A couple of centuries back, Victor Hugo found himself seriously stuck.
Whenever he sat down to write, he found himself pulled away to attend to a different matter. If Victor lived in 2024, you could say he found himself randomly scrolling Facebook, or rearranging the cutlery drawer, which was suddenly super irritating.
And his writing was left waiting for him like a lost puppy out in the cold.
He managed to scribble a few bits here and there but he soon came to the realisation that he needed an Oprah-level intervention. If things really wanted to get done. So he called over his servant (the one that would actually be tending to his cutlery drawer in real life) and gave him orders that were no doubt very awkward to follow:
He asked him to take all of his clothes and hide them.
Once he had written the appropriate amount, Victor would be allowed his clothes back. You might say (as I did) “seems a bit extreme” but for Victor, it proved an effective, if not cold and exposing technique.
At the end of that, we found ourselves with the book titled The Hunchback of Notre Dame. You may have heard of it.
Now, I’m not here to advocate suffering for your art or passions, or nudity as a way forward (although that’s a difficult one because I’m not *against* nudity either).
But what made me share this story with you is a realisation I had the last week, that I think I’ve always known but at this point really *got*.
Where you are like, oh. Oh, I really understand now.
This is that realisation:
No one is coming to save me.
At first glance, I admit that this could read a little heavy and perhaps even be seen as slightly depressing, but I can assure you the opposite is true.
Our friend Victor had a moment where he realised if this book was going to get done, he was going to have to stop fluffing around. No one was going to write it for him and no-one was going to save him.
A similar thing happened to me, except it was more related to an existential crisis about the world.
I’ve talked a lot lately about caregiving and the multiple roles many of us carry that can see us depleted and exhausted. The idea of self-care is bandied around as though the solution is as simple as having a massage and buying a new, more attractive bath mat.
I heard Tricia Hersey say recently, ‘I bring them in, get them to have a nap, sprinkle them with lavender oil and then I say to them “Have you heard about this thing called capitalism?”
It made me snort my tea out of my nose. But I am with her. Man, am I with her.
But let’s continue on.
Realising that no one was coming to save me forced me to look at how I was both complicit in and a ‘victim’ of the challenges I was facing.
The tiredness, the over-work, the endlessness feeling of so many things… A lot of that was on me. I was perpetuating patterns of all of these things and they had served me. They are how I have got to where I am, how I have the resilience and fortitude that I do.
How I can take dust and make it into something.
But that little buzzing energy inside me that tells me to go and go and go?
That doesn’t belong to me. That’s what the world has taught me.
And maybe it’s taught you too. In fact, I know it has. If you live in the same world as me, I know it’s taught you too.
So please let me gift you this:
No one is coming to save you.
If you need to rest, you are going to have to, like the Nike ad said all along, just do it.
If you are waiting for time to open up, the truth is, it probably won’t. Not in the way you imagine.
What if there’s never a right time? What if that is the truth?
Finding ease, allowing for more rest and creativity, for more time with your horses is not socially supported. Everything we have been trained into is funnelling us towards the opposite.
You will feel guilty and perhaps you will feel shame. But so what.
We are more than our discomfort. That is a price we have to be willing to pay.
Honestly:
Rest, create, ride through all those gnarly feelings. It’s not the same as stuffing them down. It’s just recognising their untruth. Their service to something that is a cheese grater to the business of being human.
What the world needs right now is not more depleted people.
It needs you stepping out of the whirlpool for long enough to imagine a different way.
And you aren’t going to be handed it. You have to take it for yourself.
Meanwhile, Tolstoy has never been so relatable.
