The Gist: On Protecting Your Gift
This started out as a Note but turned into more of a love letter to us.
Protecting my Saturday mornings for writing has actually had a side effect that I didn’t expect : a renewed conviction that my work - our work - matters.
You don’t protect something that is expendable or worthless.
You take care of it, dust it off (sometimes, yes, it goes without interaction for a while but it’s still valuable), display it where you and others can enjoy it but where it’s not likely to get knocked over or broken.
So, in that mortal exchange of time that happens every nanosecond and of which I am painfully aware ever since starting a full-time corporate job (exactly 4 years ago today!), the act of protecting my Saturday mornings has helped build a resilience, an insistence, that when I feel the Muse/Urge/Vibe to write any hour of any day, it is worth the Exchange.
Sometimes that Exchange is with not-so-little-anymore people I must shoo away with an
“I LOVE YOU GET OUT I’M ONTO SOMETHING HERE I LOVE YOU”
Sometimes that Exchange is being a little late to dinner…
“I’m coming but if I’m taking too long just start without me”
…but not too late. Let me stop here so I can go eat with the family.
Sometimes that Exchange means eating lunch at my desk while I work so I can clock out in time to write in the evening before my brain shuts off.
(We exchange a lot of our time with eating…or, at least, I seem to.)
Other times it means not going to the spa Saturday mornings when I really wanted that Me Time. Writing is not about me. It’s about us.
I have to remind myself of all this, as maybe you do, when that Evil Thought creeps in…what difference does it make? I still hear that nasty little gremlin every now and then and I have to remind myself that I can’t actually know what difference it makes. And neither can you. All we can do is figure out how God made us to be in this world - what personality and talent and heartache and triumph He needed to add to the story of Humanity - and go out and do that thing and use it for His Glory by pointing people to the Truth.
What Truth? The Truth of the moment, of the person, of ultimately - Jesus.
That’s it.
What difference does it make that you made a stranger smile at the grocery store because you were singing along to Wilson Philips, just being yourself?
What difference does it make that you reassured a customer on the phone or a client at a meeting, just by being yourself?
What difference does it make that you have a talent for XYZ and you share it with others, even when it comes at a cost?
What difference does it make that you keep getting up, day after day, working hard to build a life for yourself and your family? (It’s not just about the food, clothes and shelter that God has already promised you, by the way. Your hard work is deeper than that.)
YOU. CAN’T. KNOW.
No amount of hearts or DMs or encouraging texts can tell you, even though it seems like they can. Analytics dashboards don’t tell the whole story.
Some people tell me what difference I’ve made for them.
These people are anchors in the storms…or more like a warm light in the darkness of the Internet Void when no one responds to my posts and the only engagement is me reposting it to my own IG story (be your own biggest fan, yada yada yada). But I’ve learned that many people don’t engage even when they appreciate something. How have I learned this? People tell me but also, I’m just as guilty. Although, now that I am being intentional in this space, I make a point to interact with posts and people. Because I want to be someone else’s light in the void.
Another thing that happens to me is that someone will reach out and tell me, “I never told you this but…” or “I just want you to know that I’ve always appreciated…” and, often, they will tell me something that I either forgot I even said/did or something that hardly anyone seemed to care about when I said/wrote/posted it. Or it will be someone I would not have expected to hear from, ever or after all this time.
In the Content Creator Economy, digital engagement really matters.
But in God’s Economy, heart engagement is the point.
Operating as designed is the point.
You and I are designed (designed!) to function in certain ways - generally, as humans and uniquely, as us. And when we do that, we affect the world. (We can talk about quantum entanglement another time.)
*
In acting and modeling, we treat auditions like the win whether you book the job or not. For one thing, it’s hard to get an audition. If you make booking the only goal, you’ll be in a constant state of disappointment and despair. A really great booking rate would be to book one role for every ten or twenty auditions but some actors can go upwards of 100 auditions before booking! Imagine racking up 99 failures before a win. You can’t live like that.
Most importantly, though, when the audition is your opportunity to show them who you are and what you can do, being cast is when you get to do what you do. Does that make sense? I showed you what I can do, now let’s go and do it.
So, the healthy way of approaching auditions is to consider them more like an offering or a gift. “Here it is - do with it what you will.” If you get the part, great. If you don’t, oh well. There will be another one and you don’t know whether your expensive little headshot was put in a Maybe Pile instead of a Never Pile. One time, I took my daughter for an audition at a company that casts models for major toy brands. They didn’t call us back for two years! She looked completely different - as kids do - but ended up booking a major Disney print job! Here is just one example of many that came from it:
I’ll bet there are things in your life as well that you’ve realized if you approach them like doing that thing is itself the win, the results can be held lightly. You can celebrate if it goes well but if the dish is too salty or the deal falls through or the weight isn’t coming off yet, it’s not an instant KO.
You know that putting in the work will yield results. Even if you can’t know for sure what those results will be, you know they’re coming.
Remember the words of St. Hildegard of Bingen:
We are responsible to our gifts because they were given to us.
Like Frodo and the ring, if we do not find a way, no one will.
Can someone else bring shareholder value or make a casserole or paint a landscape? Sure - but not the way you do it.
So, this Gist is in more of a Weekly Reflection format but don’t mention it because I’m supposed to have a posting schedule of Weekly Reflections on Wednesdays and working on and hopefully publish Gists on Saturdays (are you interested in my writing process for these? Let me know!)
I want to make my gift valuable to you and today that looked like spontaneously writing you a love letter to encourage you to protect and value your work. Your children, your family, your friends, your world, your God will be glad you did.
Thank you for this! I needed this encouragement, especially as I'm trying to figure out how to protect my writing and find space and time for me to do it (after over 4 months of not posting anything 😭). I'm a mom of 6 with a lot of other life going on so the struggle is real 😅 but it matters so very much.