The Work-Life Balancing Act
And specific ways in which to NOT be like Kafka.
Hello. It is 2:22 on Tuesday afternoon as I am writing this post on my phone, standing in the kitchen watching the soup that I'm… hold on, my daughter needs help skipping an ad on her Mah Jongg app… making for dinner tonight. This is the first thing I have written in almost a week, which for me is extremely stressful.
I have what my wife (and my therapist) call “situational permanence disorder.” Basically, it means that until I get back on a regular writing schedule again I have a low-level constant dread that I will never write again. That I'm all washed up, kaput! This is my life now, making soup and skipping ads and wrapping gifts and going to the post office and the grocery store and doing laundry and washing the dishes (second full sink of the day) and digging things out of the storage unit and… well you get the idea.
Not done (or even begun) today, besides writing, is a huge stack of final portfolios to grade… skipping another ad, one sec… revisions on a letter I am writing for a colleague, and any work on my novel (which is all I want to be doing).
There’s also a traffic fine to pay, a guinea pig cage to clean, a giant pile of leaves still in my yard to clear, the inside of the house is also a huge mess, and my phone has buzzed at me three times while writing this because my friends are all bored at work and texting each other on our group chat.
Now it's 2:31.
Usually, Tuesday is my “get shit done” day because I'm not teaching until Thursday and my kids have after school activities until 5. But today my daughter is home sick (and was yesterday too) so I haven't gotten to catch up very much, despite running around nonstop. She’s also been up three times a night coughing and I spent several hours asleep on her floor last night.
Of course I am not alone in any of this. My wife is working in our home office, popping out every chance she gets to help out with whatever she can. But she's putting out important fires at work, and also scheduling the kids’ doctor's appointments, ordering last minute Hanukkah presents, rescheduling the aforementioned afterschool activities, and helping me to force our daughter to finish her lunch. We're both overextended and exhausted and, oh by the way, my family arrives for Christmas on Thursday night.
Next week both kids are off of school the whole time. Which means I'm looking at maybe after New Years before I get to write much more than a few hundred words via my phone while I'm waiting for the soup to finish cooking. And… there's the oven timer. And another ad on the Mah Jongg game. And another text message. And the laundry is ready to be changed.
It's now 2:41.
I'm not complaining, I swear. In a thousand ways, I am an incredibly lucky man, living my best life. I really mean that. My kids are wonderful. My wife is a literal superhero. I live in a house that I love. I have a day job I enjoy that I was incredibly incredibly fortunate to get and that pays enough (though far from well) and that supported me on a sabbatical for half this year… and I get to spend a huge amount of time in my life working on my writing—a career which already exceeded my wildest expectations almost a decade ago.
But today, right now, I feel stuck.
That's just how it goes. Sometimes the Work-Life Balance isn't so balanced. It takes me real focus and patience to remember that this too shall pass, and that the words will all be right where I left them. The situation is never permanent, even if it feels that way today.
When I get like this, it helps to think about Kafka.
Yes, that Kafka. Franz, himself. Arguably one of the most important and influential writers of the 20th century, though truly despite some of his own best efforts to die in obscurity.
Before he died he asked his best friend Max Brod to burn everything he'd failed to finish or publish in his brief lifetime: three partial novels, dozens of short stories, all his letters, and all his diaries. At one point he requested that Brod might also go around to everyone he had sent letters to during his life and burn those as well. He said he regretted publishing most of the stories he *had* published, save for a handful including “The Metamorphosis”… though this he did wish he'd been able to revise more before it went to print. (The publisher had to essentially trick him in order to get the final version released.)
In short, Kafka was a mess. His incredibly high standards for his work are to be admired and even emulated now, but they also prevented him (or so he claimed) from getting married as he feared having to support a family would mean working more and writing less.
But he could not afford to live independently either, so he stayed at home with his overbearing parents and worked for the insurance company in a job his father helped arrange, and spent his little free time endlessly revising his work and hardly ever finishing anything.
He didn't go out much, except to spend time with fellow writer Brod, who was incredibly (and annoyingly) prolific. [Writing this on phone at the library now, 4:04, while my daughter asks me how to spell “allergic”… not sure why…] Kafka’s life was so imbalanced and unhappy that he was actually grateful when he contracted tuberculosis, because it meant he could move to a remote area to recover and finally devote all his time to his writing. And that worked out pretty well actually—at least until it killed him.
It’s probably the orthodox view to say that Kafka was correct to eschew family life and bourgeoise satisfactions and to instead stress endlessly over his writing—after all he wrote some of the greatest stories of his generation or any other.
But I don't know that there's a real causation there. If anything he seems to have held himself back, not just in completing his work, but in all other aspects of his life.
What if he'd written a little more slowly, but had experienced more of life? What if that had even included the joys and agonies of fatherhood? I'm not saying every person, or every writer, would be better if they became parents. It's not for everyone, and it's not a good experience for many. But with Kafka I do wonder.
Kafka famously wrote a long letter (never sent) to his own father, blaming him for most of his failures. What might he have had to say twenty years later to his own son or daughter? We’ll never know, and perhaps if he had gone down any other road in life, it might have cost us all “The Metamorphosis”, but I don’t know that I buy that. Maybe we would have gotten the same in the end, or better.
It’s 5:31.
We’re done at the library and I’m making a second, separate dinner now for my son, who won’t eat the soup, alas.
My friend and former classmate Keri Bertino recently wrote an incredible piece for The Millions about Writing in Parenthood that I encourage everyone to read, whether they are a parent or not. Keri talks about how parenthood, and especially motherhood, becomes a moment where many promising writers are thrown off track, and often permanently. Because we do such a terrible job in this county of supporting mothers, artists—and then doubly so for artist/mothers--it can be extremely difficult to maintain any of of productive life as a writer while also raising kids. Keri looks at length at a scientific study recently done in New England that breaks down the essential components to sustaining an artistic practice. You should read her full breakdown in the article, but much of it comes down to having a community of other parent-artists (or even just one buddy!) to support you and help keep you motivated. It's one reason I have long loved the organization Pen Parentis, which is dedicated to this cause. And it's one reason I keep in touch with writers like Keri who know how hard it all is.
Keri spoke to my Teaching Creative Writing class recently over Zoom, and we talked about how this research has affected the way she teaches now—not just how to write well, but how to write at all. By prioritizing the “affective domain” of learning over the “cognitive domain” she recognizes that it doesn’t matter that you know all the ins-and-outs of great character development and plot structure if you can’t figure out how to do any writing in your life in the first place.
When most people talk about balancing Work and Life, they're trying to get to a healthier alignment of these two sides of their day-to-day. Something like this:
Most of us are over-worked in the “earning a living” department, putting in extra time at our offices and having that eat into our weeknights and weekends, so we have little time left over for anything “fun” on the Life side. When we do go out on the town or spend a night watching movies in bed, we tend to pay for it later by needing to catch up on the other obligations and chores we didn’t do yet.
When we start to feel like some of the things that ought to be in the Life column are, instead feeling more like obligations, that presents a further problem.
But if I am a writer (and I am) then where does writing go in my balancing act?
If it is a “hobby” then is it something I do for fun when my real work is finished? Or if it is another kind of “work” is it something I need to prioritize over, let’s say, seeing friends or going out to the movies, or engaging with my family members—does it put it counter to “life”? (and therefore, counter to fun?)
Even though I enjoy my job as a professor quite a lot, when I’m excited about something I’m writing—and that may be a condition lasting weeks or months, if not years—then I tend to instead see everything else in opposition to that. I don’t end up with a Work-Life balance but a Writing-Life balance instead, like this:
Living in this condition, I’m basically Kafka. I'm lumping everything else in the former Work and Life categories into one side, which may as well be called “Distractions” and then everything to do with my writing life on the other side. This, obviously, is not very healthy. It means I’m cutting corners on everything else: not just my job but in my family life and when it comes to my friends. I’ll definitely let my garden become overgrown and forget to go running and complain about spending an afternoon at the beach… it’s a bad state of affairs.
It's also not great for my writing. Failing at everything else important in my life tends to make me stressed, and I'm not writing that well in that headspace. Letting down my family and friends also means that I risk losing some of that community and support that Keri’s article shows is so important.
We tend to prize the reclusive, isolated author. An ascetic loner who is monkishly devoted to the page and the pen, and who faces the cold solitary madness of life in a macho, tough, nihilistic sort of way. But what does that poor guy have to say that hasn’t been said already by a thousand other malcontents who’ve come before? That wasn’t said better by Kafka himself, a hundred years ago? I want to be able to see the things that he couldn’t—wouldn’t allow himself to see. If that sounds ballsy and crazy, well, that’s what two days of very little sleep have done to me. But that’s where I’m at, Franz. Sorry.
What if we do away with the whole balancing act entirely? What if I accept that some days I'll write more than others and that there needs to be give and take. But better than that, there needs to be some flow between the two sides. What's good for one side isn't bad for the other. What's good for one can be good for the other.
When I see both writing and life as interconnected, rather than in conflict, then I end up in a better place all around.
It's 8:43 now. I didn't get most of my To Do list done today, or write much— just this, and it took all my free moments. But I did play Go Fish with my daughter, did drive around town in the sunshine, did daydream, did make some incredible soup, did take a few mental notes about odd characters at a Starbucks, did watch my daughter read a sentence by herself for the first time, did build a doll house… and whenever I can write again, tomorrow, or three weeks from now, I know I can channel some of that into something interesting, so long as I allowed it to be interesting to me as it happened.
Sounds better than tuberculosis, anyhow.
Until next time, happy holidays and a good end to 2022 to you all. Keep at it, and as ever—have fun!
P.S. - This was why my daughter wanted to know how to spell “allergic” as it turned out:
Love this! Thanks, Kris. Wishing you and yours a Happy Merry!