Escape Velocity

on the cost of professional deformation, and the cost of pushing against it

At a party recently, the birthday girl turned toward me and said “Sarah, you’re laser focused on only what you find interesting, aren’t you?” This was, I think, a gentle rebuke, for having summarily given my (solicited) opinions in my interest-area. For having bluntly asked which of the scientists at the party do research related to my next book. Probably it can all seem a bit wonkish or uncurious or instrumental in the wrong moments.

But. At the core of it is simply this: I tend to be mostly thinking about my projects most of the time.

The French have a word for something adjacent to what I’m trying to get at: deformation professionelle. One tends to see the world through one’s professional training, and it limits one. Of course, I am thus deformed; I see the world through my professions, the both of them: content-strategist-wellness-themed-instructional-designer, and the critical-theorist-public-facing-writer. When I go through instagram, I think not of the content but the structure of the thing I’m watching, wondering why it took off in the algorithm. When I write an email, even a very personal one, I move the sentences around to match the studies on what keeps people reading. Most “professionals” are deformed in ways they might feel slightly proud of, since they work the jobs our economy rewards with both status and money. Most “non-professionals” are, of course, still deformed by their work, they just may take less bourgeois, twisted pride in their deformation.

But it’s not just “professional deformation” that I’m trying to describe here. In fact, it’s something that is in a way the opposite of what that term describes, something that is a resistance to the deformation we experience from the demands of our jobs. I want to describe a kind of intentional self-shaping that I’ve done over years to prevent myself from being fully shaped by the external rewards of “job” and, to a lesser but real extent, “life”.

To be both a writer-for-pay and the writer-for-love, and especially to be the latter in a world that only directly rewards the former, I have had to acquire a kind of barrier: a barrier against whatever might make me give up writing and thinking about the books I want to write, a barrier against the many pressures to (for example) earn more of a living, get some rest, or just feel less stressed.

This barrier against the rest of the world is not innate, not even easy to maintain. I have cultivated this, after a decade of working for pay while doing what I love most on the side. In the crowded tiny apartment we lived in until just recently, there was no space for a desk in my room, so I created a room of my own in my mind itself, writing my book in my bed, or else shutting my lovers out of the kitchen every moment I could so I could write in there.

The barrier I’ve kept up isn’t merely physical. In fact, it’s mostly temporal. I have, for all of adulthood, basically, set rules for myself about working hours and timeblocked each day of my life and barely spent any time outside work and social life; I have formed a protective barrier between myself and other interesting things so that I can do just what I need to do. What was I doing any given night for the last seven years? On average, probably working, or going to an event related to my writing and my world of writers, to learn what there might be to do together.

Won’t I take a full time job with them, the clients ask, over and over again? No, I cannot, though I like many of my clients and their projects, though it would be very sensible and, in the tech world, relatively lucrative. I have probably lost some 60k+ over the last two years alone, giving up paid working hours in my field to write this book. I have probably given up an additional three times that much in earnings over the last decade to get a PhD. I have no regrets about this, to be clear, and am so grateful for the immense privilege that permits me this option, but to choose this path requires a certain kind of turning-away of attention from the incentives the world thrusts in my face.

No, I can’t take the full-time tech job, I have explained over and over again to very kind and thoughtful CEOs and recruiters, who only sometimes and somewhat get it. I can’t because it would mean amputating something I have been growing internally for a long time.

Most of all, though, I’ve turned not just away from money or even status, but from other draws on my time and attention, and it shows. I get what the birthday girl was saying about me, I hear it, I know it’s true. I know this inward-turning is a feature of my cultivated self and that this focus within makes me sometimes appear weirdly distant, unapproachable, now and then.

On the other hand, if I’m honest, when I consider what has happened to most of the people I know who wanted to become writers, artists, academics, really whatever under-funded, under-supported thing, I have no regrets. I have watched so many relinquish what really interests them to simply get by. I know very few who haven’t done this in the end. Most people cannot but sink against the current. If I am lucky enough to be allowed to swim against the current, I intend to swim as long as I can. Maybe I can even somehow buoy up others, for a bit.

I cherish my protective membrane that lets me keep going in this way. I am just sorry about some of what doesn’t get through to me as a result.

I also think anyone who thinks one can do what the world doesn’t fully reward without some kind of membrane like the one I’m describing is, well, deceiving themselves.

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A week ago, I turned in my book manuscript. Suddenly an immeasurable weight had been lifted. For seven years I’d either been doing a PhD or writing a book; now I “only” had a job, a move to unpack from, and a million social commitments. (I’m an over-committer).

For once, I really let myself be messy, in all the ways. I had lots of feelings. I ignored the to-dos in the rigid calendarised system for days. I was endlessly social (I’m endlessly social by nature, it seems to me, that bit came pre-programmed). I slept on a boat several times, I saw lovers, slept three of us in a bed. I was for once the kind of scandalous being I am sometimes imagined to be when people inquire about my life. (Usually they are wrong; usually I’m not so much being decadent as, well, working, writing away).

I was also decadent in simple ways. I read sci fi, I spend days just baking. There were cookies and movies and the whole group sat on the couch for hours. It was joyful, it was weird, it was uncomfortable. It was being unwound, relaxed into a new shape, or into the potential for one, anyway.

I know it won’t last. But it will need to for a little, now and then this year, or I will forever be bound too tightly.

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It is so, so difficult to be focused enough to get to do something you actually love, and especially to plot the direction of your own life. Nearly everything else in life, even the good things, pulls against it. Friends, family, the news, work, your phone, your body, self doubt all drag us in the other direction, away, mostly from the contributions we might most want to make outside of the ordinary script of life. To be deeply, deeply at work at one’s own project involves, in a strange way, a kind of ignorance and avoidance of the outside world, including and sometimes especially to the detriment of one’s curiosity about anything else, at least for a significant period of time. This is why I love airplanes and late nights, when this kind of ignorance is even easier.

Of course I feel guilty about this barrier and its costs all the time. I feel guilty about how I barely could take in my own wedding 18 months ago, how I have put off having kids. I feel guilty most of all about the cost to relationships. I am not trying to glamorise the very real downsides, the deformation genuinely caused in this case and others, to myself and to others.

But also, if I’m honest, when I see the real cost of writing a book, the hours and hours, the years and years, the weeks-of-just-doing-footnotes, the never being turned off, I feel determined more than sorry about the trade-offs I’m made,. I understand now the real cost of making something like a book. Indeed one of the main things I’ve learned in the last year is that most people who tell you they are going to write a book are absolutely never going to do that. It’s simply too expensive, in every sense, and far larger of a task than they can imagine. Knowing the cost, now, siting on the other side of such a project, I can choose this kind of project more wisely more honestly. And I would choose it again, costs and all.

I have only achieved an important escape velocity by tearing myself away, both from bad noise (guilt, criticism, people who mostly drain energy) and also good noise (relationships, profession, leisure, the beauty of long walks). I plan to take in a bit more of the latter now that I’ve hit a first big milestone. But I am not deluded about the need for a pulling-away from so many things to return to the thing I’ve chosen in the deepest sense.

This matters, of course, not because of me, but because of everyone else, because so many of us are struggling with some version of this, this question of how accept some deformation from work, how to fight other bits, how to resist and re-form themselves agains the pressure of work. That’s the secret painful core of the question of the side-hustle, the dream job: that one senses one can’t really be one’s real or full self without it. Many of us recognise, at least unconsciously, that work steals not just our time and attention but the chance to shape ourselves into what we hope and ought to be. We therefore long for an alternative activity, so that we might acquire an alternative, re-formed self.

May we all manage to resist and reform ourselves against this professional deformation, to some degree, somehow.

May I be correctly distracted, may I never lose the escape velocity I need to stay in orbit, may I fail to notice what isn’t really mine.