keep going, keep going, keep going.
the word of the year is endurance.
I’m not, typically, a word of the year kind of person. Nothing at all against it — it’s just one of the trends I never managed to get into.
Whether it’s because my kids have turned my brain into scrambled eggs or because the chaos of the world has made the idea of a safe haven of intention feel much more appealing, my usual skepticism at the usual late-December-early-January influx of “word of the year” memes, posts, and emails just didn’t show up this year.
Like a lot of other creatives, I found the last few months of 2023 overwhelming, exhausting, and full of despair. The expression “you can’t pour from an empty cup” came up a lot in my conversations and communities, echoed with the similar sentiment, “you can’t create from an empty cup.” As I wrote a few newsletters ago, strong emotions can be a powerful vehicle for creativity, but while grief and anger and righteous passion make great art, exhaustion tends to dry up the creative well.
But just like the grief of the world demands our action, even when we’re tired and hurting and overwhelmed, so does our creativity. Creative work, I hate to say it, isn’t always full of passionate inspiration. Sometimes — often, even — it’s about buckling down and getting the work done.
So, coming off a truly heartbreaking end of 2023, entering into a year that started with bombs falling on refugee camps and children working in cobalt mines and babies with bone-thin limbs shivering in the rain, here is my word of the year for 2024:
Endurance.
The work of creation — creating art, creating action, and combining the two — is never finished, and it demands an endurance that can be daunting. Burnout abounds in creative communities as well as in communities of helpers, and there’s a reason for that: work that calls for an investment not just of our time and energy but also demands our tenderness, our softness, and our refusal to close ourselves off to suffering is inherently more taxing than work that allows for emotional disengagement.
But to do this work is a gift, because to be able to do this work is a gift. And so we owe it our endurance.
What that looks like in practice is obviously going to be different for everyone — no two people train for a marathon in exactly the same way. (…I mean. They might. I don’t run. Maybe don’t look too hard at that particular metaphor.) That said, here are three aspects of endurance that I’m going to channel this year, and I invite you to join me.
creating for good — and with endurance — in 2024
Balancing urgency with longevity.
You’ve probably seen an Eisenhower Matrix before — those “Urgent/Important” punnett squares designed to help prioritize the most urgent and important tasks in a given situation. Anyone who’s ever worked at an understaffed nonprofit knows that despite popular opinions from executive directors and board members, not everything can be both urgent and important all the time. Things need to be delegated, put off, or, frankly, kicked off the to-do list because they a) just don’t need to happen or — more likely — b) can be done far better by someone else, and it’s not your job to figure out who, because that other person already knows about it and is probably already handling it better than you can.
(See also: the number of truly terrible statements put out by organizations, celebrities, politicians, etc, when quite frankly it would have been better for them to just say “I am taking my cues from [much more expert people or organizations]” rather than disappoint, like, so many people. Thoughts and prayers to the social media and PR teams dealing with that nonsense. I do not envy you.)
What I’m getting at here is that in creative work, as in organizing and action, while many things are urgent, important, and both urgent and important, just as many things are not urgent and/or important for you, personally, to handle. You can’t write every book that comes into your head at the same time. You can’t complete every piece of art. You can’t be an expert on every issue, a donor to every cause, an organizer on the front lines of every action.
In order to sustain our work, to endure the ups and downs, the emotional wear-and-tear, the frustrations and setbacks and horrors and exhaustions, we need to balance urgent, rapid action with the slow-and-steady work of maintenance and support. Not every moment can be your emergency. You can’t answer every pitch, take on every blurb request, leap at every opportunity. Prioritization has to happen. Focus your most active energy on finding the areas where you are the expert, where you voice is the one that has to be heard, and heard urgently. Put your steadier, steadfast energy into the work of maintenance: lifting up the calls you can’t personally answer, broadening your learning, digging into the day-to-day mundanity of work both creative and action-oriented.
It’s not that everything doesn’t need to happen — it’s just that one individual can’t take on every task. That’s why we don’t do this alone.
Building and sustaining community.
One of my very favorite anecdotes about community work, I’m not ashamed to say, comes from a post on Twitter:
I genuinely believe that the best of our work happens in community. From group chats to discord groups to organizing communities to coalitions, we are so much more powerful, organized, and effective when we work with others: listening to their voices, learning from their perspectives, and combining areas of expertise to create the fullest, most impactful works we can — whether it’s a book of poetry, an awareness campaign, or a direct action.
Communities keep us accountable, build us up, support us when we falter, and guide us through moments of challenge and constriction. They celebrate with us in our victories and hold us in failure and loss. No two communities are the same, each of us bringing something unique and complementary to create a fuller, more effective whole.
This year, I’m leaning into my communities. Personally, I struggle with vulnerability and with appearing as anything other than an expert, but in the spirit of working towards endurance, my focus this year is on offering what I can but also allowing myself to drink from the communal well of expertise and support. In exchange, I’m committing to stepping up my offerings, not just in my creative communities but also in the communities where I live and work: offering more mutual aid, offering the physical and logistical support I’m privileged to be able to provide, and using my platform — minimal, but enthusiastic! — to lift up all the calls and questions I can.
Finding joy and delight.
Our communities give us more than support and a chance to add our voice to the choir. They’re also a source of joy.
In Inciting Joy, poet and essayist Ross Gay writes, “My hunch is that joy is an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity.” Joy is key to endurance, to the maintenance and power of both creative and active work: without moments of joy, moments of delight, moments that we can savor, moments that remind us why we do what we do, our work falls apart.
Mary Oliver, our teacher of blessed memory, reminds us that joy is not meant to be a crumb. There is a tendency, especially in times of intense grief and pain, to squash joy and delight as a way of showing our commitment to the seriousness of the moment, the urgency of the tasks set before us. But in fact, the opposite is true. Joy, delight, solidarity; the scent of a fresh-brewed cup of coffee, a child’s laugh, the rush of endorphins when someone we admire shares our work, the elation of a protest well-organized or a piece of legislation passed — these are the elements that fill our cups, that allow us to continue to water the gardens of the work.
A friend of mine recently shared his practice of maintaining a joy jar: writing down the good things, small and large, that happened over the course of the year, and reading through them each December. I don’t know if I can commit to quite that level of intentional joy-tracking, but I can, at least, pledge to write down one moment of goodness each day.
That’s my three-pronged path to endurance this year. What’s yours?
updates from shelly
It wouldn’t be a new year kickoff newsletter without at least a little bit of reflection and goal-setting! 2023 wasn’t a massive year, at least compared to 2022 (when I signed with my agent, revised the living hell out of a book, and sold my debut novel), but personally, I still think I kind of kicked ass — and 2024 looks like it has the potential for some serious excitement and growth.
2023 victories!
grew and birthed an entire human being!
read 20 new books
worked with 10 nonprofits on communications, marketing, and fundraising campaigns
pitched a new book to my agent 👀
2024 look-ahead!
it’s my debut year! :D we’re launching RULES FOR GHOSTING in august — more on that to come!
finish proposal materials and take book 2 on sub
work with 15 “good for the world” organizations, professionally or as a volunteer
pitch 25 articles or essays, aiming to place pieces in at least 3 new-to-me publications
resources, links, and further reading
spotlight on: endurance
I so enjoy being in community with you! ♥️ What a lovely reflection!