Drawing the Chicken 12: On Commitment

As I write this, I’m closing out one more cycle of subscriptions for the Committing to Your Writing Practice workshop subscription I run, and it makes me think of how often students ask me “How do you stay committed to writing in the face of everything else in your life?”. Too much creative advice in the world is absolutist about this: If you want to be a writer, you must write every day; if you want to commit to your art, you must prioritise it first thing every morning, and so on.

I have never written everyday, not even at my most productive. And I’m okay with that. All lives are different, and commitment will have to look different in all those lives (at the very least, these ideas of commitment meaning EVERYDAY are able-ist, as I can attest after years of a creative career through chronic illness), but they are also simply not that useful, I find.

I’ve written before about how hard it is for me to get back into motion after a long period of stillness, such as after recovering from my December eye surgery. But honestly? This is usually frustrating only if productivity is your goal in and of itself. If the actual goal is fulfilment and balance in your life, then it’s easier to see this as part of a journey towards what work and play can look like in very particular life that is yours, and that's more a source of wonder than anything else.

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

Let me reframe this idea of commitment a little. I’m in a committed relationship with someone I love, but I don’t necessarily want to see him everyday. I’m committed to so many beautiful friendships in my life, but I don’t have to call them every day (or even every week). I’m committed to health but some days it’s more important to stay up and tend to a sick pet than to get my 8 hours of sleep. Every commitment is part of a larger bucket of other commitments, and every secure commitment has room for accommodation — if my partner and I had to see each other every single evening, no matter what else was happening in our lives or who else needed us more that evening, I would call that a pretty obsessive relationship. And I don’t want an insecure, obsessive relationship with anything, including my art.

So then, what does commitment look like? For me, it is a bedrock of what I hold dear, of what sustains me. Commitment is what I fall back on emotionally, and it is a set of practices and intentions with which I move through my days and weeks (more than my hours and minutes). Committing to my writing can also mean reading on some days, having a conversation about words with a friend another day, helping edit a colleague’s poem another day, just as much as it can mean writing everyday. Committing to my writing can also on some days mean going for a more mindful walk than I would otherwise have taken, or making notes on a really interesting turn of phrase I heard on the metro, or taking a quick photo of a quirky bumper sticker that I might use later in something I’m working on. Like most healthy loves, it is a sustaining commitment more than a demanding one— it is more interested in nurturing my life and spirit than in a narrow idea of “output.”

And then, of course, there is discipline. Of course you need discipline to see a project through — any project, not writing alone, but definitely writing too. The word has roots in the Latin word disciplina (teaching, learning, or instruction), and discipulus (disciple, pupil). Discipline is not self-flagellation and punishment, it is a process of learning, and self-discipline then must be a process of self-learning/ self-teaching. Each of us has to self-teach/ self-learn how we are going to build our ourselves the creative lives we want. Each of us has to show up to learn that, over and over, and it will take time, energy, and resources to do so. But again, to goal is that learning and growing, the goal is how our creative work changes in response, and how we change in response to our creative work. Whether that means showing up everyday, or connecting over the course of a week, or finding different kinds of touch points so that one has options of how to connect when one is feeling disconnected (“If i’m feeling too to write a poem today, I can read poems instead, and let that count as working on my collection of poetry”), the goal of discipline is self-expansion rather than self-censure.

Every relationship ebbs and flows, and as long as our core of love and commitment hasn’t changed, we will figure out the details. This is true for people and true for creative work too. Commitment is a wonderful thing, and self-discipline and community can help stay the course, but there’s no need to be fanatical about it.