For most of my adult life, I’ve worked like I’m running out of time. Maybe because I am. (Aren’t we all?) The leukemia diagnosis and relapses certainly intensified the urgency I feel around work, but the truth is my sense of self-worth was tethered to my output long before that.
I used to think that once I made it—got the book deal, built a steady-enough stream of freelance work, stashed away some savings to weather a health crisis or creative drought—I’d finally feel free to slow down when I wanted to. That I’d be able to choose rest without guilt. That I’d reach some mythical state of work-life balance.
Instead, accomplishment—and the sense of “arrival” I imagined would come with it—proved elusive. Each time I reached one goal, two new ones grew in its place. With success, the cycle didn’t let up. And it didn’t just persist—it was reinforced by praise and rewards in the most insidious way. It bloomed into a many-headed hydra of ambition, self-doubt, and perfectionism.
That’s the strange double-edged sword of being a self-employed artist: nothing is guaranteed, everything is possible. No one can tell you when to rev up and when to clock out because the only boss breathing down your neck is the one who lives inside your head. And no one can fill in for you—because the work lives in your body, like a second heartbeat.
Case in point: my birthday trip. To take time off, I crammed two weeks of work into one. By the time I boarded the plane to Morocco, I was so drained by the effort of stepping away that I muttered, “I don’t ever want to take a vacation again.”
And yet—that trip filled me to the brim. I came home humming. Recharged by new rhythms, creatively transported by the change in scenery, awash in gratitude for my travel companions and the memories we made. I told everyone it was worth it a million times over: “I’d work twice as hard to make space for this kind of break again.”
But deep down, another voice was stirring—the one that’s tired of the frenetic pace, the one that knows there’s a better way. The one that sees through the myth of enough, that knows the goalposts will always just keep moving. That understands how capitalism doles out prizes for visibility and speed—even when those very forces stifle the creative process and are at odds with what it takes to make something daring, unruly, and true.
That voice piped up again the other day when a friend texted me this poem by Emily Dickinson:
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee. And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few.
I’ve returned to this tiny gem a dozen times since. I love its sly rhythm and simplicity, the way a single clover and one lone bee flare into a whole prairie. The idea that all you need to create something vast and fertile is a sprig of green and a little effort.
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