This is 42 (pt 2): my stop-doing list for the year ahead
Letting go of: comparison loops, clenched jaws, and the fear of becoming Kato Kaelin
Welcome! I'm Sara Ramsey, a novelist and tech worker who recently moved back to my 430-person town in rural Iowa. I write about the wild and weird magic of my rural life, as well as anything else that strikes my fancy. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please join me!
Hi friend,
I recently turned 42. Last week, I shared twenty items on my to-do list for the year ahead — check it out if you missed it. Thank you for all of your encouraging comments (especially about my desire for a camel coat!).
I intended to follow up with a list of twenty things to stop doing. However, I cut the list to seven after noticing the repetitions. There were various flavors, but most items fit a clear theme: letting go of the fears and comparisons that keep me from embracing the story I need to tell.
Letting go is so much harder than taking on. Across all of life’s phases — child, teenager, young adult, thirtysomething, the current space between hottie and crone — I see might-have-been lives that I’m still holding on to. Put me in a blazer and I feel like I should be a COO. Give me a kaftan and I’m back in Bali, writing a novel and watching all the digital nomad life coaches tend to their side hustles. Brush my hair into pigtails and I’m six years old with a Barbie Dreamhouse of possibilities — doctor, astronaut, war correspondent, lawyer, fashion designer, professor, president.
Freely choosing to put writing at the forefront of my life hasn’t made it easier to let go of those other paths. Maybe it’s made it harder? Writing sometimes feels like going into a mine, excavating in the dark, and coming back with something that feels like a diamond but might be desiccated dog shit. Or, it feels like floating, untethered, while everyone else is safely moored to their daily accomplishments.
Sometimes, more rarely, it feels like fire. It feels clear that the ability to create is humanity’s greatest gift, and that the most important thing I can do is say, this is how I see the world, and this is the magic in it.
But, omg, all the paths I could have taken are still seductive. They whisper promises of more prestige, more money, more influence, or whatever else feels lacking while I’m sitting, solitary, in front of my still-cooking manuscript.
I know I need to, but I haven’t completely let those other options go. I hoard people and paths the way I hoard pinto beans and pillowcases, keeping all the options open just in case. It’s the scarcity instinct of my childhood, playing out in social networks instead of storage rooms.
If I were a Bali-based life coach, I would tell myself: a butterfly in transition can’t hold the door open forever. It can’t return to its caterpillar life.
I tend to roll my eyes at this kind of advice…but it’s not wrong.
Seven things to stop doing or let go of:
1. Doomscrolling LinkedIn and comparing my twisty path to the people who shot straight to COO.
Same goes for reading Publishers Marketplace and checking in on the latest book deals. It’s a shame spiral masquerading as industry research. That’s not to say that I won’t find a new day job this year — I like using my brain for projects other than writing — but the comparison loops don’t help me write my next book.
2. My recurring nightmare about becoming Kato Kaelin.
The world’s most famous house-guest-turned-murder-witness from the OJ Simpson trial has become a bogeyman for me. My brain has turned him into a symbol of what happens if you stray too far off a conventional path.
The fear is this: what if I fail to write the next book, squander all my talent, run out of money, and spend my days mooching off rich friends’ guest houses? I don’t think any of those friends would murder a spouse (at least while I’m in residence). But what if I am doomed to be a footnote in someone else’s story?
Of course, if the OJ murder trial hadn’t happened, Kato Kaelin probably never would have made it even as a D-list celeb. So maybe I should stay in a friend’s guesthouse and hope for a true-crime saga. But I would rather succeed on my own merits.
3. Reading think pieces about motherhood.
I’m obsessed with them right now. It’s an experience I don’t have, and I’m pressing my nose against the glass of other people’s houses, wondering if I would be happier in their lives. The glass is covered in children’s sticky fingerprints; some of the mothers are drinking wine and loathing their husbands’ weaponized incompetence; others are performing TikTok tradwife nightmares; and everyone seems exhausted and unified around the idea that child care in America is completely broken.
But there isn’t a think piece in the world that can give me what I really want: a guarantee that, if I want a child, it’s still possible to get pregnant and that the end result of that pregnancy would be a healthy child, happiness, a “good” life, etc. Or, maybe what I really want is a guarantee that I can choose a childfree life, make it wildly my own, and be at peace with that decision.
There is something deeper here about letting go of the search for guarantees, but I’m taking baby steps (free pun for the day!).
4. Clenching my jaw.
I often carry tension in my jaw. I once had a boss whose voice made my jaw clench every time I heard it. My jawline changed shape during that job because my jaw muscles were overexercised. My face became visibly more linebacker-ish. This was the gateway to botox injections, which forced my jaw to relax and made my face a little less square.
In retrospect, it would have been better to leave the job instead.
I can’t always let go of clenching my jaw, but I want to get better at recognizing the message my clenched jaw is sending me — since it always happens in places where I can’t fully use my voice or speak truthfully.
5. My Mayflower ancestor and the Puritanical association of work with pain.
I had an ancestor on the Mayflower, but I can’t place all the blame for my screwed-up work ethic on them — I’m sure zee Germans in my background upped the ante. But writing only feels like “legitimate” work to me when it’s hard. The mining for dog shit days count; the fire of inspiration days do not. Reading, which always helps my writing, often doesn’t feel “allowed” during “working hours” (nonsense anyway, since I’m not on set shifts in the writing mines).
This is all antithetical to actually writing a book — which makes sense, since my inner Mayflower ancestor wouldn’t have wanted me to do that either! That fire-and-brimstone voice needs to go.
6. Interior design Instagram.
I painted my bedroom blue last year, and now Instagram has me wanting warm whites and terracotta linens. I’m living in the land of La-Z-Boy, and I think I’m the only person in my town to have ever gotten a Room and Board delivery (the delivery guys slept in their truck outside my house overnight because I was so far away from their previous/next deliveries). But secretly, I must say — the La-Z-Boy couch I had in the early 2000s was much more comfortable than my sleek Room and Board sectional.
Of all my neuroses, interior design isn’t high on the list to resolve. But I have a foot in two very different aesthetic worlds, and I want to explore how that has shaped my taste. It’s time to prune some of the influences that dictate what I allow myself to find beautiful, since I suspect those influences also sneak into what I allow myself to write about.
7. Avoiding the hardest parts of the story.
You would think my inner Mayflower ancestor would looooooove all the pain of digging into the deepest, hottest parts of the story (whatever story I’m telling — fantasy, blogging, romance, memoir, etc.). But the Puritans were not known for expressive, revelatory explorations of the human heart.
The problem, I think, is one of precision. I want to be precise when I tell you what I see in Iowa. I want to give you a perfectly nuanced viewpoint that anticipates and accounts for all critiques.
I want you to love this place as much as I do. I want you to understand it. I do not want to misrepresent it.
But the heart of this story, my story, isn’t a mathematical theorem. It’s emotionally messy. It’s individual losses, community upheavals, irrational hope. It’s long histories with forgotten players and no obvious winners.
It does not guarantee that anyone will love this place, or see it fully.
It does not even guarantee that I will love this place, or see it fully.
But the hardest parts of the story are, ultimately, the parts that must be told.
I’ll end with two wishes:
I hope that my next book feels true — like I found the core of the story and told it without flinching.
I hope you’ll stick with me as I share more stories in this newsletter — and that you’ll hold me accountable for what resonates vs. what feels like it could have gone deeper. I love the personal connections that are coming through this community, and I hope those connections continue to grow.
Next week, it’s back to your usual dose of rural magic! Thank you, so very very much, for reading — I may feel mid about being 42, but I can’t wait for the year ahead with you.
Cheers,
Sara
A couple of years ago I realized that I was stuck being a writer, that I was too old to have any alternate careers. Not that I really wanted any alternate careers, but realizing that all the other doors are closing was still a solemn moment.
As someone who quit the corporate job to dig into rural life and write, I relate to this so very much and loved the way you captured the particular tension at work in living that choice from day to day. Thank you!