THANK YOU for putting this into words. I have been feeling for weeks — no, MONTHS — that I am just steps away from serious illness and complete collapse, except that I don't have time for it and will move to the next task by sheer force of will. I don't know what would happen if I let myself just . . . stop. I think a lot of successful Gen X women feel the same way.
Thank you for this, Neko. This part especially is so relatable, so familiar:
“This post is in no way a complaint, I do love my many jobs and know what I signed up for, but I do know the methods also need to change.”
Yet It’s a conundrum for I find that part of the exhilaration of the creative life is when the hyperfocus takes hold and I have such clarity, whether it’s immersing myself for hours to get the granular details of a paragraph just right, or networking with a half dozen people to organize an event that will bring me joy. All the parts of my brain—all the parts of ME—align and joy just courses through.
The conundrum is how to change a pattern that fosters these times which really are the best of me without making them either all or nothing.
For this I try to lean into what my beloved poet friend said to me years ago about fallow times, for I have long stretches of those too.
We were driving together across northern Ohio where I then lived and everything was frozen and covered with snow. The trees bare, the wind howling, as though nothing were alive.
The land needs that kind of time too, though, where it’s not producing, but resting, restoring itself, even sleeping.
Sometimes I have to let myself sleep, and at 51, my body has this shut off emergency cord it pulls when I can’t do it for myself, and I’m learning not to fight that.
It’s like loving low tide on the Maine coast, which I discovered about myself yesterday when I walked through a woods and crossed over onto an island.
At low tide there’s so much to see and touch and smell and feel that I couldn’t at any other time. I’m a Midwesterner and don’t have the full vocabulary of the northeast coast, but felt something big just being there, seeing vegetation usually underwater and out of sight, knowing it has the reserves it needs to stay alive even under the dry heat of the sun—maybe it even needs the sun as much as the water? (I’ll investigate this later, how it all works.)
What I think I want to say is I can’t fight the cycles—the fallow periods or the tides.
And when I keep myself so busy, so ON all the time—even with the creative things I love and enjoy most—I won’t be able to sustain any of it, not even myself.
Hope you can enjoy some down time after what sounds like an amazing experience working on Thelma and Louise!
As a person on the other side of a complete collapse (gratefully, selfishly now putting my oxygen mask of tons of rest on first) please pay attention to the warning signs. We need your art and magic and words but not at the cost of your health Neko! I have a ticket to your show in Toronto in October but if it means giving you a full night of well-deserved rest, please keep (your likely minuscule portion of) the money and take the night off! Or a live-streamed show from your home instead? I’d pay for that!! 🦊🌸
Hi Neko, once again your lived experience has me in some weird sympathy as I felt clammy in a kind of supportive fashion.
I'm retired and learning or should I say unlearning the rules about doing and shoulds drummed into me since Adam was a bit scout.
My love Jenny is working still, long long hours and giving every ounce of her considerable compassion to her work, helping homeless and sheltering DV affected families.
I try try to get her to slow down, but I know she has to do it her way. Just as you have to do it your way.
I feel so privileged in many senses, except for my left eye which half filled with blood making me vampiric in appearance.
I say to Jenny what do you need and each night think of how to be a better partner.
In your world we know it doesn't stop for stragglers, so if you need anything give us a shout.
Thank you for this post. I see myself in much of what you described. A desire to bring something into the world that will delight others, transport them into a beautiful magical place. Make something new that also delights us. But it does have a cost to your body and mind. I think this is the tough balance for any creative person, and I include motherhood in that creative umbrella. To create is to birth a previously nonexistent thing, and acknowledging what we give of ourselves in that process I think is part of what will ultimately change the toxic system we live in.
I love your music and your writings. Thank you for bringing us along through parts of your life journey.
Your comments about working and work ethic made me think about how driven people often neglect their own health and (family) in pursuit of their goals .
I just watch “Jim Hensen: Idea Man.” It was so sad to know he passed away from complications of pneumonia at age 53. He would often work through projects even when ill…. Such a loss.
The first part of your post reminded me of how I would feel after working with shoe factories in China--arriving home in CA too exhausted to do anything but face plant my gross self in bed. Jet lag "hangover" is something I do not miss!
The segment on Thelma & Louise was such an exhilarating counterpoint! The excitement oozed through each word. Congratulations!
A post from the edge! Much respect and love to you for your sharing and efforts to document. I’m inspired by your words as I reflect back on my own experiences…. And also ALL of your efforts to share with humanity just for the sake of sparing another from miseries felt. It’s a gift you share freely with us and I am grateful. Thanks!
God I love your writing - I could practically smell the smells and feel the feels. Sending restful vibes from what looks to be a perfect chilly yet sunny day in the Catskills. See you October 1 at the barn! OH and my own manfriend Jeff and I are getting married the next day at Golden Notebook open invite to you just in case you wanna be our best woman 😝
Ah summer time and the dulles drip. Bet Netflix has a algorithm for that. Well at least the Train from Kansas City has come home. Here's a Documentary to watch about Max's Kansas City in Ny. Wow, so much of the punk scene got a start there.
I am a GenX music Maven in VT. I teach in Tunbridge K-4 and sing with the BSO on the side. The struggle is real. The thing I grapple with now that I am 57 is that my brain thinks I am 26 and my body acts like its 80. I am often a gelatinous mess. Recovering from a residency takes days. I can’t find anything! I am reeling through post musical processing. The Rachmaninoff All Night Vigil has taken over my brain post concert. How long will homeostasis take? Should I just embrace the mental and physical aftershocks?
I hope you know how kind, poetic and powerful you are. I can’t thank you enough for your Substack posts! They have been so helpful as I’m perimenopausal and trying to figure this baloney out from day to day. Now I know why so many older women dressed in layers. Oooh, I get it. Muu-Muu’s are a way of life at home now as I’m back working from home sewing upcycled clothing for shows and other vendors that hire me.
Being a soon, 52 Gen X’er and running my own business— slow down is not ever an option. I just know WORK from a very early age. I don’t know FUN. I was taught that a vacation is traveling to another location to WORK. That’s your FUN. Getting older now— I’m realizing how much I have missed of this elusive word FUN and I’m MAD about it now. I’m MAD!
I do hope you’re able to rest some, listen to the birds outside your home and get some horse hugs. As always, thank you for your music and poetry. You are part of what is needed and good in the world!
>>pre-system failure
THANK YOU for putting this into words. I have been feeling for weeks — no, MONTHS — that I am just steps away from serious illness and complete collapse, except that I don't have time for it and will move to the next task by sheer force of will. I don't know what would happen if I let myself just . . . stop. I think a lot of successful Gen X women feel the same way.
Thank you for this, Neko. This part especially is so relatable, so familiar:
“This post is in no way a complaint, I do love my many jobs and know what I signed up for, but I do know the methods also need to change.”
Yet It’s a conundrum for I find that part of the exhilaration of the creative life is when the hyperfocus takes hold and I have such clarity, whether it’s immersing myself for hours to get the granular details of a paragraph just right, or networking with a half dozen people to organize an event that will bring me joy. All the parts of my brain—all the parts of ME—align and joy just courses through.
The conundrum is how to change a pattern that fosters these times which really are the best of me without making them either all or nothing.
For this I try to lean into what my beloved poet friend said to me years ago about fallow times, for I have long stretches of those too.
We were driving together across northern Ohio where I then lived and everything was frozen and covered with snow. The trees bare, the wind howling, as though nothing were alive.
The land needs that kind of time too, though, where it’s not producing, but resting, restoring itself, even sleeping.
Sometimes I have to let myself sleep, and at 51, my body has this shut off emergency cord it pulls when I can’t do it for myself, and I’m learning not to fight that.
It’s like loving low tide on the Maine coast, which I discovered about myself yesterday when I walked through a woods and crossed over onto an island.
At low tide there’s so much to see and touch and smell and feel that I couldn’t at any other time. I’m a Midwesterner and don’t have the full vocabulary of the northeast coast, but felt something big just being there, seeing vegetation usually underwater and out of sight, knowing it has the reserves it needs to stay alive even under the dry heat of the sun—maybe it even needs the sun as much as the water? (I’ll investigate this later, how it all works.)
What I think I want to say is I can’t fight the cycles—the fallow periods or the tides.
And when I keep myself so busy, so ON all the time—even with the creative things I love and enjoy most—I won’t be able to sustain any of it, not even myself.
Hope you can enjoy some down time after what sounds like an amazing experience working on Thelma and Louise!
Thank you for this thoughtful response :)
To be met by a Greeting Cat is one of life's great pleasures.
As a person on the other side of a complete collapse (gratefully, selfishly now putting my oxygen mask of tons of rest on first) please pay attention to the warning signs. We need your art and magic and words but not at the cost of your health Neko! I have a ticket to your show in Toronto in October but if it means giving you a full night of well-deserved rest, please keep (your likely minuscule portion of) the money and take the night off! Or a live-streamed show from your home instead? I’d pay for that!! 🦊🌸
Thank you for sharing. Hope you can rest and recover.
I am in the process of how to retire from a job that I enjoy. Your sediments really help..
It is more difficult than you would expect.
Hi Neko, once again your lived experience has me in some weird sympathy as I felt clammy in a kind of supportive fashion.
I'm retired and learning or should I say unlearning the rules about doing and shoulds drummed into me since Adam was a bit scout.
My love Jenny is working still, long long hours and giving every ounce of her considerable compassion to her work, helping homeless and sheltering DV affected families.
I try try to get her to slow down, but I know she has to do it her way. Just as you have to do it your way.
I feel so privileged in many senses, except for my left eye which half filled with blood making me vampiric in appearance.
I say to Jenny what do you need and each night think of how to be a better partner.
In your world we know it doesn't stop for stragglers, so if you need anything give us a shout.
Love from Adelaide.
Thank you for this post. I see myself in much of what you described. A desire to bring something into the world that will delight others, transport them into a beautiful magical place. Make something new that also delights us. But it does have a cost to your body and mind. I think this is the tough balance for any creative person, and I include motherhood in that creative umbrella. To create is to birth a previously nonexistent thing, and acknowledging what we give of ourselves in that process I think is part of what will ultimately change the toxic system we live in.
I love your music and your writings. Thank you for bringing us along through parts of your life journey.
Your comments about working and work ethic made me think about how driven people often neglect their own health and (family) in pursuit of their goals .
I just watch “Jim Hensen: Idea Man.” It was so sad to know he passed away from complications of pneumonia at age 53. He would often work through projects even when ill…. Such a loss.
Anyway thank you and rest up!
The first part of your post reminded me of how I would feel after working with shoe factories in China--arriving home in CA too exhausted to do anything but face plant my gross self in bed. Jet lag "hangover" is something I do not miss!
The segment on Thelma & Louise was such an exhilarating counterpoint! The excitement oozed through each word. Congratulations!
A post from the edge! Much respect and love to you for your sharing and efforts to document. I’m inspired by your words as I reflect back on my own experiences…. And also ALL of your efforts to share with humanity just for the sake of sparing another from miseries felt. It’s a gift you share freely with us and I am grateful. Thanks!
God I love your writing - I could practically smell the smells and feel the feels. Sending restful vibes from what looks to be a perfect chilly yet sunny day in the Catskills. See you October 1 at the barn! OH and my own manfriend Jeff and I are getting married the next day at Golden Notebook open invite to you just in case you wanna be our best woman 😝
Ah summer time and the dulles drip. Bet Netflix has a algorithm for that. Well at least the Train from Kansas City has come home. Here's a Documentary to watch about Max's Kansas City in Ny. Wow, so much of the punk scene got a start there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksq9Vay02RU
❤️rest and recover and revive and relax.
May you find some peace and ease.
I am a GenX music Maven in VT. I teach in Tunbridge K-4 and sing with the BSO on the side. The struggle is real. The thing I grapple with now that I am 57 is that my brain thinks I am 26 and my body acts like its 80. I am often a gelatinous mess. Recovering from a residency takes days. I can’t find anything! I am reeling through post musical processing. The Rachmaninoff All Night Vigil has taken over my brain post concert. How long will homeostasis take? Should I just embrace the mental and physical aftershocks?
I hope you know how kind, poetic and powerful you are. I can’t thank you enough for your Substack posts! They have been so helpful as I’m perimenopausal and trying to figure this baloney out from day to day. Now I know why so many older women dressed in layers. Oooh, I get it. Muu-Muu’s are a way of life at home now as I’m back working from home sewing upcycled clothing for shows and other vendors that hire me.
Being a soon, 52 Gen X’er and running my own business— slow down is not ever an option. I just know WORK from a very early age. I don’t know FUN. I was taught that a vacation is traveling to another location to WORK. That’s your FUN. Getting older now— I’m realizing how much I have missed of this elusive word FUN and I’m MAD about it now. I’m MAD!
I do hope you’re able to rest some, listen to the birds outside your home and get some horse hugs. As always, thank you for your music and poetry. You are part of what is needed and good in the world!