Help! My Substack Editor is too Demanding!

(Okay, my Editor is me and I am the problem)

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the joy that writing this Substack brings me.

This week, I feel like a fraud.

For the last few months, I’ve established a robust writing routine and published something each Wednesday at 12 noon. This was a regular practice that I have found edifying, joyful and exciting.

But this week, my Wednesday deadline approached and I had nothing ready to publish. And I felt really bad about it.

I was deeply disappointed in myself for missing this self-imposed, non-existent deadline.

But I also felt a knot of anxiety in my chest.

Had the overbearing, deadline-obsessed control-addict in me accidentally smothered all the joy?

My History of Joy-Killing

For context, I have previous with the joy-killing.

I am a person who has a natural tendency, when I happen upon a new fun hobby, to go all-in and charge headfirst into manic overdrive where the new hobby quickly becomes my entire personality. Before I know it, I have spent hundreds of pounds on everything I need for that hobby, filled my house with new hobby paraphernalia, talked non-stop about the new hobby and pulled a few all-nighters in a mad pursuit of imaginary deadlines for said hobby.

It is never sustainable.

I did this with Screen Printing a few years ago. One casual Saturday taster course and a few months later, I was staying up until 4am each night printing and sewing hundreds of textile products for craft markets every weekend. It escalated. I burnt out. I killed the hobby.

Binge-watching TV Shows Until my Eyes Bleed

I’ve done the same thing with TV shows too.

Often it’s under the guise of research for work. It can be genuinely embarrassing to sit in a meeting with a broadcaster and have not seen their hit series. And then other times (not naming any names) there are TV shows where people tell you: get to the third season and it’s the best thing you will ever watch. So you rush through those draggy early seasons to get to the good stuff. Or the latest season of that cult show has been released and you are late to the party and everybody is talking about it so you must catch up before you are left in a cultural wasteland.

You speed-watch episodes at such a break-neck pace that it becomes a soulless consumption marathon which is less about watching and more about completing. I work in TV so you’d think I’d have more respect for the content given my appreciation of the work that goes into making it. But no, I am no different. And my other toxic trait is my tendency to second screen. Yes, I am just going to respond to those work emails while we stick the next episode of whatever Taylor Sheridan series featuring grizzled-anti-hero-battling-a-tough-life that we are watching right now.

Hobbying Too Hard

Lena Dunham recently wrote about having a “Jobby” being a cross between a job and a hobby and, presumably not quite fitting into either category. In that you take it too seriously to be a hobby and perhaps are mildly monetising it. But it is also a creative passion that doesn’t feel like work.

I think what I do is cross a line where I take a hobby but apply an unhinged work-ethic to it. This is not done out of an actual expectation to earn money out of it but rather I get so intoxicated by the rush of learning a new skill or creating something out of nothing that I become too focused on output. I am getting so much joy out of it in that early honeymoon phase that I want to do it all the time.

With Screen Printing there were endless possibilities. So many patterns to design. So many textile items to make from my own fabric. Why not sew a range of tote bags? A set of cushions for me and my friends? Sun lounger cushions for my mother? An enormous hand-screen-printed teepee covered in all my nieces favourite jungle animals with closable windows and doors? Yes, yes, yes and yes! The teepee, incidentally, was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I retired my screen-printing career after completing that.

The Dopamine Hit of Self-Publishing

Writing on Substack was no different. At first, there were so many ideas for things to write about buzzing in my brain. I was rushing to get it all down. I wrote with urgency, as if the ideas might evaporate if I didn’t bag them in a net right away.

I think writing about the struggle of balancing motherhood and my job was a delicious escape from the actual struggle of doing them. In the footsteps of Nora Ephron, when something went bad in my day, I thought “Hmm, this would make a good Substack”. It’s like a creative light was switched on and the everyday became potential content. It felt like a bit of hope and fun in the mix of the everyday grind.

I took to writing a Substack like I do everything else: at a 100 mph sprint.

But, it turns out, doing a demanding fulltime job, being a toddler-mum and trying to write a 1500 word essay every single week, was a bit much.

Writing is the Hobby That Must Prevail

I really must stop trying to hobby at an absurd level of output imposed on myself for absolutely no reason.

This all comes from the same part of my brain that finds it incredibly hard to sit still and relax. There is always something to do. Something to tidy away. A dog to groom. A cupboard to re-categorize. That skirting board looks a bit dusty. And now you mention it, I cannot sit down until I have tackled that pile behind the door. My brain won’t allow it.

But the benefits of writing on here are too great for it to become just another hobby that I kill with enthusiasm. Working Mum in TV does not deserve to be the latest casualty in the Hobby Graveyard.

Beware of the Anxiety Pyramid Scheme!

The warning signs are there. One missed deadline and I have a full-blown emotional reckoning over something that should be relaxing.

I started this Substack as a creative outlet in which to humorously and thoughtfully explore the stress and anxiety already generated by my life as a Working mum in TV Land. I really don’t need the very act of writing about stress and anxiety to generate even more stress and anxiety. That’s just an anxiety pyramid scheme. There is only one way it ends: emotional bankruptcy.

This week’s disappointment is a much needed wakeup call that I just need to…Chill. The. Hell. Out.

Dear Deadline, Can We Still be Friends?

What my negative feelings around a missed deadline tell me is that I want to keep writing. And I feel a bit desperate when I think I may suddenly and abruptly just stop writing.

The depth of my disappointment really comes from the fact I have let my writing routine lapse and, by extension, I feel I’ve let myself down because I made a promise to myself to carve out space for myself.

Deadlines and goalsetting can be extremely healthy. Setting myself my own deadline of a weekly article has been something to anchor my weekly writing around. It focuses my mind and helps me commit to making space for me and my thoughts across the chaotic juggle between office work and mumming.

But when does a goal become an oppressive deadline? And when does something that was meant to be a hobby start to feel like work?

I think it is all in the mind and how I approach things. I’ve just got to reprogramme the part of my brain that refuses to take my foot off the gas. I also need to stop looking at other Substackers who started writing in January and have 50000 times the followers. As ever, comparison can be the thief of joy.

This Substack has to remain fun.

I need to stop my endless attempt to impose a prescriptive and regimented regime on something that – quite simply – is there to give me joy.

I will just publish this article when it’s ready. And if that is on Friday, or next week, that is going to be okay. Of course it is. Because nobody is paying me to write this.

I need to visualise myself sat in my favourite coffee shop and shaping industry insight mixed in with amusing anecdotes about my parenting experiences. Rather than hunched over my laptop on the sofa at 2am on a weeknight as if I have to hit a hard deadline for a hideous client.

My Substack editor needs to relax.

She needs to drink a Margarita. And maybe sit for a whole hour doing nothing but savouring an hour of a really good TV show that she is not in any particular rush to watch.

And you know what? It may be time to rekindle some old hobbies too. My own child now crawls in and out of the teepee I made, opening and shutting the windows, springing out of the door shouting “Boo!”. The teepee has now achieved family heirloom status. “Did you really make this, Mummy?” says my toddler, looking in awe at the giraffes and the elephants and the crocodiles.

“Yes, Mummy drew all the animals and made stencils and printed them and then sewed it all together. It took her ages. ”

There is a pause as my toddler considers this and then looks up at me excitedly and says: “Can I do some scween printing with you, Mummy? Can we make some animals together?”

I hesitate. And then grin.

Because, you know what? I think it might be time.

What hobbies has everyone else got obssessed with but not followed through on? Please share!