Weekly Insight
I posted that on a Wednesday morning with nothing in front of me. No shoot, no call I was dreading, nothing to clean up from the night before.
For years boring was the worst thing a day could be. An empty Friday was a problem and I had a reliable way to solve it. Whatever else happened, at least the night had something in it.
Now the day looks like this. The walk as the light rises. Coffee. Reps in the gym and reps on the computer. Work that feels meaningful. Dinner, bed at the same hour, nothing to explain to anybody in the morning.
It took a long time before that felt like anything other than a punishment. Early on I’d sit in a quiet evening and wait for something to arrive. My guest this week drank nine non-alcoholic beers on a Friday because she needed something to do with her hands. I understood that completely.
What I didn’t expect is that boring is where everything gets made. Nothing happened last night, so I get the whole day. That’s the part I wouldn’t have believed.
The beautiful showed up years after the boring did.
If your days have gone quiet and you’ve been reading that as a sign something’s wrong, sit in it longer before you decide.
Six years of work to get to boring, and I'd do it again.
Podcast
Tiffiny Yaxley draws cartoons. Online she’s the graphical bear. She lives in the Canadian Rockies with her husband and her dog, she has a science degree and a full-time job, and she stopped drinking in May of 2022.
Before that she spent about twenty years as the entertainer. Figure skater, center of attention, the one who made everybody laugh. “All of Western Canada has seen my butt, because I think mooning is hilarious.” The reputation got paid for the next morning, on the kitchen floor, where her husband was the only person who ever saw that part.
In 2014 she woke up at a friend’s house after a Halloween party having spent most of the night in the bathroom, and she drew a bear throwing up in a toilet. At the time she thought it was just funny. She knows now why she drew it. “If I can make it into a joke, and people laugh at it, then it’s okay.”
A year into not drinking she brought the bear back and made her herself again, and started publishing the comic with the story of why she drew it. That’s the part I wanted to understand. Once a feeling was a strip on paper, she could look at it from the outside and then set it down.
The part I keep coming back to is what showed up after the drinking shame was gone. She was meditating, doing yoga, eating well, seeing her coach every week, not drinking. And still having stretches she describes as really low. “I’m doing all this work. How come I’m not feeling better?”
Her doctor told her that sometimes people’s brains are different and they need help. She said she didn’t need that kind of help. It took a couple of bad episodes and her husband telling her he was worried before she took it. “If I broke a bone, I would go to the hospital and have the doctor help me fix it.” She has a therapist now and she’s on medication, and she’s careful to say it’s still a journey. For years before that she figured she was just weak.
A friend of hers in her late sixties read one of those blog posts, silly comic attached, and asked her own doctor about antidepressants. She told Tiffiny her relationship had never been better and that she should have done it twenty years ago. Tiffiny puts her own reach at “tens of dozens of people.” Then: “But it helps. It helped me.”
She grew up on 6 a.m. ice times, so mornings were always hers, and drinking took most of them back. There’s a loop around her street she walks with the dog. In winter the sunrise puts hot pink on the tops of the peaks for about half an hour. At minus thirty she still goes out for it.
The book took her two and a half years of drawing. The last panel is a Venn diagram about success. One side is fame, physical feats of strength, money, a job. The other side is a cozy place to have coffee.
You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.
My guest this week is with Lisa Marie Simmons on September 24 at 12:00P ET
Lisa Marie Simmons says a song starts as the seed of a whisper. Something arrives in a dream, or on a long walk when the light is doing its thing in the trees, or in the middle of a crowded bar where she grabs a coaster because the idea needs to be tangible right now.
She has been following those whispers a long way: Boulder to New York at nineteen, then Amsterdam, Costa Rica, St. Maarten, France, Central and South America, and finally a lake in northern Italy where she writes and records with her husband, pianist Marco Cremaschini. That path has run through Carnegie Hall, the Venice Biennale, the Jaipur Literature Festival, and five-star reviews in Downbeat. Earlier this month it ran through the John Lennon Songwriting Contest, where her song “Shaping the Yet-to-Be” took the grand prize for best jazz song.
When I first reached out, she told me straight away that she isn’t sober. She has cut back drastically over the last few years, and she was honest that the change is hard to measure. What she could point to was energy. Her workday goes further now. There’s more of her left at the end of it, which matters when you are, in her words, a bit of a workaholic who loves the work.
That’s exactly the kind of conversation this show is for. Lisa and I will talk about making things you can’t control the fate of, about the reckoning with permanence that happens in a recording studio, and about what changes in a creative life when you stop spending your evening energy somewhere else.
Who I'm Celebrating
I met Camille St Martin for Coffee & Connection last week and she shared her creative work with me, so I’m sharing it with you.
She published a poetry book called SPILLED, and three of those poems have become songs. The first one is “From My Head to My Heart,” built from a poem of hers called “The Distance of the Disagreement.” Here’s how she describes it:
“It began as a poem I wrote about what it feels like falling into the every day trap of alcohol addiction: saying you won’t drink, believing you won’t drink, and somehow finding yourself doing it anyway.”
“For anyone who has ever said, ‘I won’t,’ and then did. And for anyone learning how to make ‘I won’t’ become ‘I don’t.’”
That last line is the whole thing. I spent years in the first half of that sentence.
This is what those calls are for. There will be more open slots next month, no agenda, nothing to sell each other. I got off that one with a song I listened to writing this week’s newsletter (just after 5 o’clock…song is fire by the way Camille).
The next Clear Hour is Tuesday, October 6, 11:00am ET. Same shape as the first one. Ten minutes to arrive. Thirty-five where we all make something, cameras on, mics off. Fifteen at the end to say what came of it. Free for subscribers, and the link goes out the morning of.
If you commented or replied last week, you’re already on my list and I’ll send it to you directly.
I love my boring days now. 💕