Serious Work and Committing to Play
I’ve been thinking lately about the value of play. Somewhere over the last decade, between pandemics and tweenagers and writing books, my life has grown a bit too…serious. Not in a bad way, really. But there are so many things to be done each day. Many of the tasks in my life have to be done right the first time, every time. That might sound overdramatic, but when the health of your child depends on doing a division problem in your head at 5:45 am, it pays to take things seriously.
Somewhere along the way, though, that very real sense of life or death started to bleed into everything else. I don’t regret that. Those other things - my books, my kids’ schooling, my friendships - they’re important and worth thoughtful consideration. But they’re not life or death, and, more importantly, they’re not made better by making them high stakes.
When it comes to injecting my kids with insulin, that extra jolt of stress is quite important. I need to be on my game. I need to be aware of a lot of factors - so many that I actually can’t list them all out here. Many of those little calculations are so ingrained that I forget I’m making them. It’s only when I talk to another parent of a Type 1 kid that I remember how much I’m doing.
Sometimes people who don’t know what it’s like see my seriousness and tell me I need to take a break, to relax a little. And to be honest, nothing makes me feel less seen or understood. It’s, frankly, infuriating. This isn’t just my anxiety talking - other Type 1 caregivers will tell you the same thing. This vigilance is the difference between my child being healthy, having a seizure, or dying 15 years earlier due to health complications.
So I suppose it makes sense that moving into play is a little harder for me than it once was. Maybe not harder. It just takes more commitment. I have to choose to embrace the joy that I feel. I have to choose to lean into the cringiness of being unabashedly happy. And the hardest part is, I have to do this while I work.
There are a lot of parts of writing books that are not creative - editing and formatting and researching and hours and hours of proofreading. They need a critical eye. A brain that says, “Nope, that’s wrong.” The main part, however, the big part, requires something completely different. That voice saying “That’s wrong,” as true as it might be, is quickest way to stop a good writing day in its tracks. There can be iterative work, building and changing and rebuilding again, but “wrong” has no part of it.
It reminds me of when my girls were little and would engage in these elaborate, hours long pretend play sessions. They would pull out the dress-up bin or the legos and create whole worlds and intricate storylines. But it wasn’t like a real story that starts at the beginning and smoothly flows to the end. There was a lot of, “Wait, no, I want them to be sisters,” and “How ‘bout instead of it being regular, it’s actually winter and they’re cold.” And then there would be arguments and negotiations and either they would come to an agreement or the game would end.
That’s a little bit of what writing is like for me. Play. Complicated, elaborate, sometimes frustrating play. In order to do that, I have to turn off a part of my grown-up brain. I still need the parts that can plan, and empathize, and incorporate historical events. But I really, really need to get rid of the serious part. Like a parent who joins their child’s game just to try and direct it, that part takes what could be really interesting and makes it mundane…boring…conventional.
It’s hard, sometimes, to shut off that serious self. Quieting that part of myself is also what I love about writing. I get to, if only for a few hours, discard my negative self-talk. And at the end, whether what I wrote is good or bad, I know that I was able to achieve something rare and fleeting in my serious life. I was able to remember how to play.
