Archives for July 2015

The 30-Day Writing & Publishing Project, Day 14: On Creative Sovereignty

One of my favorite pieces of writing about the creative life (and making a living at it) is Hugh MacLeod’s How to Be Creative. Written in 2004 and downloaded over 5 million times, this “meditation on creativity and finding meaning,”  is full of so many great insights, I could spend the next month just talking about the lessons contained within, forget all the other things I planned to write about during this 30 day project.

But I won’t do that. Instead I’ll just tell you to go download it yourself here (it’s free), if you haven’t already.

What I will share is one of my favorite brilliant insights from the piece – the idea that as creatives, we often have two kinds of jobs.

This is an excerpt from item #7 in MacLeod’s manifesto, something he calls “The Sex and Cash Theory”:

[BEGIN QUOTE]

Keep your day job. Iʼm not just saying that for the usual reason i.e., because I think your idea will fail. Iʼm saying it because to suddenly quit oneʼs job in a big olʼ creative drama-queen moment is always, always, always in direct conflict with what I call “The Sex & Cash Theory.”

THE SEX & CASH THEORY: The creative person basically has two kinds of jobs. One is the sexy, creative kind. Second is the kind that pays the bills. Sometimes the task in hand covers both bases, but not often. This tense duality will always play center stage. It will never be transcended.

A good example is Phil, a NY photographer friend of mine. He does really wild stuff for the indie magazines—it pays nothing, but it allows him to build his portfolio. Then heʼll go off and shoot some catalogs for a while. Nothing too exciting, but it pays the bills.

Itʼs balancing the need to make a good living while still maintaining oneʼs creative sovereignty. My M.O. is gapingvoid (“Sex”), coupled with my day job (“Cash”).

Iʼm thinking about the young writer who has to wait tables to pay the bills, in spite of her writing appearing in all the cool and hip magazines…who dreams of one day of not having her life divided so harshly.

Well, over time the “harshly” bit might go away, but not the “divided.” This tense duality will always play center stage. It will never be transcended.

As soon as you accept this, I mean really accept this, for some reason your career starts moving ahead faster. I donʼt know why this happens. Itʼs the people who refuse to cleave their lives this way—who just want to start Day One by quitting their current crappy day job and moving straight on over to best-selling author…well, they never make it.

Anyway, itʼs called “The Sex & Cash Theory.” Keep it under your pillow.

[END QUOTE]

Although I’m experiencing the “tense duality” Mac­Leod speaks of in my work right now (and trying to find a way to make peace with it), I don’t happen to believe it will always be this way, that it can never be transcended.

But I take his point about “maintaining oneʼs creative sovereignty.” I’m a firm believer in the idea that there needs to be space in your life where you can create whatever you want with no limitations, where the creative work you do doesn’t have to be twisted to fit someone else’s definition of what’s acceptable, sellable, or worthwhile.

Which reminds me of someone I once met years ago when I lived in New York. My boyfriend at the time was getting his MFA in creative writing at Columbia, and his circle of friends included a few people who later went on to achieve a fair amount of success in the writing world.

Once such person was a guy who got a story published in The New YorkerThe New Yorker, fer cryin’ out loud! – yet still had to deliver pizzas for some time afterward to earn money to pay the bills.  This person now has several published books to his name.

Of course we all know people like this – a damn good writer who teaches to pay the bills, a talented artist who holds down a job at the local coffee shop to make ends meet, an excellent musician who repairs computers in the daytime so she can play in a band at night, and so on.

It’s the price we’re willing to pay as creatives to be able to do our true, true thing.

The 30-Day Writing & Publishing Project, Day 13: I Got Nothing

Today, I got nothing.

I planned to publish a new blog post today, as I have every day for the last 12 days. I wrote the draft of today’s intended post last night. That draft is very nearly complete, but not quite.

And because it’s 10:20 p.m., and I just finished a 13-hour work day, and my back is killing me from sitting in front of my computer all day cranking out a client marketing plan, law-dee! – I am going to post this note, call it a published post, and call it a day.

And rustle up some dinner. 

And that’s all, folks.

The 30-Day Writing & Publishing Project, Day 12: Bookstore Fight Club {and a suggestion}

There are two national chain bookstores in my town.  Big, commercial bookstores. Both of which I happen to frequent. This is not because I don’t love small, independent bookstores, by the way, which as a serious reader and appreciator of all things literary, I know I’m required to say.

This is because I often find myself in the two areas of town where these bookstores happen to be located, with a serious hankering for a new book and a little extra time on my hands.

But the experience of being a patron in these two stores could not be more different.

When I enter Barnes & Noble, I instantly feel at home. Myself. Where I’m meant to be. I can (and often do) spend countless hours in this heady environment, surrounded by books, and thoughts about books, and rivers of eloquent sentences and paragraphs and words. There are some mysteries about how things are organized here, but mainly, it seems logical. And most Barnes & Noble “associates” are helpful and kind.

The lay of the land and general attitude at Books-a-Million, on the other hand, makes no sense to me.

When I enter this store, I feel twitchy and nervous. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to the organization of the books here. I once asked a Books-a-Million employee where the essay collections were, and after displaying noticeable irritation at being interrupted while rearranging the complete works of J.K. Rowling, replied, “What’s an essay?”  Seriously, she said that.

Also, I recently found a memoir I was looking for in the fiction section, next to the author’s novels and short stories, in this store. 

Ok, I get it, there probably isn’t room, even in a bookstore this size – not quite gargantuan, but pretty darn big, nevertheless – to file every book in its true category.  Or to have an actual section just for essay collections. No, in this case, essays are often found in the section that corresponds to their subject matter – travel essays in the travel section, Nora Ephron essays in the humor section, for example.

Here’s what I propose, to make it easier on those of us who still love to roam the aisles of a good bookstore, yet want to find the thing we’re looking for without having to ask a sullen, put-upon bookstore employee: install a map at the entrance of the store showing where each category of book is located. This way, patrons don’t have to wonder about aimlessly – or gasp – ask for help from a moody employee.

Everybody wins.

The 30-Day Writing & Publishing Project, Day 11: When Limitation Becomes Liberation

I recently watched a Ted Talk in which artist Phil Hansen shared how he turned a potentially devastating diagnosis of permanent nerve damage into a new way of creating art, and in the process, learned how embracing a limitation can drive creativity. Called “Embrace the Shake,” Hansen’s talk explores the how the artist used constraints to create some pretty awe-inspiring works of art.

The talk got me thinking about the task I set for myself to write and publish here for 30 days. Though not nearly as serious a constraint as Hansen faced, publishing a new blog post every day while running my copywriting business, doing existing client work, and taking care of what feels like 2 dozen other daily obligations is genuinely challenging some days.

I’ll be honest, there are times this daily to-do feels like a heavy burden in an already overcrowded day, and I think, “Wait, why did I decide to do this?”

Then I think back to all those projects I started and never finished, and I remind myself that I decided to do this thing to prove to myself that I can set a 30-day task, commit to it publicly, and see it through. Also (and I’m sorry to have to get all “woo-woo” here), I wanted to feel a deeper connection to my writing, to make a commitment to MY writing, the writing I do outside writing copy for clients, the writing that’s been getting the short end of the stick lately.

And I felt like the creative limitation of having to publish something new each day when I have a crazy-packed schedule already, would generate useful insights I could use to improve my overall productivity, and even lead to some creative breakthroughs and a-has, if I was lucky.

And indeed, there have been a few “mini-breakthroughs”:

:: Because I have to get something “shipped” every day to honor the commitment I made, I’m revisiting things I’ve had in my drafts folder for ages – some of it barely started, and other things that just need a quick polish to be blog-publishable. I’m pleasantly surprised to note that there’s actually a “body of work” forming in that drafts folder, which leaves me feeling re-energized and re-committed to the “other” writing I do outside of client projects.

:: Knowing I have to publish something every day for 30 days has compelled me to consciously seek out inspiration, and the sheer pleasure of spending part of my day in deep creativity mode researching for interesting topics, watching Ted Talks, and otherwise stretching my inspiration muscles is wildly rewarding – and fun. Plus, there’s way more on my ideas list now than I’ll be able to write about in 30 days, so I’ll have plenty of blog topics left over to explore in the coming weeks and months.

:: The other benefit of committing to this project is it’s making me a faster writer. I don’t have time to belabor decisions as much as I normally would, so I have been letting go of some of the debilitating perfectionism that usually causes me to spend loooooong hours, and hours and hours and hours, writing blog posts. I hope this trend continues once I’m at the end of the 30 days – that would be huge for me.

I fully intend to have more mini – or hey, maybe even maxi! – breakthroughs as I make my way through the rest of this project, and I’ll share those at the end of the 30 days.

So I think an important question to consider is, since we all have constraints on our creative output, how can we use them to our advantage, as artist Phil Hansen did? Share your thoughts in the comments if you feel called to.

(And check out the video linked at the top of this blog post to watch Hansen’s Ted Talk.)

The 30-Day Writing & Publishing Project, Day 10: “Nothing is a Cliché When You Really Do It from the Heart”

Most creative people I know consume reams of information each day. Maybe on the way to finding inspiration for our own work, or simply in the course of the work we do that pays the bills, if that happens to be different from the passion work.

Sometimes in the course of this daily consumption, we find a quote or a passage that sticks with us long after we read it, and even changes the way we think about something important, or the way we approach our work.

In December 2013 I read an article about director David O. Russell, of American Hustle, Silver Linings Playbook, The Fighter, and Three Kings, among other movies, fame. There was one specific passage in the article, a quote from Russell, that changed the way I think about what’s “ok” to write, and what’s not.

Here’s what he said:

Nothing is really a cliché when you really, really do it from the heart.  And if you really feel it, and it’s real, and you know people who have felt it, there is nothing clichéd about it. It will bring you to your knees. It will make you cry. And that’s my job: To tell those stories in ways that surprise us and remind us of the opera that we’re living with every mistake and every new chance.

As creators, we all have times when we look at our creative output and think it can’t be good, it can’t be worth sharing, because it’s cliché, because it deals with well-worn territory that’s been trod a thousand times before.

Often when I read over what I write before hitting “publish,” I’m thinking that. And if not, “That’s been said a thousand times before, so why bother?,” then “Everybody already knows this,” or “This isn’t new, different, or interesting enough to write about,” or some derivative thereof.

And then I start to feel constricted creatively, because here’s a thing I want to write about, but I’ve told myself I can’t.  I can’t because it’s been done before. Which when you get right down to it, is patently ridiculous, because practically everything’s been done before, written about before, explored in writing or art before. “There’s nothing new under the sun,” as the saying goes.

But the truth is, like Russell says, “ . . . if you really feel it, and it’s real, and you know people who have felt it, there is nothing clichéd about it.”

And besides, each person’s approach to life’s big (and small) themes is their very own, a unique expression of that writer’s or artist’s perspective.

So whether your art is about heartbreak, overcoming obstacles, embracing love, finding the courage to do something different with your life, or any of the other “big” topics that art typically explores, it’s yours to write about, paint about, photograph, illustrate, or whatever it is you do, with wild abandon.

Because nothing is a cliché when you really do it from the heart.

The 30-Day Writing & Publishing Project, Day 9: It’s the Little Things

Sat nite soccer

Last night I went to a soccer game with my friend, Kristal, to see our hometown team, the Wilmington Hammerheads, play.

It was a beautiful night – balmy, breezy and not as god-awful hot and humid as it usually is this time of year, for which we were both very thankful.

Alas, our team lost, but being outdoors in a stadium surrounded by other fans (some so fanatical they glue plastic hammerhead shark figures to their hats, as you can see in the image above), drinking a cold beer, and hanging out with a great friend – there’s nothing better.

It’s the little things.

After the game, we went out for tacos and beer, and let me tell you, the pulled pork taco I had at this new place in town called Beer Barrio was heavenly. So heavenly, in fact, that I may write an ode to it – “Ode on a Pulled Pork Taco” – it was that good. (Do people still write odes? Or did that practice die with Romantic poet John Keats, who famously wrote “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to Melancholy,” and “Ode to a Nightingale” back in the 1800s?)

It’s the little things.

Today when I woke up, the first thing I did was check the weather on my phone, and discovered it was only 68 degrees out. 68 degrees!  This was around 7:00 a.m., but like the balmy weather last night, this is uncharacteristically cool for this time of year here in the hot, humid, dirty South y’all.

Learning it was so nice out made me really happy, giddy even.  I immediately turned off my air conditioner and opened my patio door. I walked outside with my coffee, practically overcome with joy at the simple pleasure of being able to sit outside and read the Sunday paper in the late July southern summer, something that hasn’t been possible since May.

It’s the little things.

Now, if I can just hold on to the calm centeredness I feel as I sit here and write this on Sunday night, this happy, relaxed, reveling-in-the-small-moments joy, throughout the coming week full of deadlines, work demands, must-dos and should-dos, I’ll be all set.

The 30-Day Writing & Publishing Project, Day 8: Finding a Sacred Rhythm

It’s hard to overestimate the importance of habit. Of routine.  . . . So much can be accomplished in one focused hour, especially when that hour is part of a routine, a sacred rhythm that becomes part of your daily life. 

~Dani Shapiro, Still Writing

Since committing to this daily writing & publishing project a week ago, I’ve been trying to find an hour or two early in the day in which to get the writing done. When I started out, I thought I’d get up at 6:00 am every morning and write for 1-2 hours, hit publish, then move on with the rest of my day.

That was the plan.

But what’s happened instead is, I get up at my usual time of 6:30 a.m., do my daily practice, which consists of, first, the making of the coffee, obviously, then meditation, writing in my journal, and some other personal growth practices.

I’m usually at my desk by 8:30 a.m., but I always feel like I must, must, must, knock out the client work first, then I “get to” do the daily writing afterwards. But by 5:00 or 6:00 or 7:00 pm when the work, work is out of the way, I feel creatively spent.

I write and publish to the blog anyway, but it feels like I’m not giving the writing the attention it deserves (after all, this is my craft, the thing I really want to do, do well, and get consistently better at doing). But, alas, the writing has been relegated to second-place position.

In the past, when I’ve gotten up a wee bit earlier than my usual time and written before I begin on the client projects for the day, I feel accomplished, joyous, and inspired, a feeling that carries over into the client work, making me feel more productive, efficient, and overall happier about the landscape of my work days.

This thing Dani Shapiro speaks of, “a routine, a sacred rhythm that becomes part of your daily life,” is something I’ve wanted to establish for my writing for a very long time. But I’ve tried and failed, tried and failed. The writing gets done, but as for time of day it gets done, it’s all over the place. And that makes me twitchy. I long for the calm knowing that every day at X time, I’m going to sit down at my desk and write, and I want that “X” time to be in the early a.m.

So, next week I’m going to try that practice on for size again. Writing first, client work, second. This won’t be easy since I have a big load of client deadlines next week, but hey, I’m gonna give it the old college try! (You know what popped into my head just now, writing that? The quote from Yoda in Star Wars, “Do. Or do not. There is no try.”)

Then I remind myself that my current daily routine of meditation and journaling in the a.m. took me a couple of years, I’m ashamed to say, to become habit.  So if I stick with the attempt to write every morning, before the work day starts, I’ll get there eventually.

I’ll share how it goes here on the blog very soon.

The 30-Day Writing & Publishing Project, Day 7: Essentialism

I recently watched a talk given by Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, to employees at Google. I’d been hearing about this book for weeks and it was already on the “Books to Buy” list I have saved into the Notes app of my iPhone, so I paid close attention to the ideas he shared.

In the talk, McKeown asks, “How do you build a habit or routine that supports the things that are the most essential, so that it becomes the default position, even when we’re not aggressively trying to pursue it?”

I’ve been thinking about this, and reading more about McKeown’s book and its premise over the last few days. I gather he’s talking mostly about our work lives, and some reviews I’ve read of the book over on Amazon suggest that that is, in fact, the case.

So for the purposes of this blog post, let’s assume we’re not talking about the really big things that we all understand to be essential. Things like good health, love, meaningful relationships with family and friends, and so on.

As artists, creators and writers, we may feel that our creative work is the most essential thing in our day-to-day lives, the thing that gives our lives meaning and purpose. But do the schedules we set for ourselves reflect that?

McKeown says, “We need to design our lives deliberately, or they will end up being designed for us by people that aren’t as invested as us in achieving the essential mission of our lives.”

This is one of the reasons I left my corporate writing gig at a medical center in February of this year. While I enjoyed the work I did and the colleagues I worked with, I knew it wasn’t what I was “meant” to be doing, not even as a day-to-day work to pay the bills gig. But pay the bills it did, so obviously, I couldn’t up and quit.

Although I was running my copywriting business at the same time, by necessity it remained a side hustle, and I wanted to make it my full-time thing. But I knew that as long as I stayed at the corporate gig, I would never fully develop my own business; instead, my work life would be designed for me by default by people who weren’t invested in helping me achieve “the essential mission of my life.” They were working on their mission, and it’s a good one, but it wasn’t mine.

This isn’t to say that my “mission” per se is running a successful copywriting business, but it’s one element of my plan for world domination, bah ha ha.

But seriously, folks, the copywriting business allows me to do other things that are a part of my mission, such as more writing in general, and writing of a different kind – essays, narrative non-fiction, memoir, etc. – and to submit that work for publication.

I don’t have the essentialism thing licked by a long shot – just take a look at my daily to-do list and you’ll see what I mean – but when I think back to leaving the reliable corporate gig for the peaks and valleys of doing my own thing, business-wise, I see that I was indeed making a choice to pursue the things that are most essential to my creative mission.

And that is a darn good feeling, especially when I think of all the terror and self-doubt I experienced right after leaving the corporate gig.

McKeown tells us that living a life “built around the voice inside instead of the noise outside” is the key to being happier and more fulfilled, and I genuinely feel like I’m getting closer to that ideal every day.

Because for me, as scary and uncertain as it was to leave something solid and reliable that paid the bills and then some to go out on my own, with all its potential risks and pitfalls, the payoff has been well worth it.

I believe that when we choose the thing that makes us happiest, even when we haven’t arranged for a safety net to catch us if it doesn’t work out {raises hand}, it will eventually pay off.

And your creative mission deserves at least that much respect.

Read more about Greg McKeown and Essentialism here.

The 30-Day Writing & Publishing Project, Day 6: All Procrastination is Fear

Once upon a semester when I was an undergraduate in college many years ago, I took a full load of classes, worked two part-time jobs – one at an architects’ office for a few hours every afternoon, the other as a waitress at a high-end restaurant Friday-Sunday nights – had a serious, committed relationship with a boyfriend that needed regular tending, and a kept up a very active social life full of friends and family visits and nights out with girlfriends.

It exhausts me just thinking about it now. Where did I get the energy? 

But that semester, the one full to the brim with activities and relationships and school work and paid work, and another semester very much like it later in my college career, I made the Dean’s List. When I had less going on in my life, I still did well in college, grade-wise, but, alas, no Dean’s List.

It took me a while to figure out that the more I had to do, the more I could do, and the better I could do it. 

As writers, we often feel like we need vast expanses of uninterrupted time to create our great work, or even that 500 word blog post that needs to get published by close of business today.

“If only I had all day to write,” we think, “how much I could get done.” Oh, for an entire day stretched out before us with no obligations to distract from the work at hand. Or for a series of days like that, even better. Oh, yes. It sounds positively dreamy.

I don’t know about you, but even when I do manage to get that blissfully uninterrupted day of writing space, I don’t always use it well.

Sometimes on these days, I find distractions.  Seek them out, I tell you. On purpose.

Here’s this thing I love doing above all else, this thing I want so badly to have more unfettered time to do, yet when the time to do it does present itself, I don’t always use it well.

It’s maddening.

And so I think back to those halcyon college days, days of knocking out research and socializing and studying and boyfriend time and 20 page papers on terrorism in literature (I am not making that up) without once uttering, “I don’t have enough time,” and I wonder how I can get that groove back. The groove in which I just suck it up and get.the.work.done, instead of frittering away time reading the latest articles on Huffington Post or Muck Rack Daily.

I recently listened to a podcast in which writer Elizabeth Gilbert was having a conversation with another writer about this topic. This writer, a mother of two young children, desperately wanted uninterrupted time to write, yet when she got it, she didn’t work on her book.

What Gilbert shared with her was this:

All procrastination is fear. Anything you do that stops you from doing the work that is gnawing at you, the work that wants to be made through you, the creative project that’s begging you to release it, the treasures that are hidden inside of you, anything you do that blocks that is fear. And it might look like fear very obviously or it might not – fear has a lot of shady disguises. Fear shows up as perfectionism, fear shows up as insecurity, fear shows up as guilt, fear shows up as procrastination. All of it is just something that you’re too scared to do.

Aha. So if this thing that prevents me from writing when I actually have time to write is fear, then the best way to deal with it – not overcome it, because I don’t know if that’s possible, but deal with it – is to sit down in front of the computer and write anyway, in spite of whatever shady disguise fear chooses to wear that day.

Just write, every day. Even if the writing is bad. Even if it’s nonsensical. Even if it never rises to the level of publishable or shareable.

That’s partly what I’m trying to accomplish with this 30-day project – I’m hoping that by making myself accountable to write & publish here daily, no matter what, I can learn to kick that procrastination, er, I mean fear, devil right where he lives.

The 30-Day Writing & Publishing Project, Day 5: All Hail the True Break: Hit the Reset Button in Your Brain for Maximum Creativity

Vacation isn’t a luxury. Neither is daydreaming. Don’t skimp.

This was the pull-out quote from a recent article in the Sunday New York Times called “Hit the Reset Button in Your Brain.” Written by Daniel J. Levitin, director of the Laboratory for Music, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University and author of The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, the article reminds us that to experience peak creativity, we need to stop multi-tasking, take real vacations (you know, the kind in which we don’t compulsively check email or answer work-related calls, etc.), and allow plenty of true downtime in our daily lives.

When I started thinking back over the last few months, what I noticed was that “true” downtime is practically non-existent in my life. I used to work 7 days a week, then about 6 months ago, I started giving myself Sundays off. Sundays are now mostly work-free, though about two Sundays a month are spent doing some kind of work-related something for a couple of hours.

Some of that manic work activity I chalk up to having a writing business, a business in which it feels as if there is something important to be done nearly every minute of the day – client work; taking a business-building class; marketing, outreach and promotion; honing my writing skills; looking for and acting on opportunities to “build my platform;” social media interaction, and other assorted activities.

This is the cost of doing business, as they say, but the cost lately feels high. No play, no fun, no frivolity, not even one full day a week where I’m not doing something to move my business forward or thinking about what else I could be doing or should be doing.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this lately, because I’ve spent a lot of time feeling spent – worn out, wrecked, exhausted, fried, dog-tired.

And for months I’ve been brainstorming ways to slow it all down and build in unadulterated fun and carefree do-nothing time into my schedule. So when I read Levitin’s article, it felt like a permission slip.

Daydreaming as part of the creative process, how logical. Of course, right?

Then I remembered a glor-i-ous day I had recently, back in March. (Ok, so not too recently, but still.) I made plans to go to lunch with my friend Carolyn and her 7-year-old daughter. Before meeting up with them, I did the usual morning routine – gratitude practice, meditation, the drinking of the coffee, and so on.

I do this every day, but this day, for the first time in a long time, it didn’t feel rushed. I didn’t race through what’s meant to be languid and slow, all so I could hurry up and get to my desk and work, work, work. Instead, I dawdled. I dilly-dallied. I loafed. It was lovely.

Then I met up with my friend and her daughter a couple of hours later for nice leisurely lunch. Afterward, we strolled over to the bookstore, where we spent an hour or so wondering around, reading from books that intrigued us, and drinking coffee in the café.

There were plenty of other people doing the same thing, and as I looked at them sitting there enjoying their coffee and magazines, I thought, “So this is how regular people spend their Saturdays.” It was a revelation.

Then I drove home, read from the new book I’d bought earlier that afternoon, and napped. Later, I went for a walk at the park near my house, then made a Whole Foods run. For the rest of that evening and all the next day, I felt, relaxed, happy, and deeply rested. Like my creative well had been replenished.

It was the best day I’d had in a long, long time. Even now, a calm sort of washes over me as I write this, remembering it.

And the best thing was, I didn’t feel the least bit guilty the next day for taking the day off, which is miraculous. I’ve worked every Saturday as long as I can remember, and on the rare occasion I don’t put in at least 5 or 6 hours on a Saturday, I usually end up feeling like a guilty slacker, like I’m not doing “enough” to build my business.

But on this day, I actually felt like I deserved the time off, and my work the next week was better for it.

I’d like to say I kept up the habit of allowing myself a day like that glorious one last spring at least once a week, but that’s not the case.

But I’ll always have the memory. And because it did me so much good in the mental health department, and helped me have a more productive week the following week, the goal is to find a way to carve out many more Saturdays just like it in the very near future.