What Are Your Foundational Activities?

What baseline self-care activities do you need to do so that you can do your best writing?

As a graduate student and, later, as a professor, I did not prioritize self-care. The work due always felt more pressing! I was a habitual over-committer and a perfectionist with really high standards for my work; thus, I lived my life under the tyranny of deadlines! And, also, if I’m honest, in thrall of those (sadly transient) dopamine boosts that came from checking something off my to-do list.

For years—almost two decades—I repeatedly dived into the work itself, putting out whatever fires felt most immediate, but never developing an overall gameplan for how I was approaching my life or my career, and seldom budgeting time for self-care. I knew, at some level, that this wasn’t working for me. I always felt out of balance and overworked. I resented it when students asked anything extra of me. I often started counting down to the end of the semester only two or three weeks into said semester. A break would arrive and it would feel like I’d barely caught up on home tasks before the start of the next semester was looming on my calendar, and in my psyche, and it was time to plunge back into preparations.

When the pandemic hit, I spent the entire spring and summer of 2020 telling my husband that I did not want to live through something like this and not let it change me. At a very deep, soulful level, I knew that I needed to change. I wanted to change! The first thing I did was to leave my fulltime job teaching writing at Harvard. It had been a great job, one that I’d truly loved when I’d started it, but I had started feeling the grind of the pace of the semester, of all I was expected to cover (which seemed to increase each year), of the amount of time I spent responding to students’ work, while my own writing languished.

I left my position teaching writing, but I continued to teach psychology—I had started teaching a master’s-level Capstone course for Harvard online, and that seemed like the perfect solution to both my burnout and my fear of being required to teach on campus when I had a young child I was trying to keep safe from covid. So, I ramped up my course-load from one to two sections (doubling the number of students whose work I was responsible for supervising), and I spent a year teaching 30 students in the final leg of their master’s program in psychology, guiding each of them through a capstone project of their own design.

Many of the students’ projects incorporated interventions I’d long dreamed of for myself—journaling, meditation, writing retreats, yoga, etc. And so, I decided that year, that it was time to get back into balance.

Enter, foundational activities! These are things you can do to fill up your own well. No one else will give you permission to do them. You have to take the time for them yourself.

I once read a quote that went something like – What is the only difference between you and a person who has completed a novel? The novelist gave themselves permission to sit down and write for the length of time it took to produce a book.

That hits, doesn’t it?

We can’t wait for that permission to come from the outside. It has to be an inside job. And this permission is not just about writing, it extends to other areas of our lives too. It’s about all the things we can do for ourselves that help us to feel like “whole” people. Because these things help us to show up on the page too—with our work—as our best selves.

I love Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way for this reason—the way in which it emphasizes the importance of leaning into life, of creating a full life. In Cameron’s way of thinking, your life is your canvas and it’s up to you to make it into art, to fill it with the things and experiences that bring you joy, delight. We can’t just expect ourselves to work, work, work all the time without burning out. We have to pause. We have to fill up our own wells.

So, when I talk about foundational activities, I mean the things that make you feel most like your best self. These activities aren’t the writing itself (though in some cases, like writing Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages, they may involve writing), but doing them helps you get to a place where your writing can get done.

For me, that list includes things like regular exercise or movement, drinking water, having solo time to rest and recharge, having a plan—and a stocked fridge—for what I am going to feed myself and my family on any particular day. If I attend to these things, I find I am better able to write.

If you’re struggling with burnout, or having trouble getting your writing done, I encourage you to experiment with foundational activities. Choose just one or two that you think might help you. They don’t necessarily have to take up time (e.g., for me, buying a nice water bottle that actually keeps water cold all day and doesn’t leak condensation all over my desk actually takes very little day-to-day time; once I found and purchased the bottle, the habit was pretty much in motion). You also don’t have to completely remake your life, all at once. Even doing just one or two small things, daily, will create a helpful shift.

To choose your foundational activities, reflect on the following questions:

What fills up your well? What activities make you feel great when you incorporate them into your daily routine? How can you add a pocket of joy to your life?

I invite you to choose just one thing and add it to your life this week. See how you like it. See how it affects your writing.

Happy writing!

Photo by Scott Webb via Unsplash