As both an escape and a means of processing our world, I've been immersing myself in spring as much as I can. I take walks around the neighborhood and in city parks. I planned and planted our five-container kitchen garden, which is so much more reasonable than last year's anxiety-motivated abundance of more than 20 containers. And I finally created a twine basket to suspend the heart-shaped leaves of my neglected yet resilient pothos that has sat coiled in a literal box for a literal year.
Amid all this botanical growth, my potential sources for newsletters are multiplying, too.
On Monday I pulled out three different non-fiction books that I thought I might reference in this issue. Across the week, I had "maybe I'll work this in" thoughts about at least a couple podcast episodes, three memoirs from the last couple month’s nonlinear reading, and a few news videos that caught my attention. When I asked my partner recently if I had told him about the latest novel I've been reading, he looked at me with three parts befuddlement and one part admiration, as if to say, "Another one??”
Despite all this literal and figurative growth, I found myself up late Wednesday night still figuring out where this issue was going. I liked the intro, which was more or less like what you have just read, but I was having trouble transitioning from that to the source that I finally decided to focus on.
Sending Finding Out is about sharing my journey to explain and understand how UX research works. But writing Finding Out is also my personal pursuit of work that supports being a whole person.
Journalist Anne Helen Petersen writes eloquently about the difficulty changing the way we think (and act) about how much we give to our livelihoods in a recent issue of her newsletter, Culture Study. She says:
"I spend a lot of time trying to convince myself and others that, as I put it in December, you are beloved and worthy of rest. I cannot tell you how deeply I believe that, how fiercely I want to dismantle this ethos of constant productivity and workism, and how spectacularly bad I am at consistently taking my own advice. I am trying and failing and getting slightly better and backsliding. I have tried to be consistently transparent about that — because that is what unlearning an ideology looks like. It doesn’t mean that the work [of unlearning] is bullshit. It means the work is hard."
See there? I just did it. Just put the paragraphs one after another, and hope that the connection that I feel comes through to you, dear reader.
From the beginning, I’ve written about my process here with transparency. But I've also daydreamed about delivering in a way that I know is counter to most of our work experiences. I'm excited for when I will give myself the care that John Oliver's Last Week Tonight staff seem to give themselves when they take regular multiple-week-long breaks from producing their weekly show. I know, however, that consistency is key when building a subscription-based venture, and it feels risky to decide to completely disappear for even one week.
It feels risky, but it also feels important. So, I’ve decided to plan a real break for myself, coming up in a couple weeks.
Petersen talks about the difficulty of living what she believe in and says, "…that is what unlearning an ideology looks like." Unlearning is messy. And being human is definitely messy.
Mentioned in this issue: Culture Study issue, “Against “Feel Free To Take Some Time If You Need It” by Anne Helen Petersen, published 11 April 2020.