the end of my mobile data plan: “Why haven’t you gone Unlimited?” I was taken aback. She’d asked a great question for a person in my circumstances. I pay a mere $25 a month for a device that I use a lot every single day. Wasn’t having access to the cloud—where all my creative work lives—worth an extra $10 per month? Yes, it was, I decided. And it is in this way that, every single week, we negotiate our own needs and desires, come to terms with what we believe we deserve or can afford. Now, all of what I’m about to write here must also acknowledge that $10 a month is a lot to a whole lot of people. I was that person, a single parent, living on a middle-of-the-pay-scale teacher’s salary, with shit credit, having to ashamedly take out high-interest loans to get through some months. So, when I say go unlimited, I mean go unlimited within your means. If you can, open generous spaces in your budget to cultivate your creative practice. Go unlimited so that you can connect to your body of work anytime and anyplace you want to. Pay for a hotel for a night or two of solitude. Buy a train ticket out and back, just to ride the rails and write.

If you can’t afford those things, go unlimited in other ways. Gift yourself with no-responsibility evenings where everyone in your household fends for themselves and you put on your noise-canceling headphones, go for a walk, and really let your project move through you and settle into your tissue. Cut something from your budget that doesn’t bring you joy anymore, and replace it with something that fuels your creative life. Take a day off work to do nothing but immerse yourself in your real work.

So much of my life I have pondered pointless questions about what I deserve, as if there were some sort of bar I had to reach before being called a writer. There is no such bar. You are an artist if you say so. Even if you haven’t written or painted or sewn a single thing in months. A wise writer friend once helped me frame this work in a way that has stopped the relentless self-admonitions that come with being an artist when the production has stalled. In better words that I am using here, she described how writing begins with the idea and includes all the time you spend thinking and walking and procrastinating. All of that is part of the work. Apply that to any creative work. You can be painting in the shower or making music on the treadmill. In that way too, we can go unlimited.

In case you’ve forgotten, this post is a reminder that you absolutely should go unlimited when it comes to your creative work, no matter how long it has been since you’ve worked, no matter how successful you have been at selling your work, no matter how young or old you are. The argument could even be made that you have an obligation to do this. If you’ve been thinking lately about how cold and cruel the world can be, you might also acknowledge how more people making meaning from their lives is its own sort of revolution.

What if everyone was in the habit of the empathy of probing emotion, memory, identity, and desire, in order to create an artistic act of communication that feels real to those who encounter it? This happens in public schools. This week, watched eighty freshmen, many of whom felt unprepared for the task, create three poems that conveyed emotion and imagination. Next week, they’ll pick the one they’re most proud of and record themselves reading it and reflect on the choices they made in their creations. This is what a well-rounded education can do: sow poetry seeds in every soul.

The decision to make art takes courage and resilience. Mostly, you have to fight your own shadows constantly to keep faith in the truth that to be human requires you to not simply live your days from sunrise to sunset, but also to make those days meaningful, and that the artist is inherent and alive in us all.

I also work as a writing coach and love helping writers gain confidence, set goals, and develop their work. For more information on coaching, email me at eatyourwords.lizshine@gmail.com.

lizshine74

lizshine74

Liz Shine teaches high school English, writes, edits, and coaches other writers from her home in Olympia, WA. When she begins to feel overwhelmed by it all, she simply looks up at Mount Rainier in the distance and gets back to work. If that fails, she heads to the ocean. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press. Her Substack Make Time is her gift to writers, like her, trying to magic time in this crazy, busy world. All of those posts are cross-posted on the blog here. You can see more of her writing at lizshine.com and find her on Instagram {@lizshine.writer} cooking, traveling, and in other ways seeking moments of awe. She has been an active participant in communities of writers since the early 1990s. She’s learned that two things feel truly purpose-driven in life: writing and coaching other writers. In the in between (because one cannot be driving for a purpose every moment), she enjoys looking for wonder and connection. She is a lifelong yoga student, an enthusiastic walker along streets and trails, and an amateur gardener and vegetarian cook. She lives in Olympia, WA. She believes in the power of practice and has been practicing writing since some time in the early 90s when she became an adult in the rain-soaked city of Aberdeen. Writing began with journaling, as a way to understand a confusing, sometimes violent coming-of-age. She writes mostly fiction, some nonfiction, and poetry, and holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writers Workshop. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press.