This post was originally published on Substack
Hello, friend! I’m glad you’re here.
Last year, I was writing under a different Substack called …and the meal. I really enjoyed it—and, I dare say, I wrote some pretty good stuff—but I was also a bit hard on myself. I’m weird about self-accountability, mainly in that I think I’m not so great at it, so I end up overcompensating by putting really tough standards on myself. I felt like every piece I wrote had to be absolutely excellent all the time, and that I had to publish on a strict schedule even though I had no one to answer to but myself. All this during a pandemic where I was woefully underemployed and dealing with all that.
I got myself burnt out! Whoops!
These days I’m (thankfully) back to full-time employment at a job that still feels like a cosmic prank—I mean, you’re really telling me I get to read books and write about them in exchange for a salary and health insurance???? What’s the catch? (None, so far.)
Writing monthly book reviews for work has been a blast, but it also made me realized how rusty my writing muscles are. There are plenty of stories out there about the daily word counts of famous writers—in On Writing, Stephen King notes that he writes “ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words.”
Writing is a practice. Writing requires practice.
I was never really an athletic kid growing up—I, uh, definitely took advantage of the fact that marching band counted as a gym credit in high school—so the discipline of doing something over and over in preparation for the big game isn’t exactly in my toolkit.
I do weightlift sometimes, and right now, the way writing feels to me is the way it feels to try and pick up a really heavy object without the proper lead up to it. Do I have enough natural strength to do it? Yeah, sure. Do I end up feeling really tired and sore after I do it? Also yeah. Could I have made this easier on myself by incrementally making my muscles stronger? Yes, of course.
So here we are! This is the space I’m creating for myself to be a little less precious about my writing and to just let it flow for the sake of practice. I probably could have done this privately in a journal to myself but I need your validation I think there’s something valuable about letting you see my writing in all its weird forms, and not just the edited, polished stuff.
I saw a tweet recently (I don’t remember from who) in which the writer soothes their overly-critical brain with this quote from the Saturday Night Live David Pumpkins sketch: “It’s 100 floors of frights. They’re not all going to be winners.”
Not everything I write is going to be this grand, marvelous thing! It’s not supposed to be that way anyway! So let’s just go for it!!!
Stay hydrated,
Jasmine
P.S. “Why is it called The Brain Patio?”
When I was coming up with the idea for this newsletter, my partner said, “It’s kind of like a brain patio! Just a chill place where you step out in your bathrobe with your cup of tea and do your best thinking.”
It’s a pretty great image and I decided to run with it because, let’s be real, if he hadn’t handed me that gem, I’d probably still be trying to come up with a good name for this newsletter.
P.P.S. In future letters, I’ll start peppering in some of my recommended reads. There’s so much I’m reading that I don’t get to review for work, and I still want to share it all with you! But in the meantime, feel free to reply to this email and tell me what you’re currently reading.
P.P.P.S. I read somewhere that adding postscripts to a digital document is meaningless because you can just go in and edit your work as needed, unlike a handwritten document. But whatever! I think postscripts are great!
Okay. For real now. See ya on the flip side.